“We went on that programme and we’d done our homework, thinking we were going to get into quite a tough theological argument, but it turned out to be virtually a slinging match. We were very surprised by that. I don’t get angry very often but I got incandescent with rage at their attitude and the smugness of it. And it was really the way they played to the audience that got me. We weren’t defeated in argument at all. John was brilliant. What they were trying to do was to sort of smirk at the audience and belittle what we’d done and that seemed so out of touch and so stupid and so mistaken. I mean, how do they think the film was made? That we go in there one night, write the script and the film’s made the next morning? They don’t realise we’d been working on it for two years, we’d studied, that we had an opinion and we had an attitude, but they wouldn’t let us have that. So it was their condescension that really got me irritated.’ Gilliam remembers having never seen Palin quite so pissed off before.”