The Crimson Permanent Assurance - Plot

Plot

The elderly British employees of the Permanent Assurance Company, a staid London firm which has recently been taken over by the Very Big Corporation of America, rebel against their corporate masters when one of them is sacked. Having locked the surviving supervisors in the safe, and forced their boss to walk a makeshift plank out a window, they commandeer their Edwardian office building, which suddenly weighs anchor, uses its scaffolding and tarpaulins as sails, and is turned into a pirate ship. The stone office building starts to move as if it were a ship. Sailing through the City of London, they then proceed to attack The Very Big Corporation of America's skyscraper, using, among other things, wooden filing cabinets which have been transformed into carronades and swords fashioned from the blades of a ceiling fan. On ropes, they swing into the board room and engage the executives of VBCA in hand-to-hand combat, vanquishing them.

After their hard-earned victory, the clerks continue to "sail the wide accountan-cy" (as they sing in their heroic sea shanty), until unceremoniously meeting their (now-animated) end by falling off the edge of the world.

Typical of how Pythons would weave previously 'terminated' plot lines into later scenes of the same episode (like Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition in the TV show, or the recurring theme of the swallows carrying coconuts in the movie Holy Grail), The Crimson Permanent Assurance suddenly re-emerges in the middle of the main feature of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. After the donor scene, the movies shifts to follow a modern board room debate about the meaning of life (and that people are not wearing enough hats). This debate is happening at the Very Big Corporation of America headquarters building in the same room that witnessed the battle in the short film. The debate is halted when one executive asks, "Has anyone seen that building?" which turns out to be the marauding old London building/pirate ship of the Crimson Permanent Assurance. The audience gets to see briefly the attack of the pirates from the angle of the victims in the board room. The raid is halted by a modern skyscraper falling onto the moving Permanent Assurance Company building; with a voice-over apologizing for the temporary interruption "due to an attack by the supporting feature".