TheBanyanTree: Me and the Pythons

[peter macinnis]

I threatened to a couple of you on FB recently that I would spill the 
beans on this at some stage. If we're telling stories, here goes.

It concerns a sort of fraud that I was involved in with a former friend 
of the Pythons: it was a non-Dark-Side fraud, like all of my frauds. 
I'll get around to the time I played Mr Bean, some other time, but it 
saved me from injury.

First up, for a long while, my main recognised professional skill was in 
planning, designing and executing tests and examinations. It's still a 
nice little earner for me, late each summer, but that's well past my 
active phase. It's an art, not a science.

I had an approach from another state, asking if I could help with their 
matriculation English exam, and I agreed.  We would test the questions, 
to be used in that other state, on Year 11 students in Sydney, and at 
the end of that year, Year 12 students in the other state would do the 
questions that survived.

We would guard the papers, but I would also engage in a lot of 
misdirection. First, the front page was provided by me: this said the 
test was being run by the state department of education, blah blah, but 
these kids had all seen the first page of questions, late the previous 
year, when they did a 'Reference Test', so they all worked out that this 
was something to do with a future Year 10 School Certificate, perhaps 
because I said I was from the School Certificate Development Unit (which 
was true).

To maintain total security, John was introduced as my research 
assistant, and he carried the papers, handed them out and collected 
them. He was, in fact, a full professor and outranked me by far, but we 
got on well, because we both knew our 'Finnegans Wake', and I shared 
some insights about Malay words in the book at one point (Malay used to 
be one of my languages), and when he said this insight was unpublished, 
I gave it to him.

We spent several days driving around and sampling kids in different 
schools, and the conversations were free-ranging but tended to come back 
to originality and creativity. John mentioned that when he was studying 
at Cambridge, he was on the same corridor as the Pythons, and that there 
wasn't a single theme in all of the Python shows that they hadn't been 
using as undergraduates. End of Python bit, but I ain't done yet

Jump forward a dozen years, and I was out in the desert with a bunch of 
engineers, my first-ever editor and a Jesuit priest. The engineers were 
there to launch a rocket, and I was half of the press contingent, and 
the only one of the corps who could speak fluent Engineer (the other was 
a Rupert Murdoch hack).

The former editor and the Jesuit were there to help some refugees, but 
because of that, they were staying slightly sober. So I wandered back to 
the engineers, who mentioned their Vice-Chancellor by name.

The VC is the Top Cheese in any Australian university, and I asked if 
this bloke was a former Professor of English in the state of xxx. They 
confirmed this, so I said "Oh, he used to be my research assistant..." I 
then explained how the claim was true, and they decided their VC had 
more guile than they had assumed, and I was a damned good fellow and 
should be part of the Inner Circle for the rocket launch.

We had several more beers, and I can't recall if I told them the Python 
story. Probably not, because I usually keep a few yarns back for the 
next night.

peter