"Piranha Brothers" is a Monty Python sketch, first seen in Series 2, Episode 1 (Face the Press) of Monty Python's Flying Circus, originally transmitted on September 15, 1970. The premise is a BBC current affairs documentary, inexplicably entitled Ethel the Frog, covering the exploits of the fictional brothers Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, who employed a combination of "violence and sarcasm" to intimidate the London underworld and bring the city to its knees. The sketch constitutes a pastiche of the real life story of the Kray twins, famous gangsters in the East End of London in the 1950s and 1960s. Doug and Dinsdale Piranha were loosely based on Reggie and Ronnie Kray, and the policeman who pursued them, Harry "Snapper" Organs, was loosely based on the policeman who led the investigation against the Krays, Detective Superintendent Leonard "Nipper" Read.
The sketch is introduced by a piece of music (the Intermezzo from Sibelius's Karelia Suite) which was used for many years, until 1992, to introduce the Thames Television (and previously Associated-Rediffusion and Rediffusion London) current affairs series This Week.
Famous quotes containing the word brothers:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)