Shyama Perera: Please, boys, keep your inner Python zipped up

"Hello, is the place where you come for an argument?"

"No."

"But that's what it says."

"Well it isn't."

This carries on for a while, and then the assistant pings his bell. "Right, time's up."

It was the right joke at the right time and remains a happy memory for middle-aged, middle-class men who own several widths of pinstripe and who, when they close their eyes, see their wives not as a Teri Hatcher manquée, but Terry Jones in ugly skirts and Flo Capp turbans.

What's worrying for the rest of us is that we're in for a revival. Thirty years after Monty Python and the Holy Grail was released came the news last week that the stage version - Monty Python's SpamAlot - will open in London.

Women of Britain, hide behind your handbags, because the words of Eric Idle will unleash a strain of contagious regurgitation guaranteed to induce despair at workstations and dinner tables across the country. Lines, songs and unlikely scenes from this re-take on the story of King Arthur are guaranteed to catch on faster than bird flu.

Talking of birds ... "This parrot is not dead, he's resting. He is stunned." Let's take bets on how many times that line will be spewed out by those we putatively know and love. Or: "You were lucky - we lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank."

Oh, woe to be so po-faced while standing at the altar of comic genius, but like millions of girls I never really got Python in the same way as the boys. Every Thursday night, I saw that big cartoon foot come down and crunch the Lilliputians below and laughed because it was so clearly original and cool. But in the playground the next day, I'd be part of a female gaggle watching with disdain and disbelief as the boys went around doing silly walks and singing "The Lumberjack Song". Why?

Hindsight has taught me that men love to re-enact comedy. Let's face it, they all do David Brent, and Lou and Andy. Entire conversations can comprise nothing but an uninterrupted exchange of comedy catchphrases in put-on voices, from "Don't panic!" to "Yeah but no but yeah but...".

Python has a unique place in this canon. It is the posh boys' equivalent of scatological humour. Men pulling clothes out of the dressing-up box and saying very silly things that would have nanny reaching for the hairbrush and bending them over her knee.

Do I risk sounding like one of the harridans that peopled so many mysogynistic Python sketches? Oh dear, but sometimes looking on the bright side of life can leave one sun-blind, and a pleasure literally turns to pain.

The good news is that the Holy Grail film on which SpamAlot is based dates from a Python era when politics and passion still provided the undertow, and jokes hadn't been watered down for general consumption. Broadway audiences have lapped it up, and it looks like the same will happen in the West End. An entire new generation is poised to discover why Python changed TV comedy forever.

I'm just not sure I want to be around when the inevitable (male) chorus goes up: "Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam ..."

Shyama Perera's most recent novel is 'Do the Right Thing', published by Sceptre