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For me, that interview symbolizes a certain turning point in the political/cultural role of bishops and the church. There is such an obvious dichotomy betwee

For me, that interview symbolizes a certain turning point in the political/cultural role of bishops and the church. There is such an obvious dichotomy between the authority the clerics expected to be regarded with and the realilty. They looked and sounded so anachronistic. The moral authority just seemed gone. They just looked like python caricatures, robes, misplaced pomp and all. Meanwhile, these comedians were winning at the philosophical sparring. I'm from the next island over. We trailed the UK by 10-20 years, in terms of secularism and church authority. But, starting from a much more religious/clerical point and reaching and arguably more secular one very fast. There have been several key referendums recently, and the church simply failed to mount an opposition. Appearing in regalia and demanding the moral authority because "I am a bishop of the church" would have been a ridiculous spectacle. That element of power was long gone. In my symbolic narration of the story, Cleese and Palin did that in that interview.

dash_underscore 8y ago
Also from that island and I'd like to mention that "Life of Brian" was banned by the film censor there. I only got to see it at a private screening by a college society. That ban was rescinded at some point, I think in the 1990s. It's hard to fathom now, because the film seems so innocuous -- I think it was just a taboo subject at the time.
zeristor 8y ago
Didn’t “the next island over” have Father Ted Crilly at just the right time? Sunday opening is still constrained, although seemingly by labour MPs for unions, and Easter Sunday seems to be still betrothed to the church, even though it’s the Celtic festival of spring.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Sure. You can annotate the history however you want. I don't think there's a "truth." Various clerical abuses/scandals probably played the real lead role, if you ask most people. You can always convincingly argue for "one damned thing after another" as the real engine of history. There's also the plain fact that the BBC interview involved an entirely different church in a different country, which is points againt my version. ..That's why I say symbolic. That interview just feels like the magic is gone, curtain is pulled or pick your metaphor. Suddenly (it seemed to take them by surprise) the bishop was just an old man in silly clothes who couldn't make a relevant argument, didn't seem like an authority and wouldn't be taken more seriously than the comedians who's film had interesting commentary, besides being funny and entertaining. It captured a moment, imo. I also like python... so bias.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Don't most of the Christian significant dates originate from earlier festivals from the Celts, Pagans and the rest?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Yes, folks were always smart to re-use things such as dates, and even forms of workship etc. But the semantics changes substantially with different religions, only dates, abstract motions, and symbols remained (seldom the symbolisms, meanings, etc). Which is why pointing that this or that custom was adopted from an earlier religion doesn't say much about it's new role -- some skeptics seem to go like "it was adopted, so it's fake" and can't fathom that it just means it was convenient and served a role for both religions, nor that the role can be completely different, even if the date is the same. Like if we replaced Xmas on Dec 25, but kept the date as a new holiday of a new religion, say, "The day of buying gifts". So, instead of the message of god becoming man, redemption, love, etc, it would mean "time to indulge ourselves with crap, and buy some token BS for others to keep the market moving". Hmm, wait, we already did that.
    - Tsubasachan 8y ago
      Are you admitting religion was thought up by people?
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      Certainly, though they often seem to be some form of melding or merging of the two. There's still plenty of pre-Christian aspects to Easter and Christmas for instance. At this remove it seems just about impossible to pick apart, let alone identify the previous significance.
  - NateEag 8y ago
    I believe Christmas does, falling near enough to midwinter celebrations. Easter, however, is conceptually linked to Passover, since it commemorates Christ's death at Passover and subsequent resurrection [1]. Easter's actual date is highly variable and notoriously aggravating to compute, though [2]. For reasons I do not know, the church did not want to just say "the first Sunday following Passover." 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus
- barrkel 8y ago
  UK Sunday hours for e.g. supermarkets is much more restricted in UK than in Ireland, something that surprised and annoyed me when I moved to London.
  - dev_north_east 8y ago
    Ah yes, the SNP voting against the reforms in England and Wales (which they enjoy in Scotland) was hilarious. Nats gonna nat.
- dev_north_east 8y ago
  > Didn’t “the next island over” have Father Ted Crilly at just the right time? British produced and made, Irish written and acted. Guess it depends on your defintion of an Irish show but you can be sure that if something is funny, RTE had absolutely nothing to do with it.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
