Pythonmania终于有了篇全面的reunion采访文
来自每日电讯报，几乎是个Python职业生涯的recap，对真粉来说料不多，但读着亲切那是必须的，比如亲爱的Palin说silliness
另外，reunion show的编舞设计是传奇的Arlene Phillips，看过meaning of life的every sperm is sacred就知道这回绝对是饕餮盛宴
Monty Python interview: 'We were censored by the BBC'
Ahead of Monty Python's first live shows in 24 years, the five surviving members take Matthew Stadlen behind the scenes of comedy’s ultimate encore
By Matthew Stadlen
7:00AM GMT 09 Dec 2013
The five remaining members of Monty Python and I are sitting in a silver Mercedes. We’re driving away from the press conference where they have just announced their reunion. Opposite me are Eric Idle and the two Terrys, Gilliam and Jones. I’m squashed up next to Michael Palin and John Cleese.
It’s been “an awful long time”, says Gilliam, since they’ve been together in the same vehicle. Do they feel like rock stars on tour? “We don’t know what that would be like,” says Cleese. “I do,” Palin says. “It’s just having people wanting to tear your clothes off, John.” Cleese is having none of it: “This is very tame in comparison…”
Idle suggests the five men could almost pass as “the geriatric version” of The Beatles in A Hard Day’s
Night, “where we’re not being pursued by anybody. We’re very old and we just long to go to bed and have a sleep.” But they’re clearly having a good time. “Better than being home alone,” as Gilliam puts it.
The Pythons’ announcement, that next summer they will perform together on stage for the first time in 24 years, was filmed by 27 camera crews and transmitted live around the world, generating a wave of both excitement and nostalgia. Gilliam’s wife of 40 years, Maggie, was watching the press conference from the departure lounge of an airport in France, in tears. She was moved, jokes Gilliam, by the sight of “five old farts… about to step into the abyss”. Idle’s wife, Tania, tuned in from their home in Los Angeles. “She was enjoying it,” he says. “She thought we looked good.” Gilliam smiles, “You’ve got a better wife than I do, then.”
“How many of us are married to Catholics?” asks Cleese. Only he is, as it turns out. “Your latest one’s a Catholic?” asks Idle. “The last few years I’ve had a lot of Catholic girlfriends,” Cleese replies. “About four in a row.” He married Jennifer Wade, his fourth wife, last year in the West Indies. “By an umpire,” jokes Idle. “I declare this marriage LBW,” Palin joins in. “Leg Before Wife,” says Gilliam.
When I ask whether they ever have political discussions, the laughter stops briefly. “We’re so disillusioned now that we have nothing to disagree about,” says Cleese. Gilliam launches into a monologue about politics giving way to corporate power. “Gilliam, shut up!” says Cleese. “Not much of a discussion,” Palin observes. “It was a rant, Terry,” says Idle. “The discussion follows the rant,” replies Gilliam.
It’s 44 years since the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was shown on BBC One late one evening, changing comedy history for ever. It’s 24 years since the sixth member of the gang, Graham Chapman, died of cancer. Today, the surviving five boast a combined age of 358, yet they still make each other laugh. “The worst thing,” says Gilliam, who is now 73 years old, “is on the bus or Tube when a girl in her twenties offers you her seat. It’s so depressing.” “I thought that was called twerking,” says Idle instantly. “And you thought I was dead!”
In the days before the reunion, as anticipation grew, one national newspaper characterised the group as the “poisonous Pythons”, portraying Cleese and Idle as being at the centre of the acrimony. Before our car journey, when I have some time alone with each of the Pythons, Cleese bats away that paper’s suggestion that the five of them are in a permanent state of war, insisting that he needed no persuasion to sign up for the comeback. “It’s not very time-consuming and we’ve always enjoyed each other’s company,” he says, “which doesn’t mean we don’t argue and disagree about things. We do all the time.”
Cleese left the Flying Circus after the third series ended in 1973; the others carried on for a fourth half series the following year. What made him leave before the end? “I felt that Python had taken my life over and I wanted to be able to do other things,” he says. “I wanted to be part of the group, I didn’t want to be married to them – because that’s what it felt like. I began to lose any kind of control over my life and I was not forceful enough in saying no.”
