“Well, I was out in the Garden at the time …”

Tim Brooke-Taylor passed away on April 12, 2020 from Covid-19. His career ran the whole course of the great British satire movement of the 1960’s, from its early days when he was a student at Cambridge with classmates like John Cleese and Graham Chapman, on through various comedy troupes of the decade when he teamed with virtually all the comedy giants of his era as a writer and actor. The era culminated with some of his former colleagues creating Monty Python’s Flying Circus and he with his own long-running show, The Goodies.

The era was kicked off by a comedy group called Beyond the Fringe, made up of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathon Miller and Alan Bennett. They had a sketch that satirized documentaries about World War II that has made me draw a parallel to the times we are living in now.

At all the staggeringly important moments of World War II, one of the characters in the sketch begins his recollection by saying, “Well, I was out in the garden at the time …”

When his wife comes out to tell him about the latest most staggeringly important news, his reaction is to always say, “There, there, dear … let’s just go in the house and have us a nice cup of tea.”

I think that guy was on to something. As someone who comes home every night wondering if he’s just put a gun to his partner’s head by working in an office all day, I can tell you that you can’t live in a state where you’re fully realizing the enormity of every minute of every day. You have to go out in the garden sometimes. Sometimes, you just have to sit and have a nice cup of tea.

This is going to be a long haul. There aren’t going to be any quick fixes. You don’t want to be like those pitiful, disgusting, right-wing freakazoid protesters in Michigan. You’re going to want to craft a home worth going home to. Even if it’s a home that only exists in your mind. It’s going to be a long haul without it.

On a lighter note, we’ll probably all be like the characters in “The Four Yorkshiremen” sketch one day and complain about how kids these days don’t know how good they have it. The late Tim Brooke-Taylor gets a credit as a writer and performer along with John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman. It’s been voted the greatest British comedy sketch of all time.