You're spot on. It felt anachronistic at the time - I didn't recognise that world then, and now it's something alien. My parents were religious by baptism only, which may have contributed, and first time around I was still young enough to know relatively little of the religious culture before. Watching it again years later and it's almost unwatchable. What was most noticeable seeing it later is how respectful and careful the Pythons were trying to be. Yet met with closed minds, dogma, "it's a terrible film" and "Listen to me, because it's been that way hundreds of years". Ironic that John Cleese was trying to develop a conversation on closed and open minds! There's a few facial expressions that reveal their frustration - there may have been a bit of internal swearing! Listening to my kids and their friends, and other younger people, religion is irrelevant in the UK, outside some ethnic communities, nowadays. Ireland seems to have caught up - twenty or thirty years ago even a conversation around the abortion referendum would have seemed impossible. Yet had the church reacted to the 40 years of post-Thatcher society and they might have had as large a place as ever - albeit in a changed role - had they been inclusive, replaced the lost community resources, sense of hope and so on. That they didn't speaks volumes. From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully. I'm not sure about "end of an era". People seem to have an intrinsic need for faith. Now that organized religion is playing a less prominent role in their lifes (at least in Western countries), that hole seems to get filled with esoterics and conspiracy theories.
  - meheleventyone 8y ago
    I don't think being religious immunised people against conspiracy theories or esoteric beliefs as if it were only possible to have faith in one thing at a time! They seem mostly orthogonal.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    Esoterics and conspiracy theories where pretty strong before british (and elsewhere) decline in church authority. It isn't the end of an era in the utopian sense, from now on science and reason. But the era of the church as "1st estate of the realm," the unchallengeable political power & moral authority, ended.
coldtea 8y ago
>There is such an obvious dichotomy between the authority the clerics expected to be regarded with and the realilty. They looked and sounded so anachronistic. The moral authority just seemed gone. It's also that the Church of England is hardly a church. More like a country/bingo club. Where would it find the moral authority?
petercooper 8y ago
I'm watching the debate right now and the bishop says, when explaining why he's not particularly offended by the humour of the film, "I'm also the governor of a mentally-deficient school so I'm on familiar ground this evening". Oh boy, you couldn't get away with saying something like that on TV nowadays :-D
TheOperator 8y ago
It really amazes me to even say it but I've always seen comedy guiding morality for as long as I've been alive. I noticed during the Iraq War how much INSANELY quicker the comedians turned against the war compared to the mainstream and self-proclaimed moral authorities like journos. Institutionalized stupidity tends to be really funny to make fun of and really lame to defend. It seems like a stupid idea for comedians to be moral arbiters when comedians themselves hardly seem like particularly moral people and comedy is such an informal thing. Yet there is this skeptical contarian spirit so fundamentally baked into the medium. Which consistently leads to Comedians being one step ahead of their moral betters.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  I'd agree except that the popular comedians tend to have the same points of view as major multinational corporations and billionaires. Want to lambaste the rich? You and Buffett both. Make fun of racist white people? Who doesn't? Healthcare is a mess? A long line of CEOs parrot that line, too. Nobody is sitting around making fun of overreach for a good cause. Nobody is making fun of the absurd political mathematics thrown around by favored political movements. To be fair, it's more work to actually push against the grain of the culture you live in. It's easier to be make the millionth dig at the orange skinned jackass.
  - TheOperator 8y ago
    The big comedians backed by the big networks in the prime time slots I don't watch. It's not really the Jay Lenos of the world I'm talking about when I say this stuff. It's the sort of comedians which have picket lines outside their shows and get kicked out of town. Comedians like the Python Troupe.
  - mr_overalls 8y ago
    > Want to lambaste the rich? You and Buffett both. Make fun of racist white people? Who doesn't? Healthcare is a mess? A long line of CEOs parrot that line, too. These are popular positions (at least in the US) only among the Left. The Republican party - including its poorest members - lauds the most greedy billionaires as "job creators" and the pinnacle of achievement for Americans. Conservatives believe that straight, Christian whites are just as discriminated against - if not more so - than racial, religious, or gender/sexual minorities. Republicans decry almost any attempt to provide affordable health care to the American masses as "socialism." The positions you describe are most definitely "against the grain" for half of the US. And they are important positions to take, for the future health and wealth of the country. And I'm not sure why you're focusing on the difficulty/popularity of espousing certain positions on social issues, rather than the correctness of the positions taken.
billfruit 8y ago
Trollope's novels already had made much fun out of the workings of the Church of England. I doubt if the bishops had moral authority among the public for a quite long time. Perhaps people love the spectacle and the pageantry.

