Larry goes viral!

When Lawrence Miles posted that he would be taking his blog down, I decided to set up a Google search to alert me in case he popped up again someplace else. Recently, I've been picking up hits for posts such as this one.

It seems that the list of "Nine Things Which Appeared on The Muppet Show, But Wouldn’t Make It Onto Family Television These Days" is getting passed along. I hope this has a positive effect.

One of the bits most frequently quoted is:

But what we forget is that the issue of cross-species fertility is raised even in the original series, specifically in Miss Piggy’s performance of “Waiting at the Church”, a song about a bride being deserted by her bigamous husband on the day of her shotgun wedding. Piggy performs the song in a wedding dress that’s been bulked out to make her look eight months pregnant. This image is so distressing that it’s been erased from our collective childhood memory, yet there she is on the screen, reciting the opening lines ‘I’m in a nice bit of trouble, I confess / somebody with me has had a game’ in the finest music-hall tradition. Four-year-olds in the audience must surely have asked their parents why she looked so fat that week, and it’s doubtful that the phrase “big with spawn” would have satisfied them.

I have to admit that I did not remember this bit.

Turns out that every episode had a UK-only segment, as a half hour episode had to run shorter for American broadcast to make room for the increased number of commercials. These segment were generally music segments of no consequence, but I can easily see that this particular one was flagged to be cut from the US version for censor appeasement - in this case invalidating Miles' argument.

For the curious, it's in the second season episode hosted by John Cleese.