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The Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python)


"The Spanish Inquisition" is a series of sketches in Monty Python's Flying Circus, Series 2 Episode 2, first broadcast 22 September 1970, parodying the real-life Spanish Inquisition. This episode is itself entitled "The Spanish Inquisition". The sketches are notable for their principal catchphrase, "NO-body expects the Spanish Inquisition!" The end of the sketch uses music from the composition Devil's Galop by Charles Williams.

This is a recurring sketch always predicated on an unrelated sketch in which one character mentions that they "didn't expect a Spanish Inquisition!", often in irritation at being questioned by another. The first appearance of the Spanish Inquisition occurs in a drawing room set in "Jarrow, 1912". A mill worker (Graham Chapman) enters the room and tells a woman sitting on a couch knitting (Carol Cleveland) that "one of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treadle". When she says she doesn't know what he's talking about, the mill worker gets defensive and says, "I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition!" Then the Inquisition — consisting of Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin) and his assistants, Cardinal Biggles (Terry Jones) (who resembles his namesake Biggles wearing a leather aviator's helmet and goggles) and Cardinal Fang (Terry Gilliam) — burst into the room to the sound of a jarring musical sting. Ximénez shouts, with a particular and high-pitched emphasis on the first word: "NO-body expects the Spanish Inquisition!"


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