DVD: Ripping Yarns (15)

This compilation of Michael Palin and Terry Jones's absurd half-hour adventure parodies from the Seventies is worth it alone for the stupendous send-up of British public schools in Tomkinson's Schooldays, in which pupils wrestle grizzly bears, beat their headmaster and are nailed to the school walls on St Tadger's Day.

Palin excels at playing gormless innocents (the precipitation-obsessed Eric in The Testing of Eric Olthwaite is very droll) and control freaks (the football fanatic who trashes his house, win or lose, in Golden Gordon is particularly memorable) in these occasionally inspired slices of comedy.