It started well, the press conference to announce the Monty Python reunion show, not least because the first question was from an excited woman journalist from Spain, who wanted to know: "Why? And why now? And please don't tell me it's for the money."
"Nobody expected the Spanish inquisition," retorted Michael Palin on cue. Sadly, he wasn't actually wearing the robes of the 16th-century Cardinal Ximenez he plays in that vintage sketch, one the O2 audience will surely see when the team appear together for the first time on a London stage for, wait for it, 40 years.
"I think the clever thing is that we waited until the demand died down," said Eric Idle, after explaining: "We're all trying to pay for Terry Jones' mortgage."
For all the gags, there was something almost tentative about their (30 minutes late) appearance at the Playhouse Theatre. It was a curious mix of the mildly surreal (the five titans who transformed British comedy began by talking unintelligibly all at once, like something out of a Beckett play) and the more conventionally showbiz.
The actor Warwick Davis was compere, introducing the "five legends"; an orderly, even counter-anarchic queue of reporters outside the theatre waited to have their names checked off before being allowed into the stalls; and there was the reassuring soundtrack of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, the epochal song Idle wrote to accompany the crucifixion scene at the end of 1979's Life of Brian, a film so controversial because of its tilt at religion that it was effectively banned by 39 local councils.
