Does Yorkshire Yankee or anyone else know the date of the joke by Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis about the Spanish Acquisition (ie of the Abbey National Building Society by the Bank of Santander)?

I am interested because I thought of the exact same joke on 26th July 2004 after seeing a TV program that evening about the takeover; I mentioned this joke in a private E-mail on 27th July and another one to a different person on 2nd September 2004 (in the latter I said "Remember you heard it here first").

Honestly folks, this isn't a boast about what a great originator of jokes I am (HE SAID MODESTLY!), but am genuinely curious as to how quickly different people think of something like this and how quickly it circulates. I remember thinking at the time that it would probably be a very short time before a headline like "Nobody expects the Spanish Acquisition" appeared in a newspaper. I did an Internet search for "Spanish Acquisition at that time" and though I got some "hits" I didn't get in the above form.

If you are aware of one of Monty Pythons most famous sketches then this is a very obvious pun.

Strangely, no individual "Monty Python" quote seems to be all that common, although "Don't mention the war" by ex Python John Cleese in the Fawlty Towers Episode about the Germans is certainly heard quite often. I also like Basil Fawlty's phrase "I'm so sorry, he's from Barcelona" and (Basil Fawlty to Manuel) "(Do?)You have rats in Spain, or did Franco have them all shot?"

One of my own genuine Python favourites is "The Polar Bear's escaped", delivered in a high pitch voice, though I haven't actually heard anyone else use it. There was also a Pythonesque interview featuring the late Graham Chapman as a Government Minister":

Interviewer (possibly Eric Idle or Michael Palin): "Minister, in your manisfesto, you promised to build over 10 million houses(or some preposterous figure) in the Greater London area alone; you have in fact built only three. How do you answer this?"
Minister: "I'd like to answer this question, if I may, in 2 ways. First of all in my normal voice, and secondly, using a kind of silly high-pitched squeak".

John Cleese's father was originally called John Cheese, but changed it to Cleese in the Army in 1915 to avoid being teased (I would have thought being teased in the Army in 1915 was the least of your worries as this was in the middle of World War One. Pity though he changed it, this would have made his son John a "big Cheese" (geddit?)

Cleese himself regrets the name change and thinks it would be good to be called Jack Cheese (his wife calls him Jack). He has also traced the surname Cheese to Norwich in 1273, though Cleese himself came from Weston Super Mare in Somerset at the other end of England.

HERE ENDETH THE HISTORY LESSON