I've also heard Palin and Jones' contributions described as anything that starts out normally but eventually turns silly. Though I can't remember which of the Pythons stated it as such. (Maybe Cleese?)

Quick question: Does anyone know what the deal is with Idle' s Rutland Weekend Television series? It's never been released on video/DVD*, and I've long wondered why. I had the record album years ago, and from what I can remember, it was funny material.

You're killing Independent George!

Kinda funny to see Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World rack up another superhero amongst its cast members: It already had Captain America and the Human Torch in the person of Chris Evans, the Punisher (Thomas Jane) and Superman (Brandon Routh, natch) among its cast. Now it can add the Atom to its ranks, thanks also to Routh.…

I had heard they were going to come up with some new material to do alongside the classics. Was there anything significant, i.e. anything apart from a few different lines attached to familiar sketches?

Yes, this was Elton's idea for a Blackadder feature film: "the Red Adder," which would have been set during the Russian Revolution. The idea being that the film starts with Edmund and Baldrick as agents in the Tsar's secret police, but they end up joining the revolution, and by the end of the film, after an epic…

Yeah, "the Blackadder Five" Swinging Sixties/rock and roll spoof is the best-known (and most discussed) of all the various possibilities Curtis and Elton came up with for the never-made 5th series. I've seen it mentioned over the years in various interviews with the 2 writers, as well as producer John Lloyd, Atkinson,…

And Baldrick, natch, gets progressively stupider and more subhuman with every passing series. Tee hee!

Another mystery is that we know there were Blackadders prior to the events of Series 1 thanks to BA Back & Forth. (Oh, and Blackadder: the Whole Damn Dynasty, if you want to count that as well.) Granted, Back & Forth isn't all that good, but it does count as canon, IMO.

It's interesting to note that, for all that the Series 2 Edmund is an utter bastard, he's portrayed as mostly trying to just live his own life, not being as power-hungry as his S1 ancestor or as murderous as his S3 descendant. (In this, he most closely resembles S4's Captain Blackadder.) His misadventures here almost…

Doesn't she actually refer to herself as Queenie in Potato, when she reads the poem she's written for Blackadder?

Oh, I don't mind! I like it runny!

What about Czechoslovakian Goat's Milk Cheese?

The classic Mad Magazine parody of Columbo had the rumpled old sleuth using his singular talents to badger an innocent man into confessing to a murder he didn't commit. The breaking point comes when the dude's seeing a show, and Columbo comes dancing out onstage, arms linked to a long line of scantily-clad chorus…

He was? Oh, dear. Well, that's hardly the only historical inaccuracy from the Blackadder series.

Damn, man, and only a week after Rik Mayall passed away. What a shame.

It seems to me I had some vague awareness of Frost and Arden being a comedy team, but I'd long since forgotten. (I'm a fan of British comedy, but I'm not British, nor do I live in the UK.) Unlike many other double acts, they never had a show of their own. Or did they?

Sir Thomas More, burned alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism, must have been kicking himself, as the flames licked higher, that he didn't think to say: "I recant my Catholicism!"

I find it difficult to rank them; my opinion changes all the time.

Sod off.