"Ethel the Frog" is a Monty Python sketch. The premise is a BBC current affairs documentary, inexplicably entitled Ethel the Frog, covering the exploits of the brothers Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, who employed violence (including nailing opponents' heads to the floor) and sarcasm to intimidate others and bring London to its knees. The sketch is introduced by a piece of music which was used for many years, until as late as 1992, to introduce the Thames Television current affairs series This Week.

Dinsdale was a gentleman; he bought his mother flowers and, what's more, he knew how to treat a female impersonator. He also enjoyed nailing women's heads to coffee tables and screwing people's pelvises to cake stands. He bribed the head of the local police to accompany him armed with a tank and a tactical thermonuclear device. Dinsdale was deeply afraid of Spiny Norman, a hedgehog who, he believed, lived in a hangar at Luton Airport and who could be anywhere between 12 feet and 800 yards long, depending on Dinsdale's state of mind.

Spiny Norman (created by animator Terry Gilliam) appeared in this sketch shouting out "Dinsdale" at interesting moments. The character made brief reappearances in two later episodes.

Doug was the more feared of the two. One man claims to have seen grown men pull their own heads off rather than speak to Doug – indeed, even Dinsdale feared Doug. This was largely due to his use of sarcasm, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire.

The brothers were captured by Superintendent Harry 'Snapper' Organs, who pursued them in a series of disguises including Ratty from Wind in the Willows.

A slightly re-worked version of the sketch also appeared on the album Another Monty Python Record and an almost word-for-word transcript appeared in Monty Python's Big Red Book.

Origins

The sketch was obviously chiefly inspired by the real-life story of infamous London gangsters the Kray twins. What is less well-known is that both Spiny Norman and Supt Harry 'Snapper' Organs are both subtle references to the notorious former head of the London Drug Squad, Det. Sgt Norman Pilcher.

Pilcher made his name with a series of headline-grabbing arrests of leading pop stars in the late 1960s, including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Donovan and John Lennon. He was immortalised in song by the phrase "semolina pilcher" in Lennon's 1967 song I Am the Walrus. Pilcher was eventually dismissed from the police in the 1970s after being found guilty of conspiracy and blackmail.

In the late 1990s an article in the Guardian newspaper revealed that Pilcher had been in close contact with journalists from Rupert Murdoch's tabloid the News of the World and that NOTW journalists had passed information to the police about alleged drug use by pop stars. The article claimed that NOTW journalists had provided the tip-off about a party at Keith Richards's house, "Redlands", which was raided by police and led to the famous drug possession cases against Richards and Jagger in 1967. It was later claimed by George Harrison that Pilcher was, in effect, 'working his way up the ladder' to reach his ultimate target, the Beatles.

It is probable that the line in the Piranha Brothers sketch in which Supt Organs describes how he kept tabs on the brothers' movements "by reading the colour supplements" is a reference to this collusion between Pilcher and Murdoch's News of the World (Murdoch was one of the first publishers to introduce colour supplements in the UK).

References

• The Monty Python script