IT’S COME TO THIS: John Cleese is forced to cut famous Life of Brian scene about men having babies from his new West End show.

Cleese told an audience at his one-man show last week that when the scene (co-written with the late Graham Chapman) was performed at a read-through for the new show in New York last year, doubts emerged. ‘At the end, I said to the American actors: ‘What do you think?’ And they said: ‘We love the script, but you can’t do that stuff about Loretta nowadays.’

‘So here you have something there’s never been a complaint about in 40 years, that I’ve heard of, and now all of a sudden we can’t do it because it’ll offend people. What is one supposed to make of that? But I think there were a lot of things that were actually, in some strange way, predictive of what was actually going to happen later.’

In 1979, Malcolm Muggeridge had a meltdown over The Life of Brian. In 2022, it was the trans-obsessives. After reading Andrew Sullivan’s Friday Substack column, “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals,” I’m not at all surprised.

But then as Toby Young wrote in the London Spectator in 2019, about the debate between Cleese, Michael Palin, Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, “The irony of Life of Brian is that by lampooning Christian beliefs for perfectly honourable reasons, the makers of the film contributed to the demise of the church’s authority and that, in turn, created a vacuum that has been filled by far more egregious examples of the closed mindset they objected to. The Pythons didn’t realise it 40 years ago, but the muscular Christianity that had been drummed into them at their private schools and which they hated with a kind of life-defining passion was acting as a bulwark against less organised forms of irrationality. They couldn’t imagine anything more suffocating or tedious than that ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’; but they were wrong.”