The Crimson Permanent Assurance

The Crimson Permanent Assurance is a short film that plays as the beginning of the feature-length motion picture Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Although it is presented as a separate film, and is sometimes shown without the feature, it can also be considered a prologue to The Meaning of Life, which is almost never shown without The Crimson Permanent Assurance preceding it.

Having originally conceived the story as a 6-minute animated sequence in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, intended for placement at the end of Part V, Terry Gilliam convinced the other members of Monty Python to allow him to produce and direct it as a live-action piece instead.

According to Gilliam, the film's rhythm, length, and style of cinematography made it a poor fit as a scene in the larger movie, so it became "Our Short Feature Presentation", to be shown ahead of the "Main Feature".

It was a common practice in British cinemas to show an unrelated short feature before the main movie, a holdover from the older practice of showing a full-length "B" movie ahead of the main feature. By the mid-1970s the short features were of poorer quality, or simply banal travelogues. As a kind of protest, the Pythons had already produced one spoof travelogue narrated by John Cleese, Away from It All, which was shown before The Life of Brian in Britain.

The film includes actor Matt Frewer's debut performance.