In the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), fantasy and the surreal combine in an extraordinary comic satire. The film starts with King Arthur of the Britons recruiting knights to join him at Camelot. Arthur is joined by the wise Sir Bedemir and other ‘illustrious’ names follow, including: Sir Launcelot the Brave; Sir Galahad the Pure; and ‘Sir Robin the Not-quite-so-brave-as-Sir-Launcelot who had nearly fought the Dragon of Agnor, who nearly stood up to the Chicken of Bristol’. They are knights without horses and servants bang coconuts to imitate the sound of horses’ hooves. Instead of going to Camelot they embark on a journey in search of the Holy Grail. The film satirises events in history, such as witch trials, the Black Death and, as noted earlier in this book, cannibalism. It highlights the dark side of story-telling as a conveyor of truth-telling. There is normally a moral in every tale.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) evokes Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels (1725) in its satirical approach, narrative form (a journey) and in its shared audience of adults and children. Both highlight the permeable nature of meaning-making in the narrative form of a tale, where the moral is open to interpretation based upon the age and rational powers of the implied reader/viewer (Rose, 1984). This raises the questions: ‘Do adults and children occupy the same cognitive world of shared meanings or do adults culturally construct (and arguably) control the imaginary lives of children?’, ‘Do fairy tales contain culturally encoded messages?’ and ‘What is the meaning behind these messages?’. That is primarily what this chapter is about. We will seek to explore how media forms culturally construct the child's reality, often paradoxically through the agency of adult fantasy. As Jack Zipes (2012: ix) puts it: ‘fairy tales continue to pervade, if not to invade our lives throughout the world’. Their primary cultural target is children's imaginations. This chapter also explores the advent of the electronic media, which has arguably, given the child imaginative agency (Buckingham, 2000). The chapter poses two further questions.