One of the most celebrated characters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was John Cleese’s fearless Black Knight, who responds to King Arthur chopping off his limbs in a duel by declaring: “ ’Tis but a scratch.”The success of this sketch, which concludes with the limbless knight jeering at the king to come back so he can bite his legs off, came at the expense of a scene that was written but never performed. The sketch, featuring a Pink Knight, has turned up in Michael Palin’s archive at the British Library. Written by Palin and Terry Jones, it features a character whose manner might now be considered homophobic but which was intended to lampoon old-fashioned attitudes towards homosexuality. It begins with a knight…

Source: The Times July 31, 2018 22:52 UTC