How to Irritate People

The recurring characters of the "Pepperpots," old British housewives who annoy theater-goers and quiz show hosts in these sketches, would go on to be a major part of Monty Python's Flying Circus, appearing in the majority of the show's episodes.

The "Job Interview" sketch, featuring Cleese as an interviewer who asks several unusual questions of Brooke-Taylor, the interviewee, was later performed, almost unchanged, in the fifth episode of Flying Circus, with Chapman instead playing the interviewee.

The "Freedom of speech" sketch, starring Cleese as the host/interviewer and Chapman as interviewee Dr. Rhomboid Goatcabin, features a discussion about freedom of speech in Great Britain, in which Cleese's character repeatedly reformulates the subject's main question ("Do you believe there is freedom of speech in this country?") in so many ways as to start a monologue and not let Chapman's character speak. This increasingly annoys the interviewee to the point where he is forced to murder the host in order to express his opinion on the matter, only to be interrupted again by his spirit. This sketch bears some resemblance to Anne Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses, and was originally performed on At Last the 1948 Show, with Marty Feldman having played the interviewee.

This sketch, featuring Palin as a waiter in an Indian restaurant who is excessively – and somewhat violently – apologetic to his customers whenever anything goes wrong, may very well have laid the groundwork for the "Dirty Fork" sketch from the third Flying Circus episode. In 1980, the Python team recorded an audio version for their Contractual Obligation Album. Although cut from the final album, it featured among the outtakes on their widely bootlegged Hastily Cobbled Together for a Fast Buck album.

The "Car Salesman" sketch, in which Palin refuses to accept customer Chapman's claim that a car he sold is faulty, later inspired Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch, in which the malfunctioning car is replaced by an expired parrot.

The "Quiz Show" sketch, where Brooke-Taylor, as a Pepperpot, annoys Cleese, a quiz show host, while appearing as a contestant on a show, was later adapted into another Monty Python sketch, "Take Your Pick" (or "Spot the Brain Cell," as it would be later called) in the second Flying Circus series, where Terry Jones plays the contestant attempting to win the prize of a "blow on the head."

The "Airline Pilots" sketch is set in the cockpit of a commercial airliner, with Cleese (as captain) and Chapman (as copilot). The airliner is on autopilot. Bored, they start making reassuring intercom messages to the passengers telling them there is nothing to worry about – at which point, of course, the passengers get worried – aided by the flight attendant (Palin). These messages get continually more incomprehensible or mutually contradictory until eventually all the passengers bail out. The Monty Python sketch "Bomb on Plane" in episode 35 alluded briefly to this sketch when pilot Michael Palin told passengers, "Our destination is Glasgow; there is no need to panic."