The Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python)

The first appearance of Monty Python's "Spanish Inquisition" characters occurs in a drawing room set in "Jarrow, 1912", with a title card featuring a modern British urban area with a nuclear power plant.

A mill worker (Graham Chapman) enters the room and tells a woman sitting on a couch knitting (Carol Cleveland) in a thick accent that "one of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treadle".

The straight man mill worker repeats the cue line, the Inquisition bursts back in (complete with jarring chord), and the introduction is tried anew.

Ximénez states that she must stay in the chair "until lunch time with only a cup of coffee at 11", and begins to shout at her to confess—only to have Biggles break down and confess.

As the closing credits of the episode begin, the Inquisitors race out of a house and hop on a double-decker bus to the Old Bailey, all to the tune of "Devil's Galop".

They finally burst into the courtroom and Ximénez begins to shout, "NO-body expects the Span...," but a black title card with the words, "THE END", interrupts him.

In the Monty Python Live (Mostly) stage show, the sketch ends when Ximénez orders Biggles to "torture" the victim (who is sitting in the comfy chair) by giving her a glass of cold milk from the fridge.

Cardinal Ximénez briefly appears two episodes later ("The Buzz Aldrin Show") in a vox pop, again displaying difficulty counting (in this instance, the kinds of aftershave he uses).