The Four Yorkshiremen

The Four Yorkshiremen
Level: B2-C1
British English (Yorkshire accent)


The Four Yorkshiremen is a famous comedy sketch by Monty Python. Monty Python were a group of comedians in the 1970s in Britain. In the sketch a group of four old men from Yorkshire (in England) talk about how it was like for them growing up. They complain about how difficult life was for them. Their complaining gets worse and worse and it seems they are in a competition to see who had the worst childhood.


Watch this video to revise states and habits in the past. It's absolutely hilarious!

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Here's the transcript:


1st Yorkshireman: Aye, very passable, that, very passable.
3rd Yorkshireman: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
4th Yorkshireman: You're right there, Obadiah.
2nd Yorkshireman: Who'd have thought thirty years ago we'd all be sitting here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
1st: In them days we were glad to have the price of a cup of tea.
3rd: Aye, a cup of cold tea.
2nd: Without milk or sugar.
4th: OR tea.
1st: In a cracked cup, and all.
2nd: Oh, we never used to have a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
3rd: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
4th: But you know, we were happy in those days, although we were poor.
1st: Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't bring you happiness, son".
2nd: He was right. I was happier then and I had nothing. We used to live in this tiny old tumbledown house with great big holes in the roof.
3rd: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor was missing, and we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

4th: You were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor! 

1st: Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor! It would have been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
2nd: Well, when I say 'house' it was just a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

3rd: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake. 

4th: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road.

1st: Cardboard box?
4th: Aye. 

1st: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank. We used to have to get up every morning at 6 o’clock and clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt. 

3rd: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work twenty hours a day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

4th: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of shoebox in the middle of the night and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

2nd: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
1st: And you try and tell the young people of today that ...and they won't believe you.
2nd, 3rd, 4th: Nope, they won't!