Four Yorkshiremen

"[2] The sketch was written by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman, and originally performed in 1967 on their TV series At Last the 1948 Show.

[8] A near derivative of the sketch appears in the BBC Radio show I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again Series 7, Episode 5 on 9 February 1969, in which the cast (Cleese, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and David Hatch) in the guise of old buffers at a gentlemen's club, employ the same trope of out-doing each other for hardship, this time in the context of how far and how slowly they had to walk to get to various places in former days.

It ends with the same payoff line "...and if you tell that to the young people today, they won't believe you..." Cleese and Chapman were later among the founding members of the comedy group Monty Python.

The sketch was revived for the 2001 Amnesty show We Know Where You Live, performed by Harry Enfield, Alan Rickman, Eddie Izzard and Vic Reeves.

[9] In March 2015 the sketch was revived and adapted in a live television performance for Red Nose Day 2015 by Davina McCall, John Bishop, David Walliams and Eddie Izzard, in which they exaggerate what they did to raise money for charities.