What’s more, he says, “the Pythons didn’t really hear my objection when I said I was not happy about one or two aspects of the show. It was like, 'Cleese is on some strange trip of his own’ and they never listened. We never really communicated. And I also had the burden of working with Chapman during his alcoholic phase when no one else would work with him. So my writing consisted of sitting with someone who couldn’t remember in the afternoon what we had written in the morning.” Cleese did return for the Monty Python films, however, including Life of Brian in 1979, but they involved far less of a time commitment.
There will be those who say that the reason Cleese and the others are regrouping now can be summarised in one word: money. Certainly Jones did little to dispel that idea when he declared before the press conference, “I hope it makes us a lot of money. I hope to be able to pay off my mortgage.” But when I ask him now, he offers a different explanation: the Pythons enjoy working together. Idle also identifies “fun” as the main motivation behind the reunion. “I couldn’t really believe it. We sort of agreed in August,” he says, though he worried that the others might change their minds. “But no, everybody’s getting more and more into it.”
Idle, Palin and Jones appeared together in public at the start of this year to give evidence in court after Mark Forstater, the producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, sued for a share of profits from the spin-off stage musical Spamalot. Forstater won the case and Idle says the group have also had to pay lawyers $1million over the past year and a half. “We’ve had to deal with all this… Somebody said, 'Oh God let’s do something funny.’”
I can’t help wondering whether, after all these years, they all have the same sense of what makes a good joke. I ask Gilliam, whose post-Python career has included directing blockbuster movies such as 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, what the chemistry’s like today. “I don’t know, because we’ve gone much further apart,” he says. He’s in no doubt that, for the new stage show, “the bulk of it’s got to be old material. Everybody’s comfortable with that.”
But, he adds: “It’s going to be interesting to see how much more we can add to brighten it up; whether everybody’s as anarchic or dangerous as we used to be when we were doing Python. Everybody’s become more comfortable. We need more money to live – and we’re just older. We’re not as a group as outrageous as we used to be – and that’s why I keep trying to push it.”
Brought up in a dirt-track property outside Minneapolis, Gilliam beat a pathway to the Pythons through working briefly with Cleese in New York. As an American, he felt like the outsider – “the monosyllabic Minnesotan farm boy” – and was in awe of the others. “Because of their command of the language and just their general intelligence. But over the years I’ve realised they’re really stupid about the real important things in life – they’d been coddled by Oxbridge for so long.” He laughs.
The other five all went to either Oxford or Cambridge. None the less, Monty Python provided Gilliam with a platform for his sense of humour. “I got here and felt, 'Ah, the Brits get this.’ And we connected very quickly. When we do get together sparks start flying.”
For the new stage show, Gilliam will be reprising his role as animator, creating, I imagine, giant surreal projections. In the original days of Python, the writers were Cleese and Chapman working as one pair, Jones and Palin another and Idle on his own. Idle has come up with a structure for the live show and will be directing it, too: “I spent three weeks writing and we just read it last week. Everybody laughed and laughed and we then attacked it and made it better. That’s what’s great about Python – this is a writer’s group and the acting’s secondary so you try to make it as funny as possible and then you perform it.”
The new show, which will run across 10 nights at the O2 Arena in London next July, will be choreographed by Arlene Phillips and extravagantly staged. Will a world tour follow? “Already there’s [talk of], 'Oh well if it works there, maybe we’ll go to America,’” says Gilliam. “I don’t know. Python is very bad at long-term planning. We’ll see how it goes.”
If there is one word that comes up more than any other, it’s “democratic”. “One person may take the lead in certain things but it’s democratic,” says Gilliam. “Once the momentum is started then everybody picks it apart, pulls it this way and that.” Idle says the group were able to be honest with each other. “People would argue and fight – it was always about what size chair it should be in the sketch – [but] we could say anything we wanted to about anybody else’s work without them going out of the room crying.”
So was there no ego involved? “Not in the writing stage,” says Idle. “Actually I don’t think even in the acting stage – people have always been very generous. In The Meaning of Life Jonesie [who was originally playing Mrs Blackitt – a role later taken by Idle], came up to me and said, 'I think you’d be much funnier in this part.’ There were no ego problems at all.”
“John’s quite a dominant personality,” Palin concedes. “Not only is he taller than anybody else but also he has a quite incisive way of putting a point of view forward. On the other hand, right from the very beginning it was pretty democratic. John did not want to be the leader of the group. Nobody did.”
