Monty Python's Flying Circus (TV Series)

How Not to Be Seen (1970)

John Cleese: Advertising Boss, Announcer, Mr. Glans, Gavin Millarrrrrrrrrr, Man with Enormous Ears, Old Gramophone, Fourth City Gent, Priest, Bruce Beer, Naughty Bishop, 'How Not to Be Seen' Narrator

Photos 

Quotes 

• Voice Over : Mr. Ken Andrews, of Leighton Road, Slough has concealed himself extremely well. He could be almost anywhere. He could be behind the wall, inside the water barrel, beneath a pile of leaves, up in the tree, squatting down behind the car, concealed in a hollow, or crouched behind any one of a hundred bushes. However we happen to know he's in the water barrel.

  [the water barrel explodes] 

• Fourth City Gent : Well, I've been in the city for thirty years and I've never once regretted being a nasty, greedy, cold-hearted, avaricious money-grubber...

  [correcting himself] 

  Fourth City Gent : Conservative!

• Gavin Millarrrrrrrrrr : Some people have made the mistake of seeing Shunt's work as a load of rubbish about railway timetables, but clever people like me who talk loudly in restaurants see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a mechanized world. The points are frozen, the beast is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is frozen, the beast is late out of Paddington. The point is taken. If La Fontaine's elk would spurn Tom Jones the engine must be our head, the dining car, our esophagus, the guards van, our left lung, the cattle truck, our shins, the first class compartment, the piece of skin at the nape of the neck, and the level crossing, an electric elk called Simon. The clarity is devastating. But where is the ambiguity? It's over there in a box. Shunt is saying the 8:15 from Gillingham, when in reality he means the 8:13 from Gillingham. The train is the same, only the time is altered. Ecce homo, ergo elk. La Fontaine knew his sister and knew her bloody well. The point is taken, the beast is molting, the fluff gets up your nose. The illusion is complete, it is reality, the reality is illusion and the ambiguity is the only truth. But is the truth, as Hitchcock observes, in the box? No, there isn't room, the ambiguity has put on weight. The point is taken, the elk is dead, the beast stops at Swindon, Chabrol stops at nothing, I'm having treatment and La Fontaine can get knotted.