Still censored

Four of the five surviving Monty Python troupe appeared on The Jimmy Fallon Show last week. I caught up with the performance yesterday and a few things struck me. One was the fact that John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle don't seem overly comfortable in each other's company; another was the fact that, despite having four geniuses on the show, Fallon was too keen to make it all about him; and the third was that the show, which is screened very late at night in the US, still censored the word "shit" in Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, which Idle sang as the end. It amused me because, way back when Life Of Brian was first released, I wrote a story for the university students' paper Semper about how unenlightened Brisbane radio stations were bleeping that very word when playing the song. While cable shows in the US don't seem shy of four-letter words, it seems the free-to-air stations still play it very safe.