Title: The Package Tour Complaint
            From: Monty Python's Brand New Papperbok
  Transcribed By: Jonathan Mestel ( AJM8@PHX.CAM.AC.UK )

 
What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around
in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in
their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their
Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly
here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling
fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in
their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw
swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."  And being
herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their
modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools
full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and
frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your
table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the
first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the
hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with
nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a
big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.  And adenoidal typists from
Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy
bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to
the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding
Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant
with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep
singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so
greasy isn't it?"  - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from
Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily
Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this
country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up
over the Cuba Libres.  And sending tinted postcards of places they don't
realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our
room is marked with an 'X'.  Food very greasy but we've found a charming little
local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red
Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's
because I'm a Londoner'."  And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton
airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type
sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're
still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and
there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the
plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although
your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before
it can load you up at 3 a.m.  in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac
till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e.  the permanent strike of
Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take
off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing
"enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs
officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the
hotel that hasn't yet been finished.  And when you finally get to the
half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday
money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool,
there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a
bleeding lizard in the bidet.  And half the rooms are double booked and you
can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the
foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice
chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers'
wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just
like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American
matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any
mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop
out.  And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera
epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of
Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and
meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing
in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco.  And
then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns,
drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up
their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw
donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian
Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and
everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will
although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique
Iberian airplane.....