Series 4, Episode 43: Hamlet and Ophelia

MAN

Terry Gilliam

HAMLET

Terry Jones

OPHELIA

Connie Booth

NURSE

Carol Cleveland

The sketch:

Animated opening titles.

Banging on the wall from next door.

Man

Shut up! Will you shut up in there!

Cut to a middle-aged man with small moustache and neat pyjamas banging on the wall with what appears to be an Indian club.

Man

Shut up! (it goes quiet next door) That's better.

He walks to a side wall and hangs his club on a hook beneath big old-fashioned art-nouveau sign clearly labelled `The Burlington Wall-banger'. He goes across to bed and gets in. In the bed are a party of four Japanese businessmen in suits with lapel badges, two lady American tourists with rain hats and cameras, three other moustached English gentlemen in pyjamas, four Tour De France riders, three Swedish businessmen, and Winston Churchill. In the corner of the room are three Tour De France bicycles. All the people are watching TV. All in the bed are slightly tear-stained and sad, and eating popcorn and crisps, utterly absorbed. On TV we hear a Hamlet sad speech.

Hamlet

I am myself indifferent honest, but then I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.

Cut to the TV set in the room. Close in on TV set to see Hamlet lying beside Ophelia, who is gazing at him intently. It is the same Hamlet we saw in the psychiatrist's scene. They are in one of those rather austere modern theatre sets.

Hamlet

O fair Ophelia, nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered ...

Ophelia

So anyway, you've got the girl on the bed and her legs are on the mantelpiece ...

The nurse from the psychiatrist's office enters.

Nurse

Out! (bundles her off)