Monty Python's Flying Circus (TV Series) Salad Days (1972) User Reviews

This episode will catch you off guard...beware!

[djjimmyvespa · 20 February 2006]

I can't believe the Python boys got away with such a grisly riot of pantomime gore and blood-gushing excess back in 1972! For the most part, this episode moves along quite nicely, taking in classics like the Cheese Shop and bizarre bits like Storage Jars and Biggles dictating a letter, but in the last five minutes, all hell breaks loose when 'Philip Jenkinson' (a real life film critic, played here by Eric Idle) announces that Sam Peckinpah is changing his ways by adapting the genteel musical 'Salad Days' for the big screen. At the time, Peckinpah's name was mud with most critics (and the British censors) for his somewhat flippant treatment of rape and extreme violence in Straw Dogs, so it's surprising that the BBC actually allowed what happens next to be broadcast. Eyeballs are burst by tennis balls, arms are torn off, hands are severed along with heads, people are impaled by piano keyboards and tennis rackets, then Jenkinson gets machine-gunned whilst a caption says "TEE HEE"! It's absolutely gross but also very funny if you're able to tolerate slapstick violence taken to its outer limit. The Pythons then up the subversive quotient by offering an insincere apology, followed by a denial of the apology, and a couple of weird little blackouts featuring BBC newsreader Richard Baker and John Cleese in an unlikely historical costume stalking up and down a beach, apologising that the show's a bit short this week and there are no more jokes! It's not the best episode ever but it's one of the most memorable, it shocked the hell out of me when I was thirteen, and what a nifty experience that is for any adolescent!