I'M A MOCK 'N' ROLL STAR!

As he brings his new live tour to Britain, Eric Idle reminisces about taking the Pythons on the road and introducing comedy to huge stadiums, the lost friend he misses the most... and the jolly ditty that's proved his greatest hit

- By Matt Nixson

ERIC IDLE is in no doubt about his greatest achievement in a life that, by any measure, has been pretty damn consequential. He’s talking of course about the comedy singalong he came up with as the finale for The Life of Brian. “All our characters were coming to crucifixion,” he recalls today. “So I suggested we needed to finish with a song from the crosses. A cheery, upbeat tune, like Disney, a little bit of whistling perhaps... looking on the bright side.”

Having made his pitch, he went straight home, took out his guitar and, in less than two hours, wrote and recorded Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. It turned out to be a very good afternoon’s work, perhaps one of the best ever.

“I took it in the next day, and they said, “That's it, we’re done — we can go to the pub.” They being Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Idle’s friends and collaborators over four ground-breakingly brilliant, and fabulously silly, BBC series, three evergreen films — including the 1979 Biblical black comedy — and numerous other collaborations.

“We had a very bad end to our previous film, The Holy Grail,” explains Idle. “My daughter says it’s the most s*** ending of a film ever. We were arrested by the police, because we couldn’t afford a battle — we didn’t have any extras!”

By comparison, the ending to The Life of Brian was a triumph and Idle’s music hall-style ditty subsequently caught the popular imagination, famously becoming the song of choice for British sendoffs. It’ll be on his tombstone, so to speak, won’t it?

“Nobody has a tombstone any more, let’s be honest,” he chuckles over Zoom from his summer home in France. “On mine, it’ll say, ‘See Google’. But I think it’s the most moving thing that’s happened to me in my life - that people choose the song at the end when it’s very serious; then they have a little smile and it lightens the mood.”

The majority of us don’t need Google to tell us we're in the presence of a legend.