The Good Old Days Skit
by MV, Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor; 'At Last the 1948 Show'. 31 October 1967

It is sundowner time at a tropical paradise. Four north-countrymen, in late middle-age and tuxedos, sit contemplating the sunset. A dusky waiter pours some claret for one of them to taste.

Joshua: ...Very passable. Not bad at all.

The waiter pours the wine for the rest of them, and departs.

Obadiah: ...Can't beat a good glass of Chateau de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?

Josiah: Aye, you're right there, Obadiah.

Ezekiel: ...Who'd have thought ... forty years ago ... that we'd be sitting here, drinking Chateau de Chasselas ...?

Josiah: Aye! ... In those days we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea.

Obadiah: Aye, a cup of COLD tea ...

Ezekiel: Without milk or sugar.

Josiah: OR tea ...

Joshua: Aye, and a cracked cup at that!

Ezekiel: We never had a cup ... We used to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

Obadiah: Best we could manage was to chew a piece of damp cloth.

Josiah: But y'know ... we were happier in those days, although we were poor.

Joshua: BECAUSE we were poor ... My old dad used to say, 'Money doesn't bring you happiness, son.'

Ezekiel: He was right! I was happier then and had NOTHING. We used to live in a tiny old tumbledown house with great holes in the roof.

Odadiah: A house! You were lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, twenty-six of us, no furniture, and half the floor was missing. We were all huddled in one corner, for fear of falling.

Josiah: You were lucky to have a room! We used to live in the corridor.

Joshua: Ooooh! I used to DREAM of living in a corridor. That would have been a palace to us. We lived in an old water tank in the rubbish tip. We were woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped on us. House, huh!

Ezekiel: Well, when I said HOUSE ... it was only a hole in the ground covered by a couple of foot of torn canvas, but it was a house to US.

Odadiah: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in the lake.

Josiah: Eee! You were lucky to have a lake. There were over 150 of us living in a small shoe box in the middle of the road.

Joshua: A CARDBOARD box?

Josiah: Yes.

Joshua: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank. We used to get up at six, clean the newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, work fourteen hours at the mill, day-in, day-out, for sixpence a week, come home, and dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.

Obadiah: ... Luxury! We used to get out of the lake at three, clean it, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hours at t'mill for twopence a month, come home, and dad would beat us about the head and neck with a broken bottle, IF we were LUCKY.

A pause.

Josiah: ... Aye, well, we had it TOUGH. I had to get out of the shoebox at midnight, lick the road clean, eat a couple of bits of cold gravel, work twenty-three hours a day at the mill for a penny every four years and when we got home dad would slice us in half with a bread-knife.

A longer pause.

Ezekiel: Right ... I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of poison, work twenty-nine hours a day at t'mill and pay boss to let us work, come home, and each night dad used to kill us and dance on our graves, singing.

A very long pause

Joshua: ... Aye, and you try and tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you.