Pleasure At Her Majesty's was the name given to the filmed release of A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick), the first of the Amnesty International comedy benefit galas. The title is a play on the phrase at Her Majesty's pleasure (the show was performed at Her Majesty's Theatre, London). In America, the film was originally called Monty Python Meets Beyond the Fringe.
This show came to be considered part of the Secret Policeman's Ball series of shows that it inspired, although it pre-dated the first show in the series by three years.
The event was organized by a team of three: Monty Python member John Cleese, Amnesty's Assistant Director Peter Luff and Transatlantic Records executive Martin Lewis. It featured the cream of Britain's comedic talent of the era, setting a precedent that would inspire many subsequent Amnesty galas, as well as Comic Relief. The concept was also the inspiration of similar events, also in aid of Amnesty International in countries around the world as far away as Australia, in the case of the Stand Up For Your Rights Comedy Galas.
The film consists of both on-stage and back-stage footage, taken from all three nights of the run (1 –3 April 1976).
Luff and Lewis collaborated on producing the successor show - video-taped in 1977 as The Mermaid Frolics. Then Cleese and Lewis teamed up (with Amnesty's new fundraising director Peter Walker) in 1979 to create The Secret Policeman's Ball - the first show to carry what became the iconic Secret Policeman's Ball title.
Read more about Pleasure At Her Majesty's: Sequence of Skits in The Film
Famous quotes containing the words pleasure and/or majesty:
“Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.”
—Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.)