You're tuned to the good stuff

Dead Bishop

Monty Python's Flying Circus
SKETCH-O-VISION
A VERY GOOD USE OF YOUR TIME.

The setup

A grim household's dinner of rat-laced desserts is interrupted when yet another dead bishop turns up on the landing.

Community rating

– / 10

The premise

Here’s the bit.

In a dingy kitchen, a wife serves her husband Klaus a menu of jugged fish, rabbit fish and puddings with varying amounts of rat in them while he grumbles about every course. Their schoolboy son wanders in to report a dead bishop on the landing, and the family's only concern is which diocese it came from, since several more are already piled by the bin. Klaus identifies the corpse by a tattoo and calls in the Church Police, a pair of crozier-carrying officers in clerical collars who kneel and pray for guidance. A giant hand descends from above to point at Klaus, who cheerfully admits the crime, asks for the other bishops to be taken into consideration and is led away as everyone bursts into a hymn.

The funny people

Meet the cast. 4

Say it with us

Highly quotable.

Well, there's rat cake, rat sorbet, rat pudding or strawberry tart.

There's a dead bishop on the landing.

All right, it's a fair cop, but society is to blame.

A little extra

Notes from the archive.

Wikipedia's episode list also gives the sketch as Church Police or Salvation Fuzz. The available copy runs on from the preceding animation and into the next linking animation.

The rabbit hole continues

One more couldn’t hurt.

More from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Explore the show