Eric Idle: ‘George Harrison mortgaged his house so Monty Python could make Life of Brian’

Eric Idle was born in March 1943 in South Shields, County Durham. His father, Ernest, was a sergeant in the RAF who served in the Second World War but was killed while hitchhiking home on compassionate leave on Christmas Eve, 1945. Eric was raised by his mother, Nora, and in 1950 was sent to The Royal School Wolverhampton where his education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund. 

In 1962 he was accepted by Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English literature, where he was president of the Footlights Dramatic Club, changing the rules to accept women members (Germaine Greer was the first). Following his studies, he began to write for I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set, where he first acted and wrote with Michael Palin and Terry Jones. The trio were joined by Graham Chapman and John Cleese for BBC Two’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which ran for four series from July 1969 to 1973, changing comedy forever. The Pythons also made several films, including Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), The Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983).

Following Python, he wrote and starred in two series of Rutland Weekend Television (with Neil Innes) which led to writing and co-directing cult classic The Rutles, in All You Need is Cash. In 1975 he published his first novel Hello Sailor. His first play Pass the Butler was produced at The Globe Theatre, London 1983, where it ran for five months. His film roles include The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Nuns on the Run, Splitting Heirs, Wind in the Willows and South Park (the movie). His musical Spamalot opened in Chicago in December 2004 and hit Broadway in March 2005, where it ran until January 2009, breaking all house records, winning three Tonys (including Best Musical 2005) a Grammy for Best Broadway Album and a Writers Desk Award for Best Lyrics. 

In his Letter to My Younger Self, Eric Idle looks back at his determination to escape boarding school, being funded by rock ‘n’ roll stars and much-missed friends.

At 16 I’d been at boarding school in Wolverhampton for nine years, and my main preoccupation was just getting the fuck out. Boarding school is pretty boring. You’re there a long, long time. And boys are not the best company all the time. We would go and look for beer and a good time. I think I was about 16 or 17 when I went to London and saw Beyond the Fringe, a fantastic show with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. That changed my life because I didn’t realise you could laugh at all the things I didn’t like – the army and royalty and authority. That was a breakthrough for me. I only wanted to be a comedian from then on. 

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I did end up head boy but that’s because I was almost the only one left and my class were very slightly criminal. We never took a straight exam until O levels, because we broke into the masters’ studies, stole the exam paper, wrote it all out at night, and then took it into the exams. So O levels were the first straight exams we had ever done. And when I got back to school there were only six of us in my class left. That’s how I ended up head boy. 

My younger self wouldn’t believe that I actually became a comedian. I didn’t have any clue what I would do. But then I got into Cambridge, which you can imagine was a different world to Wolverhampton. It was just like, oh my god, everything’s beautiful, everything’s wonderful, and people are nice to you and it’s important how you live. It isn’t just about learning, they want you to join things. I joined the Pembroke Players, and when I got into the college review, my life completely changed. I was ostensibly reading English but I spent the rest of my three years doing comedy. And we went to the Edinburgh Festival, and suddenly I was on television at the age of 20. Wow, an extraordinary change. 

I auditioned for two of The Goodies. Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor auditioned me, and the first script they gave me to do was written by somebody called John Cleese. By the end of that year, I met Graham Chapman in the Footlights Club. I went to the Edinburgh Festival with the Cambridge Footlights Revue, and I met Michael Palin and Terry Jones at the Oxford Revue. So by the end of ’63 I met all of the future Pythons, with the exception of Terry Gilliam. I loved Mike and Terry right away. They were in their final year and I was a first year student. When we did the show in Edinburgh I did a lot of funny songs. That was a big change in my life. I could write sketches, but the idea that you could write funny songs has always been something that I love to do, because I love playing guitar. 

We finally got offered the after-the-pub TV slot on the BBC. We didn’t know what we were doing when we started, but we knew that we didn’t want to do anything that had been done before. And we wanted to push the envelope. We didn’t want to do boring old taglines. We liked to mess with the audience, surprise them. But we didn’t have a clue who was watching. There were one or two complaining letters sent to the BBC. But the BBC said, ‘Oh, leave them alone.’ Basically we weren’t important enough to care about. 

We started to write The Holy Grail, and by then we started to appear on stage. We did a tour of the UK, and we found our audience, and they were crazy, just nuts. They’d come dressed as characters. They sang all the words. We had no idea. So we started writing this film about King Arthur in medieval times. We found the money from rock ’n’ roll. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull put money in. I think the budget was £200,000 – luckily not enough to have any real horses. So we made it and it opened 50 years ago.  

The next film started because when we were in New York a journalist said, what’s your next film going to be called, and I said, Jesus Christ, Lust for Glory. He laughed and I laughed, and then we went home and people said, actually that’s quite a nice idea. Nobody’s ever made a film about religion, and there’s a lot to be said about religion that’s not being said. And of course, it’s really about followers and people controlling people.  

But for a while we had no money. [Media impresario] Lew Grade read it and just went nuts. He said, we can’t possibly make this. I went to America to find money. I had been talking to George Harrison who was a huge fan, and he said, “I’ll phone you in the morning, don’t worry.” And I thought, well, nobody’s got four and a half million dollars. But finally, when everybody turned us down, there was a call from him saying, “I’ve got you the money.” He had mortgaged his house and his business and raised the cash and put it all on a Python film. The most extraordinary thing to do. 

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We had a problem regarding how to end Life of Brian. All our characters were heading for crucifixion, not the normal end of a film. So I said, we should end with a song. They said, what do you mean? I said, we should all be singing it on the cross. It should be a very cheery-uppy song, like, life will get better. And it should have a whistle. I went home and wrote it [“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”] immediately, in an hour or so, and then I recorded it, and I brought it back next day, and they said, “That’s it. We’re done. We can go down the pub.” 

Michael said he was sad to see us break up? He was the first to leave! He’s such a hypocrite. I mean in some ways we split up immediately before The Holy Grail. John didn’t want to do a fourth series. After that we decided to just stick to films. After Life of Brian, we actually did The Meaning of Life, which was our last film together. Graham died shortly after that. Also, I think, when you’ve done religion and then the meaning of life, there are very few subjects left. I can’t believe Michael said he was sad. He turned down the opportunity to do it in America, in Australia, in South Africa. He turned down $30 million! 

Ageing – there’s not much you can do about it. I think the thing is that you know you can get better at things like relationships. You can get better at marriages. You can get better about people and friends, because in the end, that’s all that matters. And as you get older, sadly, you lose more and more friends. The older you get, the less you think, ‘Oh gosh, I hope this never ends.’ You’ve got physical problems, and all these things happen. You’ve just got to feel lucky that you’re alive.  

I miss a lot of people. Great people like Mike Nichols. I will find myself thinking of a funny line and thinking, you must tell Mike that. Or Jonathan Miller. So many of my heroes have gone, like Robin Williams. I still kind of occasionally speak to Billy Connolly, but I really miss him. You’ve got to find other people, you know, because there are still other funny people you can have dinner with or play guitar with. I got lucky, because I had to, I survived pancreatic cancer. So I feel that since 2019 I’ve had a reprieve. So I don’t know or care what people say about me, I’m lucky every single day. 

If I could live one more time in my life again it would be when my wife, Tanya, asked me to dance. I think I’d like to be right in that moment again. She asked me to dance, and I said to her, “I’m never going to leave you.” That was 48 years ago. I can’t explain that, I just knew. I just knew, never let this one go, and we must dance on. 

Eric Idle’s show Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! tours the UK in September.

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