"Piranha Brothers" is a Monty Python sketch, first seen in Series 2, Episode 1 (Face the Press) of Monty Python's Flying Circus, originally transmitted on September 15, 1970. The premise is a BBC current affairs documentary, inexplicably entitled Ethel the Frog, covering the exploits of the fictional brothers Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, who employed a combination of "violence and sarcasm" to intimidate the London underworld and bring the city to its knees. The sketch constitutes a pastiche of the real life story of the Kray twins, famous gangsters in the East End of London in the 1950s and 1960s. Doug and Dinsdale Piranha were loosely based on Reggie and Ronnie Kray, and the policeman who pursued them, Harry "Snapper" Organs, was loosely based on the policeman who led the investigation against the Krays, Detective Superintendent Leonard "Nipper" Read.
The sketch is introduced by a piece of music (the Intermezzo from Sibelius's Karelia Suite) which was used for many years, until 1992, to introduce the Thames Television (and previously Associated-Rediffusion and Rediffusion London) current affairs series This Week.
Famous quotes containing the word brothers:
“When you gonna get married, Marty? You should be ashamed of yourself. All your brothers and sisters, younger than you, they get married and got the children. I meet your mother in the produce store. She say to me “Eh, you know a nice girl for my boy Marty?” What’s the matter with you? That’s no way!”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)