The Four Yorkshiremen

La série culte At Last The 1948 Show, emmenée entre autres par John Cleese, est à l'origine de la création des Monty Python. Le sketch le plus connu est sans doute l'excellent The Four Yorkshiremen joué par John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman et Graham Chapman. Il a été repris plus tard par les Monty Python, dans une version avec Rowan Atkinson, et plus récemment Alan Rickman s'est prêté au jeu dans le "We Know Where You Live" Amnesty Show. Voici une retranscription de la version originale (certains passages sont légèrement modifiés).

Four middle-aged, prosperous men in dinner jackets are seated at a table, drinking wine...
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. Ahh... Very passable, not bad at all.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN. All right. Nothing like a good glass of Chateau de Chassilier, eh Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. You're right there Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN. Who'd 've thought forty years ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Chateau de Chassilier?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. Aye. We'd 've been glad to have the price of a cup o' tea, then.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN. A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN. Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. Or tea!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. In a filthy, cracked cup.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN. We never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN. The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. But you know, I often think we were happier then, although we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money won't bring you happiness, son."
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN. He was right. I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house, with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN. House? You were lucky to have a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us. No furniture. Half the floor was missing. We were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. Room? You were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in a corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. Corridor? Oh we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would 've been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN. Well when I say "house" it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN. We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in a lake!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day, day in-day out for six pence a week. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN. Luxury! We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for twenty hours, for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN. Paradise! We had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at midnight, and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-three hours a day at the mill for a penny every four years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in half with a bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN. Right. We had to get up in the morning at half past ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN. But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
ALL. Nope, nope...