Ripping Yarns

Ripping Yarns was a television comedy series loosely in the style of Monty Python written by former Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Each episode neatly parodied some pre-war schoolboy genre or other.

The series grew out of a one-off programme called "Tomkinson's Schooldays" (1975), loosely inspired by Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. Palin and Jones both wrote and starred in multiple roles.

A series of five episodes was screened in 1977, following a repeat of "Tomkinson's Schooldays" as the de facto pilot episode. A second series of three episodes followed in 1979. Jones did not appear in any of the later 8 episodes, and Palin usually confined himself to one or two roles per episode.

Table of contents

1 Pilot (1975): 2 First series (1977): 3 Second series (1979):

Pilot (1975):

• "Tomkinson's Schooldays"

First series (1977):

• "Tomkinson's Schooldays" (repeat of pilot with series title sequence added)
• "The Testing of Eric Olthwaite"
• "Escape from Stalag Luft 112 B"
• "Murder at Moorstones Manor"
• "Across the Andes by Frog"
• "The Curse of the Claw"

Second series (1979):

• "Whinfrey's Last Case"
• "Golden Gordon"
• "Roger of the Raj

The pilot was shot on videotape with filmed exterior scenes and has a laugh track. The remaining episodes were all shot on film. They were also originally shown with laugh tracks, but with a couple of exceptions these have been omitted from repeats.

The scripts were published in book form, with suitably sepia-tinted stills, as Ripping Yarns and More Ripping Yarns, and later collected in an omnibus volume, The Complete Ripping Yarns.

more detail on books to follow, hopefully