‘We behaved quite badly’: Sex, drugs and mock and roll – Eric Idle’s very funny world

I’ve just asked Eric Idle that most basic of questions for any comic. What is it that makes him so funny?

“I don’t feel it’s my job to be funny,” he says. “It’s just I find myself saying funny things from time to time. I think I have no filter. I think that’s part of it. Saying the right thing at the wrong time – someone has to say it and out it comes.”

‘I find myself saying funny things from time to time’: Eric Idle at Sydney’s Martinez restaurant.Credit: Rhett Wyman

He gives an example concerning the 2001 death of his dear friend, George Harrison, from lung cancer.

“I said at George’s funeral, ‘I’d like to thank Marlboro, without whom we wouldn’t be here today’. Now, that’s f---ing terrible! It’s also very funny.”

It is genuinely funny, and it takes a while for us to stop giggling like naughty schoolboys. Idle has that effect – the mischievous pleasure he takes in telling the story is almost as funny as the gag itself.

We’re lunching at Martinez, a suggestion from Sydney’s Good Food Guide editor Callan Boys. Idle had originally requested Doyles at Watsons Bay, but the ordinary weather changed our plans.

Grilled king prawns bouillabaisse.Credit: Rhett Wyman

The restaurant is a bright buzzy spot on the podium level of Quay Quarter Tower on Bridge Street. Adjacent to the restaurant is an inviting terrace bar, which looks like it would be a great place to lose an entire afternoon.

Idle, who eats only fish, chooses the Moreton Bay bug cocktail and the king prawns bouillabaisse. For me, it’s scallops and the mafaldine sausage. We both stick to soft drinks – at 81, the hair-curling excesses of Idle’s youth are evidently behind him.

Idle, of course, first came to prominence as a pivotal member of the Monty Python team, alongside Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam. As he tells it in his “sortabiography”, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, the birth of Python was mostly accidental, due in large part to a lack of supervision from the BBC.

“The BBC opened up a new time slot for us late on Sunday nights, when the Queen normally came on screen sitting on a horse and television closed down,” Idle writes. “They didn’t know it but there were a whole lot of people who liked to stay up after the pub closed.”

Launched towards a bemused British public in 1969, the key to Python’s success, according to Idle, was that it was never one thing but rather a loose collection of styles reflecting the different personalities writing the show.

“There is visual humour, verbal humour, clever humour, silliness, rudeness, sophistication and brazen naughtiness, constantly alternating,” he says.

And they got away with an awful lot before the BBC realised quite what they had unleashed. By then it was too late.

“We had no executives,” says Idle. “There was nobody in charge, so we were consciously trying to break barriers. We were trying to wake people up and annoy people.”

The Monty Python team was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1969.Credit:

However, it only became clear to Idle and the rest of the gang that they had – in modern terms – “gone viral” when they took the Python show on the road.

Arriving at Toronto airport after taking full advantage of the drinks service in the first-class cabin, they were greeted by a mob of howling fans, setting the tone for the rest of the tour.

“We became mock and roll,” says Idle. “We discovered that people were raving nuts, dressed like us and singing the songs. You haven’t really any idea until you go on the road.”

It was a wild time, with endless parties, sex and drugs, and Idle is quite candid that he became “an arsehole” during the period.

“You can get spoiled when you’re first treated like something that you’re not really,” he says. “Fame can be confusing because it can divert you into a world that isn’t real. It’s interesting to experience, but it isn’t really you.”

As his fame increased Idle got to rub shoulders with a Who’s Who of famous performers of the era or, as he puts it: “When you’re in the circus, you tend to meet the other clowns.”

Among the many celebrity fans who became a close friend was Mick Jagger.

“I did a lot of watching cricket with Mick and it was absolutely mind-boggling,” he says. “You’d get to Lord’s and I’d say, ‘Have you got any tickets?’. ‘Tickets!’ he’d say, and we went through the main gate and the guy said, ‘Morning, Mick’. We went down there and up some stairs and we were in the bloody English dressing room.

“It was like one of those experiences where you go pinch yourself. There’s Mike Brearley sitting reading The Guardian quietly in the corner and then Geoffrey Boycott comes along reminiscing about some innings of his. He said, ‘I’ve been in for about 34, yeah, 34, no, 35 balls’. And I realise he counted every f---ing ball. He’s that boring!”

The mock-and-roll lifestyle was ultimately to cost Idle his first marriage, to Townsville-born actor Lyn Ashley. Two years after divorcing Ashley, Idle met and instantly fell in love with actor Tania Kosevich, whom he married in 1981.

“I’ve been with that woman 47 years,” he says. “I gave her two of the best years of her life.”

The Python team went on to collaborate on three successful movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983). Much of the music for the films was written by Idle, including perhaps his best-known tune, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, which accompanies the unforgettable mass crucifixion scene at the end of Life of Brian.

Idle says that, like a lot of comedy writing, the song was born from the need to solve a problem.

“The problem was, how do we end when everybody’s being crucified? And I said we should end with a very cheery song looking on the bright side and it should be a whistle. So I went back home and I wrote it. It came together quite quickly because the big ideas were all there.

“I mean, the idea of singing from the cross is pretty f---ing naughty. It works in a very interesting way for the film. They are dying and they’re singing optimistically. So in a way it’s an ironic song. Now it’s sung at funerals. I really love that.”

Life of Brian sparked moral outrage around the world for its alleged blasphemy – it was banned outright in Ireland and Norway, leading theatres in Sweden to advertise it as “So funny, it was banned in Norway!” Idle says this is a complete misreading of the film.

Originally, the Pythons were considering the title Jesus Christ: Lust For Glory, before realising there was insufficient comedic mileage in mocking Christ. Then they hit on the idea of Brian, an ordinary bloke who is unlucky enough to be mistaken for the Messiah.

“For him, it’s a tragedy,” says Idle. “He can’t get rid of these people. What makes it funny is that the guy’s trapped in this awful position of being followed – a bit like being famous.”

Spamalot won a Tony Award for Eric Idle.Credit:

Post-Python, Idle has had a long and varied career of writing and performing that includes the Tony Award-winning musical Spamalot.

He has a particular soft spot for his 1975 sketch show Rutland Weekend Television, named after a tiny English county that was at one stage abolished for being too small.

The Rutles, aka The Prefab Four.Credit:

“[John] Cleese mentioned Rutland Weekend Television because there was a London Weekend Television. I said, ‘Oh, I like that’ and I gave him a pound for it,” says Idle.

Out of that left-field concept Idle spun a TV series, a book and ultimately All You Need is Cash, a brilliant mockumentary charting the rise and fall of the Prefab Four, Dirk, Stig, Nasty and Barry. The Rutles, as they were known, were a pitch-perfect parody of The Beatles.

Idle says it was way ahead of its time.

“It was seven years before Spinal Tap, but they had the liberty of making it up. Mine is more a parody.”

It’s classic Idle: a preposterous tower of whimsy spun out of one simple idea.

Post-Monty Python, Idle has had a long and varied career writing and performing.Credit: Rhett Wyman

The coming tour, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live!, is described as a “nostalgic one-man musical” and promises “comedy, music, philosophy and one fart joke”.

I wonder why he is still touring at all – shouldn’t he be taking his ease and enjoying the grandkids at his age?

“I think I’d like to have my feet up somewhere but alas not,” he says. “You see, nobody pays anybody any more. Record royalties and things don’t exist any more and I have to work like anybody else. But it’s not a bad job – I just have to be Eric Idle for a bit. What else are you going to do?”

Eric Idle’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! is at Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane on November 6; Sydney’s State Theatre on November 13; and Perth Concert Hall on November 18.