Monty Python - Travel Agency lyrics

rate me

Tourist: Good morining

Secretary: Oh good morning, Do you want to come

upstairs?

Tourist: What?

Secretary: Do you want to come upstairs? Or have you

come to arrange a holiday?

Tourist: Er...to arrange a holiday

Secretary: Oh sorry

Tourist: What's all this about going upstairs?

Secretary: Oh, nothing, nothing. Now where were you

thinking of going?

Tourist: India

Secretary: Ah one of our adventure holidays

Tourist: Yes

Secretary: Well you'd better see Mr Bounder about that.

(Calls out to Mr Bounder) Mr Bounder, this gentleman is

interested in the India Overland

(walks over to Mr Bounder's desk)

Bounder: Ah good morning. I'm Bounder of Adventure

Tourist: My name is Smoke-too-much

Bounder: Well you'd better cut down a little then

Tourist: What?

Bounder: You'd better cut down a little then

Tourist: Oh I see! Cut down a little then...

Bounder: Yes...I expect you get people making jokes

about your name all the time?

Tourist: No, no actually it never struck me before.

Smoke...to...much...(laughs)

Bounder: Anyway you're interested in one of our

adventure holidays?

Tourist: Yes I saw your advert in the bolour supplement

Bounder: The what?

Tourist: The bolour supplement

Bounder: The colour supplement?

Tourist: Yes I'm sorry I can't say the letter 'B'

Bounder: C?

Tourist: Yes that's right. It's all due to a trauma I

suffered when I was a spoolboy. I was attacked by a bat

Bounder: A cat?

Tourist: No a bat

Bounder: Can you say the letter 'K'

Tourist: Oh yes, Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble

Bollege Oxford

Bounder: Why don't you say the letter 'K' instead of

the letter 'C'

Tourist: what you mean...spell bolour with a K

Bounder: Yes

Tourist: Kolour. Oh that's very good, I never thought

of that what a silly bunt

Bounder: Anyway about the holiday

Tourist: Well I saw your adverts in the paper and I've

been on package tours several times you see, and I

decided that this was for me

Bounder: Ah good

Tourist: Yes I quite agree I mean what's the point of

being treated like sheep. What's the pointof going

abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in

buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering

and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans

and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors,

complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it

properly here, do they, not like at home" - and

stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and

Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and

sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy

White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen

purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."

Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes absolutely, yes I

quite agree...

Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars

and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern

international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel

and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen

pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and

frightening the children and barging into queues and if

you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the

bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first

item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every

Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the

bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch

hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair

brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for

Foreigners.

Bounder: (beggining to get fed up) Yes, yes now...

Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from

Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying

to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel

and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman

Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and

bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit

the so called typical restaurant with local colour and

atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who

keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and

complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?"

- and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from

Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals

and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and

on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country

and how many languages Enoch Pow ell can speak and then

he throws up over the Cuba Libres.

Bounder: Will you be quiet please

Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they

don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at

number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with

an 'X'.

Bounder: Shut up

Tourist: Food very greasy but we've found a charming

little local place hidden away in the back streets

Bounder: Shut up!

Tourist: where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and

cheese and onion...

Bounder: Shut up your bloody gob...

Tourist: crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's

because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the

tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with

nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you

can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because

you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every

time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and

the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the

plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only

be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland

and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can

load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit

on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen

difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic

Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory

until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga

airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and

queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed

customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that

isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet

been finished. And when you finally get to the half-

built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying

half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi

you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water

in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's

only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms

are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of

the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the

foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues

by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending

to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives

busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban

development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour

government gets in again, and fat American matrons with

sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants

looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long

enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the

Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging

cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish

tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in

1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe -

and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting

sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and

shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco.

And then on the last day in the airport lounge

everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante,

buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up

their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National

costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters

with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules

of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy

and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again

next year and you swear you never will although there

you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight

antique Iberian airplane...