Monty Python comedian Eric Idle brings 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live!' to Australia

By Hannah Story for The Stage Show

Nov 4 2024

On Twitter earlier this year, Idle said he was still working for a living: "I don't know why people always assume we're loaded.
Python is a disaster." (Getty Images: Dave J Hogan)

Eric Idle is proud that Always Look on the Bright Side of Life is one of the most popular funeral songs in England.

"I find that very, very moving actually," he tells ABC RN’s The Stage Show. "It's rather nice that people want to be cheered up a bit."

It was a song borne of need: Monty Python — the British comedy collective made up of Idle, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin — had no idea how to end their 1979 comedy, Life of Brian.

By the end of the movie, "very naughty boy" Brian, who has been mistaken for Jesus, is sentenced to death and strung up on the cross. It was Idle who suggested ending the movie with a song and raced home to write it.

"It should be like a cheery-uppy song, ridiculously optimistic … like a Disney song," Idle recalls to ABC RN Breakfast. "Maybe it should even have a whistle."

The song has since taken on a life of its own — and often pops up in unexpected places.

"I was watching a football match, and Liverpool supporters suddenly started to sing it to Manchester United fans when they were beating them. I thought, 'Isn't that lovely to be able to sit there in your home and somebody's singing your song on the terraces?'" Idle says.

It's also the name for the 81-year-old's latest tour, which travels across Australia this month.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! features anecdotes, one fart joke, a new song about not recording his show and uploading it to YouTube, and even a virtual band.

"They're much cheaper than real musicians. I've got them on screen and they're behind me and I play along. I'm hoping to have a virtual symphony orchestra next time I come," he tells ABC TV’s 7.30.

Starting out with Monty Python

At Cambridge University, as part of theatre society the Pembroke Players and the Footlights sketch comedy troupe, Idle found not just comedy but community, including some of his future collaborators like Cleese and Chapman.

"I discovered my true quest," Idle says. "I was auditioned by two of the Goodies [Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie] in my first term, and I was in a sketch which John Cleese had written, and he was at my first-ever performance in public.

"I spent all my time there [at Footlights]. It was very interesting because you learn by doing in comedy — you watch people, and you learn."

After university, Idle joined the cast of Do Not Adjust Your Set, a kids show that found an adult following and also featured future collaborators, Jones, Palin and Gilliam. The show soon led to the creation of Monty Python in 1969 and their sketch series Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Monty Python in 1969. Left to right: Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin. 
(Getty Images: Michael Ochs Archives)

The group found mentors in Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, the men behind 1960s sketch comedy show Not Only…But Also and Beyond the Fringe.

"They were the people who made me want to be a comedian," says Idle.

"They taught me you could make comedy out of anything: the army, the church, royalty — all forms of authority could be mocked."

Monty Python's Flying Circus, which aired on the BBC from late 1969 to 1974, was a mishmash of styles: of songs, slapstick, and satire, often taking aim at those very institutions. Idle puts their enormous creative freedom down to their 10:55pm Sunday timeslot.

"We would write and then we'd read it out to each other and if we made ourselves laugh, it was in the show," he says.

Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle in 2009, at the premiere of the documentary
Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer's Cut). (Reuters: Lucas Jackson )

"We were allowed to do daft things without anybody saying, 'Oh, come on' and interfering.

"[Executives] didn't really care … They thought, who was going to watch anyway?"

Laughing in the face of death

The sketch series soon led to several movies, including 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Little did Idle know he'd still be talking about the Holy Grail 50 years on.

In October, he released The Spamalot Diaries, a collection of journal entries written in the lead-up to the Broadway premiere of his musical Spamalot in 2005.

The musical, based on the Holy Grail and starring Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Charlie's Angels), went on to win three Tonys from 14 nominations, including Best Musical.

Two years ago, when Idle was moving house, he found the diaries and discovered an interesting perspective inside.

"It's about putting a show together, [about] anxieties and people arguing and fighting and some people being fired. It's the making of a show," he says.

"It shows you how something successful, that obviously looks easy, is actually a lot of hard work and conflict."

In an early scene in Spamalot a man collecting the bodies of people who have died from the Black Plague tries to dispose of a man who declares, "I'm not dead!" His protestations, as he tries to prove he's still alive, lead into the toe-tapping musical number He Is Not Dead Yet.

Idle thinks the scene is funny because it's "literally laughing in the face of death".

"And it naturally led into a song," Idle says. "It does start the musical off rather nicely."

Audiences can expect Idle to sing about death — and about his late friends — in Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live!

These tributes include a song he wrote for Robin Williams's memorial, and one for Beatles guitarist George Harrison, who Idle met at a screening of the Holy Grail, and who even financed Life of Brian.

Idle describes Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! as a one-man musical. (Getty Images: Frazer Harrison)

"The sad thing about getting older is you lose all these friends," says Idle.

He recalls something Harrison used to say: "It doesn't matter how famous you are or how much money you have, you're all going to have to die."

Idle continues: "A lot of my songs are actually about death … It is important to remember that we're not here forever. It's a very privileged thing to be alive in these bodies and have these experiences with other people on a strange planet."

Eric Idle: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! is at Llewellyn Hall, Canberra on November 2, before touring to Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide.

First published at ABC News, November 4, 2024