"Corridor? I used to dream of living in corridor. That would have been a palace to us."
Have you heard the one about the Four Yorkshiremen?
If you are a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, you will know this as one of the classic sketches (along with Jean-Paul Sartre in the Laundromat, the Dead Parrot episode and the Fish Slapping Dance). This week marks the 40th anniversary of the show that brought surrealism to TV and redefined, forever, the boundaries of mass appeal comedy.
The show that gave us the adjective Pythonesque was the joint creation of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam—Gilliam provided the animated signature cameos. The essence of the humor was ridicule. These were Cambridge graduates of the 1960s, when every aspect of British society, from the sacred to the plebian, was suddenly fair game. The Four Yorkshiremen sketch featured tuxedo-clad self-made men swigging fine wine and reminiscing about their rise from abject—in this case, absurdly abject—poverty. Ending with that familiar homily delivered by the smug and insular, “…if only young people today…”
It could have been the Four Scotsmen, the Four Welshmen or the Four Irishmen, but somehow those regions were too associated with ancient vaudeville routines. Yorkshire made a good target. First, the accent was familiar in a wave of British industrial magnates, none of whom had much tolerance for self-mockery. Second, Yorkshire has always played the part in the British thespian repertoire of providing a cast of dour, no-nonsense players.
At the time, Yorkshire took the joke in good spirits. It had its own new wave of culture to boast about—two stellar talents launching their careers - the humorist and playwright Alan Bennett and the artist David Hockney.
If anyone has rehabilitated Yorkshire’s standing as one of the wildest and most beautiful of the English counties, it’s David Hockney. After his long exile in California, Hockney returned to his home town of Bradford and, in the nearby town of Saltaire, established a gallery called Salts Mill. Hockney has been producing a series of Yorkshire landscapes that rank with those of Corot or Monet. His work seems reinvigorated by a passionate return to his roots. From the rugged North Sea coastline to the high moors, from the Roman-founded county seat of York to the multi-ethnic vibrancy of cities like Bradford, Yorkshire is worth a week of anyone’s travels.
And what of that nostalgic quartet of Yorkshire tycoons? Here, I would like to direct you to a little-known archival treasure. Monty Python actually had its origins in a virtually forgotten earlier British TV series called At Last the 1948 Show, which featured Cleese and Chapman alongside two others, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Most of the tapes of this show were lost, but many sketches can be found on YouTube while the very first Four Yorkshiremen sketch can be seen on zappinternet.com. Watch those clips now if you want to know where the bizarre genius of the Flying Circus was incubated. You will almost die laughing.
Leave a comment