Toby Young Toby Young

40 years on, Life of Brian has made the world a darker place

I went to the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican last weekend, a free speech festival organised by the Brexit party MEP Claire Fox, and listened to an interesting discussion about Life of Brian. The Monty Python film is exactly 40 years old, having been released in the UK on 8 November 1979.

The opinion of the panel, made up of comedians and intellectuals, was that its lampooning of rigid, orthodox thinking is more relevant today than ever, since we’re in the midst of a new wave of puritanism, albeit one inspired by left-wing identity politics rather than Christianity. After all, what is ‘hate speech’ if not a type of blasphemy?

When I got home I watched the famous TV debate between John Cleese, Michael Palin, Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, then the Bishop of Southwark, which is on YouTube. It’s worth viewing for the old-fashioned put-downs alone. ‘Now I wasn’t in the least bit horrified,’ says Stockwood, who’d been to a BBC screening just beforehand. ‘People said, “Oh now, Bishop, when you go there you’ll be absolutely horrified,” but I wasn’t at all. After all, I wasn’t vicar of the University Church for nothing. I’m familiar with undergraduate humour. And I’m also the governor of a mentally deficient school and once I was a prep-school master, so I felt frightfully at home.’

The consensus is that the young Turks got the better of the two elderly Christians — and that was certainly my view when I watched the debate in 1979 aged 16. But seeing it again, I was struck by how callow the liberal pieties of Cleese and Palin sounded. They maintained that the satirical target of Life of Brian wasn’t just Christianity, but all forms of received wisdom. What they objected to was the idea that we should take anything on faith, particularly a belief system with a strong moral component — and Cleese cited Marxism as another example.

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