"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:
“Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)