ON SUNDAY

DEANO

AS you probably saw on the news, Terry Jones died last week.

He was a giant – author, expert in medieval history and famously part of the Monty Python team.

I’m the first to admit that lots of Monty Python’s stuff is bilge but a lot of it was genius, and that genius reached its zenith with 1979 movie Life of Brian, which Jones directed.

As John Cleese rightly said, it was Jones’s masterpiece.

It was certainly controversial. Today it’s more or less compulsory to sneer at Christianity but back then it was still an edgy thing to do.

No fewer than 39 councils either banned Life of Brian.

These days Life of Brian would not be banned – because there is no way on earth it would be made.

You’d have better luck making a movie with Harvey Weinstein in the producer’s chair.

Why? Nothing to do with it taking the piss out of Christians.

It would be denounced as heresy because of a character called Stan and this scene, which would have today’s ‘ woke’ social justice warriors building bonfires to burn the Pythons: FRANCIS: Why are you always on about women, Stan?

STAN: I want to be one.

REG: What?

STAN: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me ‘ Loretta’.

REG: What?!

LORETTA: It’s my right as a man. JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

LORETTA: I want to have babies.

REG: You want to have babies?! LORETTA: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them. REG: But... you can’t have babies. LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me. REG: I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?! LORETTA: ( crying)

JUDITH: Here! I... I’ve got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’, but that he can have the right to have babies. FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.

REG: What’s the point?

FRANCIS: What?

REG: What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?!

FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.

REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.

The Pythons had no way of knowing it – in fact nobody could have believed it would happen – but 40 years after Life of Brian it’s socially unacceptable and possibly even a criminal offence to say that a man cannot be a woman.

When real life is more surreal than Monty Python, it’s time for something completely different…