PS That was very enjoyable. As a speaker of Midwestern American English (with perhaps a few Chicagoisms thrown in), I prefer that my British interlocutors speak the Queen’s English with the RP. While I agree that some of the regional dialects can be grating, many of them sound quite delightful. Unfortunately, many of them are intelligible only to native speakers. I remember on my first trip to Britain in 1976, I was hitch-hiking from one of the Channel ports to London. I got a ride from a guy that, from the few words that I could understand, seemed very interesting. But I probably grasped only one word in five, and hardly ever a complete sentence. That said, within living memory, some American regional dialects were hardly mutually intelligible. In 1957, my father, step-mother, and half-brothers and -sister, and I drove down to Florida to visit the paternal grandparents. On the way back to Illinois, we stopped in Georgia to visit the step-mother’s family. Amongst them was a very attractive young lady of about my age. Shy though I was, I wanted very much to communicate with her. Alas, I could hardly understand a word that she said, and I was too embarrassed to tell her so.

PS: Thank you, Mr. Anon.

PS RP was a standard of pronunciation, something you learned at public school (which is what they call private school) and which became a standard, largely I think due to the influence of the BBC during the radio and TV era. There were of course deviations from it, reflecting the actual linguistic diversity of the British people. But it seems as though sometime in the 90s, the BBC stopped insisting on it, and the fact is that a lot of british accents are rather unlovely.

PS: OK, Mr. Anon, you've got me convinced to check some more of their shows out. Now what is "Received Pronunciation"?

Regarding Monty Python, I try to stay away from ever hearing one word about what the guys have to say politically. I don't support them other than I guess the youtube hits, that I doubt do anything for them, and a video or two from library probably doesn't help them either.

Come a new movie out of them (I really doubt, as it can't possibly be funny in today's environment, well, I'll not go see it.

PS I recommend Mitchell and Webb. Most of their stuff is funny. Some of it is very funny. And that's unusual for British televsion nowadays, in my opinion. British television used to be entertaining; their dramas were interesting and their comedies (some of them, anyway) funny. With the abandonment of RP (Received Pronunciation) most of the actors sound like yobs and are highly - artificially - "diverse" (i.e. not actually british). It's almost all PC crap as far as I can tell. M&W are a rare exception to the general low quality.

I used to be a fan of Monty Python, but as all of them (other than, I think Michael Palin) have become such hectoring old liberal fools, I can't stand them anymore.