Mumblings on last night's Australian Story, addiction and Monty Python

Watched this last night; http://www.abc.net.au/austory/. Quite a sad story really. I just had to Google to see how old Mandawuy Yunupingu is. 53. He looks a lot older than that. End stage kidney failure brought on by years of boozing. There was a postscript at the end saying he was still a year and a half off being considered for a kidney transplant. Got to admit that I came away not feeling really hopeful for his future.
He claimed to have at one point been drinking 4 (!!!!) slabs of beer a day. I have a working knowledge of addiction, but that is extreme. Addiction, be it to alcohol, drugs, sex (I should be so lucky) is an awful disease. Graham Chapman wrote extensively of his alcoholism in his autobiography, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Liars-Autobiography-Graham-Chapman/dp/0413740900, the pieces he writes of his attempts to give up drinking and the physical effects of the sobering process are harrowing. Like Yunupingu, Chapman was an educated man, a medical doctor, who more than anyone must have known what he was doing to himself. Still we all fight demons of one form or another I guess.
Which brings me, in a runabout sort of way to the 40th anniversay of Monty Python's Flying Circus. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/features/nudge-nudge-eric-idle-on-40-years-of-monty-python-1803501.html Being a child of the British Empire (Canadian mother raised in England, English father, raised in Rhodesia, as it was then) growing up in the '80's my cultural touchstones were very much English. That being the case it was inevitable that sooner, rather than later I discovered Monty Python. I had never seen anything like it. It was the most wild and original thing that I had ever seen. Still is at times. But 40 years ago, when the comedy heroes of the day were Steptoe and Son and that classic English bigot, Alf Garnett, it must have been revolutionary.