In Which Max Schmeling Becomes The New World Chess Champion

Looking back, I think four things got me through the rigours of childhood and puberty. There was football, there was my older brother's record collection, there were girls...........and there was comedy.
Probably chief among these, and certainly the one which did most to shape the Pither of today, was comedy. Whether it was Round the Horn on the radio while we ate Sunday lunch or the likes of Morcambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and Doddy on the TV on Saturday nights, I lapped it all up.
There were two acts, however, which were so special, so brilliant and such an acquired taste that, not only was I TOLD to go and listen to them alone in my bedroom, I felt as though they were mine, I had discovered them, only I appreciated them and so I didn't want to share them.






The first was The Marx Brothers, all of whose films I had recorded on video (or vye-dee-oh as my mother called it).








The second was Monty Python's Flying Circus.
There is not enough space here for a full tribute to the genius which is Python but one thing struck me about them early on - they were way ahead of their time. After all, they went on to become the first people in 2,000 years of Christianity to use as the basis for an on-running gag the fact, for it surely must have been a fact, that people at the back of the 5,000 listening to the Surmon on the Mount couldn't hear properly what Christ was saying!
I was reminded today of another bizarre scenario they came up with, the basic premise for which has now been used to stage a real event. Python's fantastic idea was to have Jack Bodell, then British, Commonwealth and Empire heavyweight boxing champion, fight Sir Kenneth Clark, the foremost art historian of his generation and presenter of the TV epic Civilisation, to decide who should be the new Oxford Professor of Fine Art!
Cut to today and there was an item on the news about "Chess Boxing"! Yes, you've got it. Two burly blokes climbed into a ring in Germany and spent one round punching the Hell out of each other and then the next sitting down at a table in the middle playing chess. The gloves were back on for the next round and then it was back to the chessboard for the next, and so on. The German contender eventually came out on top after "knocking out" his American opponent by checkmating him in round six!
What a great, truly Pythonesque sport!....and it's real!! It opens up so many possibilities. We could have Javelin Darts, Shotput Billiards, Table Cricket, High-Dive Oil Painting....the list goes on.
Sadly, for those thinking of making a name for themselves by creating one of these anarchic new past-times, Python has already dreamed up the best. The Silly Olympiad in Munich featured such classics as The Marathon for Incontinents, The 100m Freestyle for Non-Swimmers (in the Bundesabsurd Pool) and the truly inspired an dangerously hilarious 100m For People With No Sense of Direction.
Python's best on the theme to my mind, however, was Novel Writing from Dorchester, featuring "a very good natured Bank Holiday crowd" which turned out to watch "local boy Thomas Hardy write his new novel, 'The Return of the Native'". Bloody superb!!
Grantham shall never, ever, ever have Monty Python.