Original Broadcast Date: Nov. 16, 1972
Attempted Synopsis: Contestants try to summarize all of Marcel Proust's volumes in 15 seconds; hairdressers try to conquer Mount Everest; a mother and her son grieve over their dying hamster; the fire brigade interrupt their housekeeping to answer a call; a Martha Stewart type gives tips on etiquette during a Communist uprising; a very assertive speaking course; a verbose travel-agency customer; a theory about the brontosaurus.
Review: Python detractors who claim that the group's comedy consists of high-pitched screaming could use this episode to support their argument. The hamster sketch ends up chasing its own tail, and the running telephone gag eventually runs into the ground. Gotta love the travel-agent soliloquy, though (Eric Idle repeated the bit to memorable effect in Live at the Hollywood Bowl).
Priceless Gag: The eventual winner of the Summarize Proust Competition: the girl with the biggest tits.
(Censor Trivia: This episode is famous for the BBC's insistence on deleting the word "masturbation" from the list of the Proust's competitor's hobbies. But another obvious edit occurs in the travel-agency sketch, where Eric Idle, as a man who says the letter "b" because he can't pronounce "c," is instructed by Michael Palin to substitute the letter "k" for "c." The bit ends with the audience's inexplicable laughter. But when the sketch was performed on Monty Python's Previous Record, it provided Idle's missing punchline: "I hadn't thought of that. What a silly bunt!")
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