Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Scene 17 : Four Yorkshiremen
From the live albums Live at Drury Lane and Live at City Center
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1st Yorkshireman Eric Idle
2nd Yorkshireman Graham Chapman
3rd Yorkshireman Terry Jones
4th Yorkshireman Michael Palin
1st Yorkshireman Very passable, isn’t it? Very passable.
All Right, all right.
2nd Yorkshireman Good glass of Chocteau de Chasselas, ain’t just that, sire?
3rd Yorkshireman Oh, you’re right there, Obadiah.
2nd Yorkshireman Right.
1st Yorkshireman Who would have thought, thirty years ago, we’d all be sitting here drinking Chateau de Chaselet, eh?
All Aye, aye.
4th Yorkshireman Them days we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea.
2nd Yorkshireman Right! A cup of cold tea!
4th Yorkshireman Right!
1st Yorkshireman Without milk or sugar!
3rd Yorkshireman Or tea!
4th Yorkshireman In a cracked cup and all.
1st Yorkshireman Oh, we never used to have a cup! We used to have to drink out of a rolled-up newspaper!
2nd Yorkshireman The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
3rd Yorkshireman But you know, we were happy in those days, although we were poor.
4th Yorkshireman Because we were poor!
3rd Yorkshireman Right!
4th Yorkshireman My old dad used to say to me: “Money doesn’t bring you happiness, son!”
1st Yorkshireman He was right!
4th Yorkshireman Right!
1st Yorkshireman I was happier then and I had nothing! We used to live in this tiny old tumbled-down house with great big holes in
the roof.
2nd Yorkshireman House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twentysix of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
3rd Yorkshireman You were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor!
4th Yorkshireman Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor! Would have been a palace to us! We used to live in an old watertank on a rubbish tip. We’d all woke up every morning by having a load of rotten fish dumped all over us! House, huh!
1st Yorkshireman Well, when I say a house, it was just a hole in the ground, covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us!
2nd Yorkshireman We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in a lake!
3rd Yorkshireman You were lucky to have a lake! There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road!
4th Yorkshireman A cardboard box?
3rd Yorkshireman Aye!
4th Yorkshireman You were lucky! We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank! We used to have to go up every morning, at six o’clock and clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week out, for six pence a week, and when we got home, our dad would slash us to sleep with his belt!
2nd Yorkshireman Luxury! We used to have to get up out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot grubble, work twenty hours a day at mill, for two pence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
3rd Yorkshireman Well, of course, we had it tough! We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and lick the road clean with our tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing cold grubble, work twenty-four hours a day at mill for four pence every six years, and when we got home, our dad would slice us in two with a breadknife!
1st Yorkshireman Right! I had to get up in the morning, at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay millowner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!
4th Yorkshireman Aah. Are you trying to tell the young people of today that, and they won’t believe you!
All No, no they won’t!