dash_underscore 8y ago

Also from that island and I'd like to mention that "Life of Brian" was banned by the film censor there. I only got to see it at a private screening by a college society. That ban was rescinded at some point, I think in the 1990s. It's hard to fathom now, because the film seems so innocuous -- I think it was just a taboo subject at the time.

zeristor 8y ago

Didn’t “the next island over” have Father Ted Crilly at just the right time? Sunday opening is still constrained, although seemingly by labour MPs for unions, and Easter Sunday seems to be still betrothed to the church, even though it’s the Celtic festival of spring.

dalbasal 8y ago
Sure. You can annotate the history however you want. I don't think there's a "truth." Various clerical abuses/scandals probably played the real lead role, if you ask most people. You can always convincingly argue for "one damned thing after another" as the real engine of history. There's also the plain fact that the BBC interview involved an entirely different church in a different country, which is points againt my version. ..That's why I say symbolic. That interview just feels like the magic is gone, curtain is pulled or pick your metaphor. Suddenly (it seemed to take them by surprise) the bishop was just an old man in silly clothes who couldn't make a relevant argument, didn't seem like an authority and wouldn't be taken more seriously than the comedians who's film had interesting commentary, besides being funny and entertaining. It captured a moment, imo. I also like python... so bias.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Don't most of the Christian significant dates originate from earlier festivals from the Celts, Pagans and the rest?
- coldtea 8y ago
  Yes, folks were always smart to re-use things such as dates, and even forms of workship etc. But the semantics changes substantially with different religions, only dates, abstract motions, and symbols remained (seldom the symbolisms, meanings, etc). Which is why pointing that this or that custom was adopted from an earlier religion doesn't say much about it's new role -- some skeptics seem to go like "it was adopted, so it's fake" and can't fathom that it just means it was convenient and served a role for both religions, nor that the role can be completely different, even if the date is the same. Like if we replaced Xmas on Dec 25, but kept the date as a new holiday of a new religion, say, "The day of buying gifts". So, instead of the message of god becoming man, redemption, love, etc, it would mean "time to indulge ourselves with crap, and buy some token BS for others to keep the market moving". Hmm, wait, we already did that.
  - Tsubasachan 8y ago
    Are you admitting religion was thought up by people?
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    Certainly, though they often seem to be some form of melding or merging of the two. There's still plenty of pre-Christian aspects to Easter and Christmas for instance. At this remove it seems just about impossible to pick apart, let alone identify the previous significance.
- NateEag 8y ago
  I believe Christmas does, falling near enough to midwinter celebrations. Easter, however, is conceptually linked to Passover, since it commemorates Christ's death at Passover and subsequent resurrection [1]. Easter's actual date is highly variable and notoriously aggravating to compute, though [2]. For reasons I do not know, the church did not want to just say "the first Sunday following Passover." 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus
barrkel 8y ago
UK Sunday hours for e.g. supermarkets is much more restricted in UK than in Ireland, something that surprised and annoyed me when I moved to London.
- dev_north_east 8y ago
  Ah yes, the SNP voting against the reforms in England and Wales (which they enjoy in Scotland) was hilarious. Nats gonna nat.
dev_north_east 8y ago
> Didn’t “the next island over” have Father Ted Crilly at just the right time? British produced and made, Irish written and acted. Guess it depends on your defintion of an Irish show but you can be sure that if something is funny, RTE had absolutely nothing to do with it.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

