“Mr Zeffirelli wouldn’t have done it like that, you know.”

The Guardian published a pretty good article by Robert Sellers on Friday about the making of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Indeed, all the extras were derived from the local population. Jones remembers, “They were all very knowing because they’d all worked for Franco Zeffirelli on Jesus of Nazareth, so I had these elderly Tunisians telling me, ‘Well, Mr Zeffirelli wouldn’t have done it like that, you know.’”

Then there was the extraordinary furore when the film was released.

The day after the London opening, Cleese and Palin famously appeared on a late-night BBC2 discussion programme hosted by Tim Rice, himself no stranger to religious controversy as the lyricist of Jesus Christ Superstar. Their inquisitors were Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Both harangued Brian from the outset calling it “a squalid little film” and “tenth rate”; no amount of measured argument on the Pythons part would dissuade the pious double act of their firmly held belief that Life of Brian mocked Christ.

Michael Palin recalls, “We 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. We were very surprised by that. I don’t get angry very often, but I got incandescent with rage at their attitude and the smugness of it.”

As the debate reached its conclusion, Stockwood, dressed grandly in a purple cassock and pompously fondling his crucifix in a way that was devastatingly lampooned by Rowan Atkinson a week later on a Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch, delivered his parting shot of, “You’ll get your 30 pieces of silver.”

Cleese sums up the affair best, observing dryly, “I always felt we won that one by behaving better than the Christians.”