Jesus: It seemed like a good idea at the time you know, Easter Weekend, the kids are home from school, everyone’s looking forward to their eggs on Sunday…What better time than that to stage a family-orientated Pop Extravaganza?
Mary Magdalen: And what better place than Altringham Zoo?
Peter: We were all looking forward to it.
Luke: Well I wasn't, I'm allergic to elephants.
Peter: Alright, apart from you then.
Jesus: So anyway, we were between managers at the time, then this guy called Pilate turns up and offers to organise the whole thing for us...Well we jumped at the chance.
Peter: I never trusted him from the start, he had shifty little eyes, and he was always washing his hands, every five minutes. They say that's a sure sign of a deep seated guilt complex.
Mary Magdalen: Hmmph. I don't remember you saying anything at the time, quite the contrary in fact. You were licking his ass like it was made out of barley sugar.
Peter: I was only being polite - you should try it sometime.
Luke: Can't you two give it a rest for five minutes and let Jesus get on with the story?
Jesus: Thanks Luke. Ok, yeah, at first everything seemed to be going fine, but soon Pilate started asking us for bigger and bigger advances - I mean, £3,000,000 to book the caterers, for example. That was a lot of money in those days.
Mary Magdalen: It was alright for a while - we'd done really well out of the previous year's "Miracle Tour" - but then the money began to run out, and that's when the problems started.
Peter: Also, we didn't find out until later that Pilate had been taking money for top class stuff, but only actually hiring second class equipment. He was creaming off the difference you see.
Luke: Yeah, like I remember he promised us a really fancy bouncy castle - one with crenellations and everything, but when we turned up on the day, all there was was a slightly leaky blow-up mattress.
Jesus: With some suspicious stains on it too if I remember rightly. But all that came later, at the time we thought everything was on track.
Mary Magdalen: And then the cheques started to bounce.
Luke: Unlike the children on that mattress.
Jesus: People were cancelling left, right and centre, and Pilate was nowhere to be found, so we had to improvise.
Mary Magdalen: For example, Peter built a stage and a lighting gantry out of beer crates and some old bits of metal he found lying about the place...
Peter: And when the firm we’d hired to do security pulled out because they hadn’t been paid, Mary had the bright idea of getting in the local Girl Guides instead.
Jesus: Yes, in retrospect, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea...
Mary Magdalen: ...But it turns out those bits of metal that Peter had found "lying around" were actually about half of the fencing from the rhino enclosure.
Peter: They weren't labelled, how was I to know?
Jesus: The first half of the gig really went quite well, I thought. Spandau Ballet were great. But when they'd finished Alison Moyet came on and started singing her first song, "That Ol' Devil Called Love", and then the ground began to shake and I looked up and saw a herd of stampeding rhinos heading straight for the stage.
Luke: The keeper said later that they'd been driven into a mating frenzy by her trumpeting voice and rhino-like bulk.
Peter: Those Girl Guides didn't stand a chance...
Luke: The rhinos went straight over them, like big, ugly garden rollers.
Jesus: What had started out as a lovely Easter concert turned into a nightmare - children screaming, people throwing up...
Mary Magdalen: Mind you, on the plus side, Alison Moyet seemed to enjoy herself.
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