Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the world's funniest film turns 50

Telegraph

22-03-2025

Not that the film's influence was confined to the US. The list of ­writers, performers, directors and artists who took on, specifically, Holy Grail's mixture of surrealism, history and anachronistic comedy is long and impressive. It includes Terry Pratchett, who drew on Python's handling of the medieval world for his own vision of Tolkien-inspired comedy; Richard Curtis, the creator of Blackadder, and his collaborator Ben Elton, who continues to mine the historical comedy vein with his Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow; and Taika Waititi, who not only made the dark historical comedy Jojo Rabbit, but also superbly rebooted Gilliam's Time Bandits for Apple TV+ last year. And there is, of course, more than a trace of Holy Grail's DNA in the BBC's Horr­ible Histories, which took Terry Deary's books and turned them into the longest-running Python tribute ever screened.
It's arguable that, more than anything else they did – more than the extremist comedy of The Meaning of Life's Mr Creosote, more than the Dead Parrot sketch so beloved by students everywhere, more than the stage shows and the LPs, more even than the controversial Life of Brian – Holy Grail represents the purest and best expression of Monty Python. Its loose narrative gives it an extraordinary freedom simply to be relentlessly funny. Its medieval fabulist setting means it can never date (it helps, too, perhaps, that it's the only Python project in which most of the female roles are actually played by women). And its history-based theme made it the template for so much of the Pythons' subsequent work, solo and otherwise, from ­Ripping Yarns to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Even after half a century, its grip on the world's psyche shows little sign of loosening. Like a cross-­cultural Easter egg, Holy Grail still crops up everywhere, in every medium. Perhaps the most famous recent reference occurs in the otherwise distinctly uncomical HBO mega­hit Game of Thrones, which not only featured scenes filmed at Holy Grail's Scottish Doune Castle location, but also a moment in which the Champion of Meereen taunts Dae­nerys Targaryen with the words, 'Your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries.' There can surely be no better tribute to the lasting influence of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
David Quantick is the writer of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Austen? starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, which will return to Radio 4 soon