Pleasure at Her Majesty's

Pleasure At Her Majesty's was the name given to the filmed release of "A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick)", the first of the Amnesty International comedy benefit galas. The title is a play on the phrase "At Her Majesty's Pleasure" (the show was performed at Her Majesty's Theatre, London). In America, the film was originally called "Monty Python Meets Beyond the Fringe", no doubt partly to play up the involvement of those well known groups and partly to eliminate a joke most Americans wouldn't get.

This show came to be considered part of the "Secret Policeman's Ball" series of shows that it inspired, although it pre-dated the first show in the series by three years.

The event was organized by a team of three: Monty Python member John Cleese, Amnesty's Assistant Director Peter Luff and Transatlantic Records executive Martin Lewis. It featured the cream of Britain's comedic talent of the era, setting a precedent that would inspire many subsequent Amnesty galas, as well as Comic Relief. The concept was also the inspiration of similar events, also in aid of Amnesty International in countries around the world as far away as Australia, in the case of the Stand Up For Your Rights Comedy Galas.

The film consists of both on-stage and back-stage footage, taken from all three nights of the run (1–3 April 1976).

Luff and Lewis collaborated on producing the successor show - video-taped in 1977 as "The Mermaid Frolics". Then Cleese and Lewis teamed up (with Amnesty's new fundraising director Peter Walker) in 1979 to create "The Secret Policeman's Ball" - the first show to carry what became the iconic "Secret Policeman's Ball" title.

Sequence of skits in the film

# John Cleese, Michael Palin - Pet shop (aka the Parrot Sketch)
# Alan Bennett - T.E. Lawrence
# Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage - Spunk!
# John Fortune, Eleanor Bron - Happy Darling
# Peter Cook - Miner
# Monty Python (Guest appearance, Peter Cook) - Courtroom Sketch
# John Fortune, John Bird - You Say Potato
# Neil Innes - Protest Song
# John Cleese, Jonathan Lynn - The Last Supper
# The Goodies - Funky Gibbon
# Alan Bennett - Telegram
# Desmond Jones - Hamlet (mime)
# Peter Cook, John Fortune - Asp
# Graham Chapman, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Carol Cleveland, Bill Oddie, John Cleese - The Japes Lecture
# Eleanor Bron - Appeal
# Beyond The Fringe (guest appearance, Terry Jones) - So That's The Way You Like It (Shakespeare Sketch)
# Monty Python and the entire cast - "The Lumberjack Song"

"The above item titles do not appear anywhere in the film but are the titles ascribed to the skits and songs on the cast album released by Transatlantic Records in 1976."

External links

*imdb title|title=Pleasure at Her Majesty's (1976)|id=0076407