Monty Python's Travel Agent Sketch
The Travel Agent Sketch
This is horked from Monty Python's All the Words and typed in
by me...Personally, I think it's one of their best.
Monty Python's Flying Circus!
presents
From Episode 31: "The All-England Summerize Proust Competition"
The Travel Agent Sketch
(Fade up on close up of picture of Everest. Pull back to reveal
travel agent's office.)
Bounder: (MICHAEL) Mount Everest, forbidding, aloof, terrifying. The
highest place on earth. No I'm sorry we don't go there. No.
(By the time Bounder is saying his last sentence the camera has
revealed the office and Bounder himself sitting at a desk.
Bounder now replaces the telephone into which he has been
speaking. After a pause the tourist -- Mr Smoke-Too-Much --
enters the office and approaches Mr Bounder's secretary.)
Tourist: (ERIC) Good morning.
Secretary: (CAROL) Oh good morning. (sexily) Do you want to go
upstairs?
Tourist: What?
Secretary: (sexily) Do you want to go upstairs? (brightly) Or have
you come to arrange a holiday?
Tourist: Er ... to arrange a holiday.
Secretary: Oh, sorry.
Tourist: What's all this about coming upstairs?
Secretary: Oh, nothing, nothing. Now, where were you thinking of
going?
Tourist: India.
Secretary: Ah one of our adventure holidays!
Tourist: Yes!
Secretary: Well you'd better speak to Mr Bounder about that. Mr
Bounder, this gentleman is interested in the India Overland.
(Tourist walks over to Bounder's desk where he is greeted by
Bounder.)
Bounder: Ah. Good morning. I'm Bounder of Adventure.
Tourist: My name is Smoke-Too-Much.
Bounder: What?
Tourist: My name is Smoke-Too-Much. Mr Smoke-Too-Much.
Bounder: Well, you'd better cut down a bit then.
Tourist: What?
Bounder: You'd better cut down a bit then.
Tourist: Oh I see! Cut down a bit, for Smoke-Too-Much.
Bounder: Yes, ha ha ... I expect you get people making jokes about your
name all the time, eh?
Tourist: No, no actually. Actually, it never struck me before. Smoke
...Too...Much!
Bounder: Anyway, you're interested in one of our adventure holidays, eh?
Tourist: Yes. I saw your advert in the bolour supplement.
Bounder: The what?
Tourist: The bolour supplement.
Bounder: The colour supplement?
Tourist: Yes. I'm sorry I can't say the letter 'B'.
Bounder: 'C'?
Tourist: Yes, that's right. It's all due to a trauma I suffered when I
was a spoolboy. I was attacked by a bat.
Bounder: A cat?
Tourist: No a bat.
Bounder: Can you say the letter 'K'?
Tourist: Oh yes. Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble Bollege Oxford.
Bounder: Why don't you use the letter 'K' instead of the letter 'C'?
Tourist: What you mean ... spell bolour with a 'K'?
Bounder: Yes.
Tourist: Kolour. Oh, that's very good, I never thought of that.
Bounder: Anyway, about the holiday.
Tourist: Well I saw your adverts in the paper and I've been on package
tours several times, you see, and I decided that this was for me.
Bounder: Ah good.
Tourist: Yes I quite agree with you, I mean what's the point of being
treated like a sheep, I mean I'm fed up going abroad and being
treated like a sheep, what's the point of being carted around in
busses, surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and
Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their
transistor radios and their 'Sunday Mirrors', complaining about
the tea, 'Oh they don't make it properly here do they not like
at home' stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips
and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in
cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over
their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they 'overdid it on
the first day'!
Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes. Absolutely, yes, I quite agree...
Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellevueses
and Bontinentals with their international luxury modern roomettes
and their Watney's Red Barrel and their swimming pools full of
fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming
pyramids and frightening the children and barging in to the queues
and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl
of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu
of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night there's
bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dago
with nine-inch hips and some big fat bloated tart with her hair
Brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for
Foreigners.
Bounder: (beginning to get fed up) Yes, yes, now...
Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with diarrhoea
and flabby white legs and hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called
Manuel, and then, once a week there's an excursion to the local
Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and
bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel, and then one night they take you
to a local restaurant with local color and coloring and they
show you there and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl
who keeps singing 'Torremolinos, Torremolinos', and complaining
about the food, 'Oh! It's so greasy isn't it?' and then you get
cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an
Instamatic and Dr Scholl sandals and Tuesday's 'Daily Express'
and he drones on and on about how Mr Smith should be running
this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and
then he throws up all over the Cuban Libres.
Bounder: Will you be quiet please.
Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they don't know they
haven't even visited, 'to all at number 22, weather wonderful
our room is marked with an "X". Wish you were here.'
Bounder: Shut up.
Tourist: 'Food very greasy but we have managed to find this marvellous
little place hidden away in the back streets.'
Bounder: Shut up!
Tourist: 'Where you can even get Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and
onion...'
Bounder: Shut up!!!
Tourist: '...crisps and the accordionist plays "Maybe its because I'm a
Londoner"' and spending four days on the tarmac at Lutton
airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried
Watney's sandwiches...
Bounder: Shut your bloody gob! I've had enough of this, I'm going to
ring the police.
(He dials and waits. Cut to a corner of a police station. One
policeman is knitting, another is making a palm tree out of old
newspapers. The phone rings.)
Knitting Policeman: Oh...take it off the hook. (they do so)
(Cut back to the travel agent's office. The man is still going
on, the travel agent looks crossly at the phone and puts it
down. Then picks it up and dials again.)
Bounder: Hello, operator, operator...I'm trying to get the police...
the police yes, what? (takes his shoe off and looks inside)
nine and a half, nine and a half, yes, yes...I see...well can
you keep trying please...
(Through all this the tourist is going on:)
Tourist: ...and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are vomiting and
throwing up on the plastic flowers and they keep telling you
it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in
Iceland waiting to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can
pick you up on the tarmac at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and
you sit on the tarmac until six because of 'unforeseen
difficulties', i.e. the permanent strike of the Air Traffic
Control in Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you
take off at eight, and when you get to Malaga airport
everybody's swallowing Enterovioform tablets and queuing for the
toilets and when you finally get to the hotel there's no water
in the taps, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in
the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and
half the rooms are double-booked and you can't sleep anyway...
(The secretary comes in and looks into the camera.)
Secretary: Oh! Sorry to keep you waiting...will you come this way
please...
(The camera follows her as she leads us out of the office, with
agent and client still rabbiting on, down a short passage to a
documentary interview set where the two participants are sitting
waiting. We follow her into the set.)
Secretary: Here they are. (she turns to the camera again, which moves
a little towards her, as if waiting to be summoned) Just here
will do fine! Goodbye.
(
geocities.com/hollywood/cinema) (
geocities.com/hollywood)