@Helleofabore I don’t think Reality was being disrespectful of your experience. I didn’t read it that way anyway.
if, as I suspect Reality is of a similar generation and location to me, then the Yorkshiremen live rent free in our heads.. it’s hard not to mention them.
if you haven’t seen the sketch it’s worth a watch, it starts off sensibly, becomes very silly, then absurd, as is most Monty python stuff. But it hits home for me because, though it is so silly, it references a grim shared experience. my parents and grandparents are those Yorkshiremen and women.
They did live in houses that were later bulldozed for slum clearance, and worked unbelievably long hours in mines and cotton mills.. that sketch follows the pattern of some of the conversations I listened into as a small child when we visited aunts and uncles. It is good observational comedy, then taken to extremes, as they did.
when I hear it,I am taken back to my grandmother’s dinner table, and my aunts and uncles trooping in and out, bringing tales of their childhood, their work and the war. The absurdity of the sketch is clever, because as a child I struggled to believe the truth of the awful living and working conditions that generation endured, so the reality of their lives did sound that absurd to me.
sorry for the digression. I’ve always had a soft spot for that sketch because of its clever kernel of truth, and just wanted to defend it.
fitflops, feminism AND working class social history via the medium of absurdist comedy. All in one thread.