As much as fun as it would be to start this chapter with ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’, the fact of the matter is that Monty Python’s Life of Brian is not really all that much at odds with the Biblical film tradition. The film owes quite a lot to Jesus of Nazareth (of which it is something of a parody) and was shot in many cases on the very same sets in North Africa and with the very same extras as the ITV miniseries had been just a few years before. ‘I had these elderly Tunisians telling me, “Well, Mr Zeffirelli wouldn’t have done it like that, you know”’, director Terry Jones joked about the production in an interview some time later. Life of Brian is about many things, of course, and the Python troupe’s usual buffoonery is everywhere to be seen in the film, but there is a consistent engagement throughout with the concept of empire. The well-known and hilarious ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ episode is a send-up of contemporary anti-imperialist movements set in ancient Judaea, of course, but it is also addressed in some wider fashion to the protests of its present day. All of the Pythons were children of Britain’s decline, who in their formative college years strongly felt the ‘Winds of Change’, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had famously called Britain’s stepdown from its own empire. In many ways, the entire Monty Python project can be seen as a madcap made-for-TV version of The Waste Land, a gathering of disiecta membra from the cultural past rearranged and reconsidered in a startlingly innovative format. If empire broadly imagined is a matter at issue in Life of Brian, then it makes sense that the representation of Pilate, as the chief agent of empire in the film, will be an especially important character to ponder.