Why Monthy Python’s pink knight satire would never be written today

A recently discovered skit written for Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be rejected today for all the wrong reasons.

A scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

One of the most celebrated characters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was John Cleese’s fearless Black Knight, who responds to King Arthur chopping off his limbs in a duel by declaring: “T’is but a scratch”.

The success of this sketch, which concludes with the limbless knight jeering at the king to come back so he can bite his legs off, came at the expense of a scene that was written but never performed. The sketch, featuring a Pink Knight, has turned up in Michael Palin’s private archive at the British Library.

Boxes of material deposited at the British Library contain dozens of unused script ideas, including two sketches written for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One is about a Wild West bookshop and another features the amorous Pink Knight.

Written by Palin and Terry Jones, it features a character whose manner might now be considered homophobic but which was intended to lampoon old-fashioned attitudes towards homosexuality. It begins with a knight standing “in a slightly camp pose” who declares that King Arthur cannot cross a bridge unless the king gives him a kiss. “None of those sort of pecking ones the French try to get away with,” he says.

Arthur resists the Pink Knight’s advances and the two grapple before falling over, their armour entangled. At this point a group of pilgrims pass by and tut as the king protests that it is not what it looks like.

One page of the sketch was shared on the internet in 2012 by Holly Gilliam, whose father, Terry, was the member of the troupe responsible for the animations before beginning a career as a film director.

Palin’s archive includes minutes from a script meeting that describe the Pink Knight as “not an obvious poof or anything”. The notes continue: “Only when we see Arthur’s reaction to him are we aware of Arthur’s very old-fashioned and defensive attitude to pooves.”

Palin said that the sketch would not be written today. “I think probably it wouldn’t be quite the same because the establishment attitude has changed quite a lot,” he said. “When we were writing Python in 1973 there was much more homophobia - or rather not homophobia exactly, but awkwardness of dealing with the whole subject of homosexuality.

“That was the key point to writing comedy. It was to find a point where people were a bit confused or had contrasting views, and [that included] people making rather absurd remarks about gayness. Nowadays that may not be as funny because we’ve changed a lot in our attitude since then.”

Palin noted that Graham Chapman, who played Arthur, was gay and would not have disapproved. “Graham was one of the first people in the entertainment business to actually come out as being gay. That was at the very start of Python. He would probably have written [that type of sketch] himself.”

The file held at the British Library contains minutes of a script meeting held in 1973 that states that the sketch should be discarded because it was too similar to the Black Knight scene. “You had to have one or the other,” Palin said.

The sketches, typical of the group’s silliness, are being prepared for public access alongside more than 50 notebooks filled with first drafts and ideas. There are doodled notes of meetings that show how Holy Grail and the Pythons’ later film Life of Brian changed radically from early drafts. In both cases the team cut material that would have caused controversy at the time and is risque even now.

The Times