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Series 2, Episode 17: Living Room on the Pavement
The cast:
MR. POTTER Michael Palin
MRS. POTTER Graham Chapman
INTERVIEWER Eric Idle
The sketch:
(A working-class lounge is arranged on the pavement. There are no walls, just the furnishings: settee, two armchairs, sideboard, table, standard lamp, a tiled fireplace with ornaments on it. There is also a free-standing inside door. Mr. and Mrs. Potter come out of the cinema and go straight to their chairs and sit down. Passers-by have to skirt the living-room furniture.)
Mrs. Potter: (settling into her chair) Oh, it’s nice to be home.
Mr. Potter: (looking round) Builders haven’t been then.
Mrs. Potter: No.
(A trendy interviewer with hand mike comes into shot.)
Interviewer: These two old people are typical of the housing problem facing Britain’s aged.
Mrs. Potter: Here! Don’t you start doing a documentary on us, young man.
Interviewer: Oh please …
Mrs. Potter: No, you leave us alone!
Interviewer: Oh, just a little one about the appalling conditions under which you live.
Mrs. Potter: No! Get out of our house! Go on!
(Interviewer turns, motions to his cameraman and soundman and they all trail off miserably)
Cameraman: Oh all right. Come on, George, pick it up.
Mrs. Potter: Why don’t you do a documentary about the drug problem round in Walton Street?
(Cut to the camera crew. They stop, turn and mutter ‘a drug problem!’ and they dash off.)
Mrs. Potter: Oh, I’ll go and have a bath.
(She goes to the free-standing door and opens it. Beyond it we see the furnishings of a bathroom. In the bath is Alfred Lord Tennyson, fully clad. As she opens the door we hear him reading… continued)