Jones, though, sees himself as having been “sort of” in charge. “I directed Life of Brian and Meaning of Life and Terry Gilliam and I directed Holy Grail. I think Terry got p----- off with me when we were directing Holy Grail – we did it on alternate days.” The Monty Python television shows, he tells me, were edited by the late director and producer Ian MacNaughton and himself.
Palin says that everyone brought a different perspective to the writing. “John and Graham were quite angry. Eric was very witty and funny and verbal, Terry and I were a little bit more surreal and whimsical,” he says. “There were no rules. You could put in what you wanted to.” An important factor in its success, he says, was the artistic freedom they were allowed by the BBC. “The thing about Python was our determination to control our own material. We weren’t easy to dictate to.”
In the third series, though, Palin says, the BBC started making some “fairly ridiculous censorship decisions”. A battle over one particular sketch saw all six Pythons in a heated argument with the head of comedy. “We fought them for the right to say 'masturbation’,” he says.
Did they say it? “It was cut out. We recorded it. It was the man in the Summarise Proust Competition whose hobbies were strangling animals, golf and masturbating. They just cut the word, so you had: My hobbies are strangling animals, golf… short pause, huge laugh… So what was so funny about golf?”
Palin is the Python who makes Gilliam laugh the most. “Mike’s the funniest. John is the most spectacular. There’s something about Mike, it’s done with such ingenuousness, such innocence. There’s no edge to it, it’s just unbelievably funny. In the real world he’s not like that at all. Once he goes into character, it’s just extraordinary to watch him in action.”
The group have been friends “from way back”, as far as Gilliam’s concerned. “I don’t like ’em but we’re friends,” he says. “No, no, it’s family, it’s more than friends. This is family. With all the things that family means – the good and the bad. There was this combination of six characters and it just was the right chemical balance. The molecule fitted. It worked.”
So what were these five Oxbridge graduates and a Minnesotan attempting to do when they started the Flying Circus all those years ago? According to Jones they were trying to subvert the Establishment. “It was so stuffy in those days, in the Sixties. The class system had a stranglehold on society.” In his view, it’s even worse today. Palin says he feels lucky to have “creatively” grown up in the Sixties when, he says, it was de rigueur to push the boundaries. But, he says, rattling the Establishment wasn’t his goal.
“I think that’s overrated. We were just trying to do something that would be very, very funny and would also have a shape and a form which was different to anything that had been done. Of course, we came very close to Spike Milligan’s Q5” – the influential sketch show that ran on BBC Two from 1969 to 1982 – “So there was surreal television around, but nothing quite like the way Python put all these things together.”
Palin, of course, is now most often seen presenting travel documentaries. But, in the post-Python years he also won a Bafta for his supporting role in Charles Crichton’s 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, which was written by and co-starred Cleese. Doing sketches with “Cleesy” has, he says, probably given him the greatest pleasure of his career. And he’s still reluctant to leave silliness behind.
“I can’t stop being silly really. It’s just inbuilt. I have two grandsons now and we got on wonderfully when they were about three years old. Their capacity to do the odd, the unexpected and the totally daft things reminded me of being with the Pythons. It comes very easily to me and, actually, I worry about being too silly sometimes. I have to be serious – I was president of the Royal Geographical Society for three years.
“Silliness is about a way of dealing with things you perhaps don’t want to do or when life gets rather, not exactly boring, but the way life is organised and the way people behave rather pompously and rather self-righteously and assume that they run this, that or the other – then you need silliness. It’s very, very important.”
Idle thinks there was another influential factor in the creation of Monty Python: radio. “We were the last generation to grow up with a radio,” he says. “There was no television, not until we were 12. So all of that surreal comedy, that’s radio. It’s much more surreal and imaginative than TV, which paints everything for you. It’s always created in your own mind and that was quite an important thing for us.”
Idle grew up in the North East of England. His father, who had served in the RAF, died in a car accident while hitchhiking home at the end of the war. Idle was two. “I learnt about grief and absence and loss early. A lot of my songs actually figure death,” he says and laughs. “And then I was in a very bleak boarding school for about 12 years and life was s--- for many years. I really have had the dark side and then the rest of my life has actually been rather lovely.” It was Idle who wrote Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. He has lived in LA now for 35 years but returned to perform the song at last year’s Olympic closing ceremony.
