Friday Night, Saturday Morning

[1] It was notable for being the only television show to be hosted by a former British Prime Minister (Harold Wilson), and for an argument about the blasphemy claims surrounding the film Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979).

[5] On the edition of 9 November 1979, hosted by Tim Rice, a discussion was held about the then newly released film Monty Python's Life of Brian, which had been banned by many local councils and caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous.

According to Monty Python - The Case Against, by Robert Hewison, the show "began affably enough, with Cleese and Palin talking on their own to their host, Tim Rice – himself the lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar, which had also faced accusations of blasphemy a decade earlier".

The full effect of the entry of the Bishop in his sweeping purple cassock and chunky cross was missed by the television audience, who found him already seated beside a bronzed and gleaming Malcolm Muggeridge when the film excerpt ended.

"[6] The debate quickly became heated and included the following exchange: Muggeridge: "I started off by saying that this is such a tenth-rate film that I don't believe that it would disturb anybody's faith."

In his diaries, published in 2006, Michael Palin wrote of the Bishop:"He began, with notes carefully hidden in his crotch, tucked down well out of camera range, to give a short sermon, addressed not to John or myself but to the audience.

Michael Palin says of this incident in the book The Pythons, edited by Bob McCabe, that when Muggeridge said "that Christianity had been responsible for more good in the world than any other force in history", Cleese said "what about the Spanish Inquisition?"

However, after viewing the debate again in 2013 for BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Cleese said that it left him bored and he realised that there was no attempt at a proper discussion, or to find any common ground.

Also backstage, according to Palin, he had met Raymond Johnston from the Nationwide Festival of Light, a prominent Christian group who had been campaigning to have Life of Brian banned.

Palin says "[Johnston] had found it quite clear that Brian and Jesus were separate people", and that the film was making some "very valid points about organised religions".

Looking back, Michael Palin recalled in The Guardian: "[w]e had done our homework, thinking we were going to get into quite a tough theological argument, but it turned out to be virtually a slanging match.

[8] The programme and the events surrounding it were told in a Pythonesque fashion in the television film Holy Flying Circus, broadcast on BBC Four in October 2011.

Chaired by a host played by Pamela Stephenson (who herself would later appear as a guest on Friday Night, Saturday Morning), the parody discussion involved a bishop (played by Rowan Atkinson) defending his new film, General Synod's Life of Christ, which was accused of being "a thinly disguised and blasphemous attack on the members of Monty Python, men who are, today, still revered throughout the western world.