Chatty Death: Oliver Cromwell

Death warms up his studio audience of skeletons and a mummy with a joke about being dead famous and a groan-worthy corpse pun, then introduces the former Lord Protector, who appears on the glittering studio screen in his Puritan collar. Death insists on calling his guest Ollie, jokes that his body had to be buried in secret because of the smell, and relays a heckle from the bony crowd. Asked how he would like to be remembered, Cromwell admits to some horrible deeds but calls them a price worth paying to stop the monarchy ever ruling again, drawing a gasp. Death then breezily explains that Charles I's son returned as Charles II, put most of the men who signed his father's death warrant to death, had Cromwell's corpse dug up and beheaded, and that the monarchy still reigns in Britain today. Left speechless, Cromwell is sent spinning into the void on his chair, and Death signs off complaining that the audience's second joke, Oliver Pongwell, was not as good as the first.

Death's account of Cromwell's fate is accurate: after the Restoration his body was taken from Westminster Abbey on 30 January 1661, the anniversary of Charles I's execution, and given a posthumous execution at Tyburn alongside John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton. His head was displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall for more than two decades and passed through private owners until it was buried at his old college, Sidney Sussex in Cambridge, in 1960.