Monday 24 December 2012

Monty Python on the problem of economism

Peter Cook was the father of British satire but he also knew its limits.

In the early 1960s, he described his satirical nightclub ‘The Establishment’ as “loosely based on the Berlin cabaret of the 1930s, which did so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler”.

In the early 1970s, Monty Python first broadcast this sketch, which in retrospect was extraordinarily prescient. As Cook might have said, it did so much to prevent the rise of amoral and economistic values in the subsequent three decades.

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