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After Monty Python's Flying Circus ended, the performers went their separate ways, and writing partners Michael Palin and Terry Jones enjoyed a modest success with Ripping Yarns, a series that gently mocked the kind of stiff-upper-lipped adventure stories that thrilled generations of schoolboys.
This tape contains three classic episodes, beginning with "Tomkinson's Schooldays," in which Palin plays a boy trapped in a bizarre boarding school where the pupils beat the headmaster and the school bully wields all the real power. When Tomkinson is caught trying to escape his punishment, he is to be entered in a grueling long-distance hopping race. Will his leg hold out? "Escape from Stalag Luft 112B" finds Palin in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War. Sent there because of his repeated attempts to break out of every other camp, he finds his fellow prisoners curiously reluctant to make a bid for freedom. Undaunted, and determined to become the first man to escape from Stalag Luft 112B, he begins to build a glider from empty toilet-paper tubes. The final yarn in this collection is the best. "Golden Gordon" relates the finest hour of Gordon Ottershaw, the grimly faithful fan of a truly awful football team. When it appears that Barnstoneworth United will be disbanded to make way for a junkyard, Gordon sets out to put together his own team in the hope that he can see them win one more time. Anyone who has followed a sports team through a bad patch will feel Gordon's pain, and everyone else can watch out for a brief cameo appearance by John Cleese. --Simon Leake
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