Originally published at: John Cleese's Favorite Sketch, The Bookshop | Boing Boing
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That’s excellent! Funny that it’s so very like The Cheese Shop, but swapped round. Curious that Cleese wrote How To Irritate People when he preferred to be cast as the one being irritated.
It’s rather different, but the misguided customer reminded me of Webb et al’s
EDIT to add: I was intrigued to see Marty Feldman playing a perfectly ordinary person, with his eyes not relevant to the joke. I only knew him from Young Frankenstein (damn your eyes!) and The Last Remake of Beau Geste.
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Wow, with Marty Feldman!
I have the Contractual Obligation Album on cassette and have listened to it many times but never heard another version.
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For the service of yanks everywhere (such as i’m) a “quantity surveyor” (or ‘QS’) is:
a construction industry professional with expert knowledge on construction costs and contracts. Qualified professional quantity surveyors are known as Chartered Surveyors (Members and Fellows of RICS) in the UK.
.there. i’ve grinned through this most excellent skit for at least the last 12,000 years and never before bothered to look that bit up.
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There is loads of good stuff in the At Last The 1948 Show, including the first version of 4 Yorkshiremen. And, of course, the lovely Aimi MacDonald.
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Threads like this are very disturbing, because the immediate impression can be that John Cleese has passed away.
Well, it probably hasn’t been quoted at him by thousands of people. I bet that helps a lot.
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My background is in civil engineering and you have no idea how much I want this book to be real.
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I remember seeing a version of Cleese doing this sketch with his wife, aka Polly from Fawlty Towers…
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That was in A Poke In the Eye (With a Sharp Stick), the first Amnesty International funding comedy show (pre Secret Policeman’s Ball). Graham Chapman played the Feldman role in the Contractural Obligation album version (mentioned above). (Ms Booth is still currently alive, before y’all ask.) Apparently Feldman performed the sketch twice more in his TV career, in his UK and US shows.
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Reminds me of Black Books, just with a nicer, friendly shopkeeper 
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Did you catch the “Monty Python’s Perspnal Best” specials on PBS in 2006? One episode started with a tribute to the “late” John Cleese, and included interviews with the senile, 96 year old actor taken shortly before his passing.
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A nation of shopkeepers
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Thanks for this @garethb2! I dearly love this sketch, and replay bits of it silently to myself so often I almost forget what I’m quoting. Sometimes not so silently, to the deep confusion of anyone around.
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no tookers though
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Oh great! Now I have to go buy some pearls so I can clutch them.
I thought he already had died, and some transphobic arsehole has been writing shit in his name for the last few years.
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