Terry Jones as Mr Creosote in 1983's Monty Python's Meaning of Life. (Alamy) Of course, the purpose of the scene is not to make people run in terror, but fall from their seats laughing.

By the time The Meaning of Life was finally finished, the various members of the group had all successfully begun to flex their non-Python identities; Gilliam, Idle and Jones had ambitions in film ...

Compiled regular expressions still performed comparatively well in Python, though. This method processed the 100,000 lines in 165 ms, about two times faster than string primitives in Python.