If you have lists that are not the same length, you may not want to use zip as per Patricks answer. This works:
>>> zip(*[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd'), (1, 2, 3, 4)]
But with different length lists, zip truncates each item to the length of the shortest list:
>>> zip(*[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4), ('e', )])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e')]
You can use map with no function to fill empty results with None:
>>> map(None, *[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4), ('e', )])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'), (1, 2, 3, 4, None)]
zip() is marginally faster though.