Series 3, Episode 33: Storage Jars
The cast:
PRESENTER Eric Idle
ROGERS Terry Jones
The sketch:
(Cut to very quick series of stills of storage jars.)
CAPTION: ‘STORAGE JARS’
(Urgent documentary music. Mix through to an impressive documentary set. Zoom in fust to presenter in a swivd chair. He swing round to face the camera.)
Presenter: Good evening and welcome to another edition of ‘Storage Jars’. On tonight’s programme Mikos Antoniarkis, the Greek rebel leader who seized power in Athens this morning, tells us what he keeps in storage jars.
(quick cut to photo of a guerrilla leader with a gun; sudden dramatic chord; instantly cut back to the presenter) From strife-torn Bolivia, Ronald Rodgets reports on storage jars there.
(still of a Bolivian city and again dramatic chord and instantly back to the presenter) And closer to home, the first dramatic pictures of the mass jail-break near the storage jar factory in Maidenhead. All this and more in storage jars!
(Cut to a road in front of a heap of smouldering rubble. Dull thuds of mortar. Reporter in short sleeves standing in tight shot. Explosions going off behind him at intervals.)
Rodgers: This is La Paz, Bolivia, behind me you can hear the thud of mortar and the high-pitched whine of rockets, as the battle for control of this volatile republic shakes the foundations of this old city.
(slowly we pull out during this until we see in front of him a fairly long trestle table set out with range of diffrent-sized storage jar) But whatever their political inclinations these Bolivians are all keen users of storage jars.
(the explosions continue behind him) Here the largest size is used for rice and for mangoes – a big local crop. Unlike most revolutionary South American states they’ve an intermediary size in between the 21b and 51b jars. This gives this poor but proud people a useful jar for apricots, plums and stock cubes. The smallest jar – this little 2oz jar, for sweets, chocolates and even little shallots. No longer used in the West it remains here as an unspoken monument to the days when La Paz knew better times. Ronald Rodgers, ‘Storage Jars’, La Paz.
(ANIMATION: television is bad for your eyes.)