You're spot on. It felt anachronistic at the time - I didn't recognise that world then, and now it's something alien. My parents were religious by baptism only, which may have contributed, and first time around I was still young enough to know relatively little of the religious culture before. Watching it again years later and it's almost unwatchable. What was most noticeable seeing it later is how respectful and careful the Pythons were trying to be. Yet met with closed minds, dogma, "it's a terrible film" and "Listen to me, because it's been that way hundreds of years". Ironic that John Cleese was trying to develop a conversation on closed and open minds! There's a few facial expressions that reveal their frustration - there may have been a bit of internal swearing! Listening to my kids and their friends, and other younger people, religion is irrelevant in the UK, outside some ethnic communities, nowadays. Ireland seems to have caught up - twenty or thirty years ago even a conversation around the abortion referendum would have seemed impossible. Yet had the church reacted to the 40 years of post-Thatcher society and they might have had as large a place as ever - albeit in a changed role - had they been inclusive, replaced the lost community resources, sense of hope and so on. That they didn't speaks volumes. From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully.

majewsky 8y ago
> From the perspective of now it does seem to mark the end of an era. Thankfully. I'm not sure about "end of an era". People seem to have an intrinsic need for faith. Now that organized religion is playing a less prominent role in their lifes (at least in Western countries), that hole seems to get filled with esoterics and conspiracy theories.
- meheleventyone 8y ago
  I don't think being religious immunised people against conspiracy theories or esoteric beliefs as if it were only possible to have faith in one thing at a time! They seem mostly orthogonal.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Esoterics and conspiracy theories where pretty strong before british (and elsewhere) decline in church authority. It isn't the end of an era in the utopian sense, from now on science and reason. But the era of the church as "1st estate of the realm," the unchallengeable political power & moral authority, ended.

coldtea 8y ago

>There is such an obvious dichotomy between the authority the clerics expected to be regarded with and the realilty. They looked and sounded so anachronistic. The moral authority just seemed gone. It's also that the Church of England is hardly a church. More like a country/bingo club. Where would it find the moral authority?

petercooper 8y ago

I'm watching the debate right now and the bishop says, when explaining why he's not particularly offended by the humour of the film, "I'm also the governor of a mentally-deficient school so I'm on familiar ground this evening". Oh boy, you couldn't get away with saying something like that on TV nowadays :-D

TheOperator 8y ago

It really amazes me to even say it but I've always seen comedy guiding morality for as long as I've been alive. I noticed during the Iraq War how much INSANELY quicker the comedians turned against the war compared to the mainstream and self-proclaimed moral authorities like journos. Institutionalized stupidity tends to be really funny to make fun of and really lame to defend. It seems like a stupid idea for comedians to be moral arbiters when comedians themselves hardly seem like particularly moral people and comedy is such an informal thing. Yet there is this skeptical contarian spirit so fundamentally baked into the medium. Which consistently leads to Comedians being one step ahead of their moral betters.

humanrebar 8y ago
I'd agree except that the popular comedians tend to have the same points of view as major multinational corporations and billionaires. Want to lambaste the rich? You and Buffett both. Make fun of racist white people? Who doesn't? Healthcare is a mess? A long line of CEOs parrot that line, too. Nobody is sitting around making fun of overreach for a good cause. Nobody is making fun of the absurd political mathematics thrown around by favored political movements. To be fair, it's more work to actually push against the grain of the culture you live in. It's easier to be make the millionth dig at the orange skinned jackass.
- TheOperator 8y ago
  The big comedians backed by the big networks in the prime time slots I don't watch. It's not really the Jay Lenos of the world I'm talking about when I say this stuff. It's the sort of comedians which have picket lines outside their shows and get kicked out of town. Comedians like the Python Troupe.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  > Want to lambaste the rich? You and Buffett both. Make fun of racist white people? Who doesn't? Healthcare is a mess? A long line of CEOs parrot that line, too. These are popular positions (at least in the US) only among the Left. The Republican party - including its poorest members - lauds the most greedy billionaires as "job creators" and the pinnacle of achievement for Americans. Conservatives believe that straight, Christian whites are just as discriminated against - if not more so - than racial, religious, or gender/sexual minorities. Republicans decry almost any attempt to provide affordable health care to the American masses as "socialism." The positions you describe are most definitely "against the grain" for half of the US. And they are important positions to take, for the future health and wealth of the country. And I'm not sure why you're focusing on the difficulty/popularity of espousing certain positions on social issues, rather than the correctness of the positions taken.

billfruit 8y ago

Trollope's novels already had made much fun out of the workings of the Church of England. I doubt if the bishops had moral authority among the public for a quite long time. Perhaps people love the spectacle and the pageantry.