“I read this wonderfully funny book about a Scouting wimp through in one enjoyable go. I don’t come from Derby and I have never been in the Scouts although I was a Girl Guide in the 1960s and 1970s in the West Bromwich area in the West Midlands. Mr Lowe’s witty writing flows and I love his self deprecating style. (spoiler) I actually shed a tear when he wrote about the death of his mother when he was nine.

The way Mr Lowe’s words address his life as a shy boy and teenager during the 1960s and 70s took me right back. My Dad was a hoarder too and our shed at home was just the same mess of tools and paraphernalia and spiders!!! I would recommend Scouting For Monty Python to anyone who enjoys quirky intelligent nostalgic writing. The book made me want to be a Girl Guide all over again. ” Alice Parsons.

Scouting For Monty Python promotion

Phil Lowe’s Derby and Derbyshire based Scouting For Monty Python is a fond memoir of being coerced into joining the Wolf Cubs and the Boy Scouts during the 1960s and 1970s. It is written with a great deal of nostalgic humour and plenty of tongue-in-cheek, sometimes quite surreal, storytelling as we follow the wimpy adventures of Figgy Lowe- a shy boy with sticky out ears – whose idea of adventure is planting an apple pip on a sports field and hoping it will grow into a tree – by the next day. Laugh along as you read about his bold invites into Scouting; invites that included going abseiling, canoeing, wild swimming, hill running or climbing a mountain but instead, make him run for the hills in abject terror. As we first meet him, Figgy is nine years old. He just wants to make daisy chains, draw cartoons, eat the neighbour’s home-grown tomatoes, play with this Action Man, swop Batman cards and imagine being the Man From U.N.C.L.E’s spy hero Napoleon Solo. For Figgy, living on Derby’s vast housing estate of Chaddesden in the 1960s and 1970s has its joys of Instant Whip and chips for dinner and the potential perils of bumping into big boys dressed as teddy bears (Teddy Boys) on the way to a boisterous night at the Wolf Cubs.

In 1969 Monty Python’s Flying Circus becomes a new hit comedy on the television and Figgy and his Scouting mates can’t get enough of practising their silly walks and batty women impersonations. Somewhere along the way there is a dead parrot to encounter and songs to sing about cross-dressing lumberjacks and lovers of Spam.  But first there’s Scout badges to win and important Scout badges to collect, camping thrills to be had, toilet accidents to be avoided, midnight hiking to be done and the delights of actively experiencing being in Scout Gang Shows.  

Scouting For Monty Python by Phil Lowe makes you yearn for simpler times; wonder what became of all that clutter in the garden shed; be pleased you took advice about dodging the groping hands of dirty old men; be forever grateful you learnt to tie a reef knot and not granny knots; be ever thankful for surviving Bob-A -Job Week year-on-year and finally learn that Baden-Powell was not called Beepy or Bacon-Powell and much more.

If you were ever in the Cubs or the Scouts and grew up in a working-class family Scouting For Monty Python is a detailed and delightful slice of irreverent light-hearted boyhood and Scouting nostalgia.

For ‘something completely different’ you can bet your woggle you’ll not read anything better than Phil Lowe’s Scouting For Monty Python and there’s a funny piece about sheds. What’s not to like? Arthur ‘two sheds’ Jackson.

This book makes us regret never joining the Scouts. The Spanish Inquisition.