Culture

Show us the Messiah! Torquay lifts its ban on Monty Python's Life of Brian

by Paul Conneally | September 24, 2008 at 03:03 pm

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Monty Python's The Life of Brian is a classic British film and it comes as a bit of a shock to find that it's still banned by a number of local authorities across Britain - it doesn't feel 'British' this banning of a satirical film.

Torquay calls itself the centre of the English Riviera and ironically is the home of John Cleese's small minded comedy creation Basil Fawlty in the TV sit-com Fawlty Towers who perhaps typifies the Torquay mentality that has seen it taking all these years to lift this ban.

Perhaps the other authorities will now follow suit and welcome Brian into their towns.

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It regularly tops polls for the funniest film ever made, yet for almost three decades Monty Python's Life of Brian has remained out of bounds to residents of Torquay.

Organisers of a comedy film festival in the seaside resort next week have been obliged to get special dispensation after discovering that the film was still on the local authority's blacklist, 28 years after its release.

The film, which starred the late Graham Chapman as Brian “He's not the Messiah” Cohen, with John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, was attacked by Christian leaders when it came out for allegedly lampooning Jesus.

Chapman played a character mistaken for the Messiah, whose life curiously paralleled that of Jesus. The Monty Python team insisted that it was a send-up of religious obsession and Hollywood Bible epics of the 1950s, but cinemas that showed the film were picketed and 11 local authorities decided to ban it.

Life of Brian remains banned by a number of authorities. In July, the Mayor of Aberystwyth, Sue Jones-Davies, who played Brian's girlfriend in the film, discovered that it was still banned in her own town. She announced her intention to have the ban lifted but ran into immediate opposition from local church leaders.

Canon Stuart Bell, vicar of St Michael's in Aberystwyth, said: “If someone was going to make fun of my wife in a film then I would oppose that. Making fun of Jesus Christ, whom I love more than my wife, in a film is going to offend me.”