The
lowdown: "The Secret Policeman's Ball" was a live benefit concert
to raise money for Amnesty International. It
was performed at Her Majesty's
Theatre in London in June 1979, and featured some of the greatest comedians
of the time,
including John Cleese and
Michael Palin from Monty Python, Peter Cook, Billy Connolly and Rowan Atkinson.
Musicians
who performed included Pete
Townshend and John Williams, while celebrities such as cricketer Mike Brearley
also made
guest appearances.
Sylvester McCoy appears in
a rather long and slightly mind-boggling performance with Ken Campbell
and David Rappaport,
who were part of The Ken
Campbell Roadshow, a theatre group in the 1970s. McCoy performs a series
of routines, including
using a hammer to insert
a four-inch nail up his nostril and the Indian Shirt Trick. He also strips
to his underwear and is
handcuffed to a chair while
a model train with a knife attached to the front is aimed at his heart.
Truly bizarre stuff, not least
because it is performed
live on stage. If you have never seen "The Secret Policeman's Ball", it
is worth watching just for the
McCoy sequence. It is rather
long at about eight minutes, but you will never look at the Seventh Doctor
era in the same way.
As for the rest of the show,
there are some great sketches that became famous elsewhere, such Monty
Python's
Cheese Shop sketch. While
it is interesting to see them performed live, the fact that it is a live
show means the quality
of the video and audio is
not as good as broadcast television. Viewers should keep this in mind when
watching
"The Secret Policeman's
Ball".
Trivia:
McCoy is billed as 'Sylveste McCoy', the name of his character during his
Ken Campbell Roadshow days. He
eventually adoped Sylvester
McCoy as his stage name after a journalist transcribed it wrongly.
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