Possibly because Congleton’s Old Saw Mill showed it earlier this year, possibly because I kept saying “the aqueduct?” in answer to stupid questions from my son, or regularly asking him if he wanted wolf’s nipple chips for tea (“…. wrens’ livers, chaffinch brains, jaguars’ earlobes, wolf nipple chips – get ’em while they’re hot, they’re lovely”) … when he was sick from school earlier this year, we watched Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, both because it’s funny and because it contains cultural memes of which I feel a young person should be aware.
Let’s face it, you’re not going to get far in life if you don’t know who Biggus Dickus is and what his wife’s name is, or indeed when and why you should always look on the bright side of life.
So we watched, and the biggest surprise was how relevant it still is, 40+ years after it was made.
As they say, a timeless script stands the test of time (as does anything timeless, obviously) and when it’s funny, it’s funny. The same applies to “Porridge”, that other Cleese outing, “Fawlty Towers” or even the more modern “Thick of It”. The world’s best telly show ever made, “Detectorists”, will still be funny in 50 years.
But two things stood out watching the Python from a modern viewpoint.
First, the story of “Brian” is a casebook study of that modern phenomenon – the social media pile-on, in which people who have no idea what they are talking about get really annoyed, despite having taken no time at all to study whatever it is they are incensed about.
(And of course when “Brian” came out, John Smyth was busy abusing boys whom he met at Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s and being covered up by the very people probably attacking the film, but that’s by the by).
Obviously, social media pile-ons themselves are satirised on “Brian”, because one of its main targets is people who blindly follow. (“You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody!”)
In “Brian’s” case the pile-on was over the fact it reportedly mocked Jesus Christ and Christianity, when it did no such thing.
The film makes it absolutely clear that its titular hero is not the Messiah, firstly when the Magi, creeping around a cow shed at two o’clock in the morning and handing out gold and bombs, realise they are in the wrong manger and snatch the gift back before heading down the street for the manger bathed in light. (We can ignore the fact that Jesus was probably not born in Bethlehem anyway but Nazareth, but the former featuring in prophecies while the latter was a scruffy village in the middle of nowhere that didn’t).
Later, the script specifies that it was Jesus who was giving the sermon on the mount while Brian listened – the scene with the pompous man waffling on about cheese-makers being blessed.
Despite this, upon release the film was blasted as the most blasphemous movie ever made, was banned for a year in Norway, eight years in Ireland and a decade in Italy.
A ban in Aberystwyth lasted three decades and – how useful a piece of trivia is this? – was only lifted in 2009 after one of the stars, Sue Jones-Davies, who played Brian’s love interest Judith, became town mayor. (I factchecked myself on this: she really was mayor but Aberystwyth hadn’t banned it. Shame!).
What is more surprising is the film’s treatment of what we now know as gender transition, and which today generates endless argument.
Decades before this became an issue, Python raised it, discussed it and dealt with it in just a few short lines.
This comes when the revolutionaries Reg, Francis, Judith and Stan are discussing the struggle against repression. Every time Francis mentions the rights of man, Stan chips in with “Or woman”.
An exasperated Reg eventually asks him why and Stan stays he wants to be one, a woman. The entire debate over trans rights is then disposed of:
Reg, to Stan. “But … you can’t have babies. You haven’t got a womb! Where’s the foetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?”
Judith (later mayor of Aberystwyth): “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.”
Reg briefly remains baffled (“What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?”) but soon comes on board with the idea of the right to be a woman, even though he really thinks its symbolic of a struggle against reality.
It really could be that simple, because in essence that is all it is.
You may think this is a naïve stance but consider not the lilies (“He’s having a go at the flowers now!”) but the Good Friday agreement. It brought peace to Northern Ireland after decades of violence, and was equally based on the acceptance that while both sides’ belief in the presence or absence of a border was somewhat symbolic of a struggle against reality, the right to hold the view that there was or was not a border was one that both sides could have, and hold simultaneously.
It all worked fine until Brexit forced people to look closely, to find that there both was and was not a border at the same time – a subtlety that escaped Boris Johnson – the exposure of which led to a troublesome real border in the middle of the North Sea, which now causes far more trouble than the previous sleight of hand.
Obviously gender fluidity is slightly more complex than this, but it really does mostly boil down to those who think it’s going against reality quietly accepting that while arguably it may be, people have the right to be who they choose to be.
Happy Christmas!