So, what is the meaning of life? He pauses. “Well, I don’t think the question has any meaning. Why should there be a point? What is the point of chocolate? You’re fortunate in this tiny blink of time to be alive. We’re only here for 45 minutes.”
In fact, the Pythons have now been with us for 44 years and tickets for the first of their new shows sold out in under 44 seconds. Since then, a further four performances at the O2 have sold out, and another five have been announced. The time I spent in their company suggests Monty Python have lost little of their old magic; in July, they’ll have the chance to prove it.
Monty Python Live will be at the O2 Arena, London, in July, 2014. Tickets: montypython.com or 0844 856 0202
另外，reunion show的编舞设计是传奇的Arlene Phillips，看过meaning of life的every sperm is sacred就知道这回绝对是饕餮盛宴
 |
Monty Python interview: 'We were censored by the BBC'
Ahead of Monty Python's first live shows in 24 years, the five surviving members take Matthew Stadlen behind the scenes of comedy’s ultimate encore
By Matthew Stadlen
7:00AM GMT 09 Dec 2013
The five remaining members of Monty Python and I are sitting in a silver Mercedes. We’re driving away from the press conference where they have just announced their reunion. Opposite me are Eric Idle and the two Terrys, Gilliam and Jones. I’m squashed up next to Michael Palin and John Cleese.
It’s been “an awful long time”, says Gilliam, since they’ve been together in the same vehicle. Do they feel like rock stars on tour? “We don’t know what that would be like,” says Cleese. “I do,” Palin says. “It’s just having people wanting to tear your clothes off, John.” Cleese is having none of it: “This is very tame in comparison…”
Idle suggests the five men could almost pass as “the geriatric version” of The Beatles in A Hard Day’s
Night, “where we’re not being pursued by anybody. We’re very old and we just long to go to bed and have a sleep.” But they’re clearly having a good time. “Better than being home alone,” as Gilliam puts it.
The Pythons’ announcement, that next summer they will perform together on stage for the first time in 24 years, was filmed by 27 camera crews and transmitted live around the world, generating a wave of both excitement and nostalgia. Gilliam’s wife of 40 years, Maggie, was watching the press conference from the departure lounge of an airport in France, in tears. She was moved, jokes Gilliam, by the sight of “five old farts… about to step into the abyss”. Idle’s wife, Tania, tuned in from their home in Los Angeles. “She was enjoying it,” he says. “She thought we looked good.” Gilliam smiles, “You’ve got a better wife than I do, then.”
“How many of us are married to Catholics?” asks Cleese. Only he is, as it turns out. “Your latest one’s a Catholic?” asks Idle. “The last few years I’ve had a lot of Catholic girlfriends,” Cleese replies. “About four in a row.” He married Jennifer Wade, his fourth wife, last year in the West Indies. “By an umpire,” jokes Idle. “I declare this marriage LBW,” Palin joins in. “Leg Before Wife,” says Gilliam.
When I ask whether they ever have political discussions, the laughter stops briefly. “We’re so disillusioned now that we have nothing to disagree about,” says Cleese. Gilliam launches into a monologue about politics giving way to corporate power. “Gilliam, shut up!” says Cleese. “Not much of a discussion,” Palin observes. “It was a rant, Terry,” says Idle. “The discussion follows the rant,” replies Gilliam.
It’s 44 years since the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was shown on BBC One late one evening, changing comedy history for ever. It’s 24 years since the sixth member of the gang, Graham Chapman, died of cancer. Today, the surviving five boast a combined age of 358, yet they still make each other laugh. “The worst thing,” says Gilliam, who is now 73 years old, “is on the bus or Tube when a girl in her twenties offers you her seat. It’s so depressing.” “I thought that was called twerking,” says Idle instantly. “And you thought I was dead!”
In the days before the reunion, as anticipation grew, one national newspaper characterised the group as the “poisonous Pythons”, portraying Cleese and Idle as being at the centre of the acrimony. Before our car journey, when I have some time alone with each of the Pythons, Cleese bats away that paper’s suggestion that the five of them are in a permanent state of war, insisting that he needed no persuasion to sign up for the comeback. “It’s not very time-consuming and we’ve always enjoyed each other’s company,” he says, “which doesn’t mean we don’t argue and disagree about things. We do all the time.”
Cleese left the Flying Circus after the third series ended in 1973; the others carried on for a fourth half series the following year. What made him leave before the end? “I felt that Python had taken my life over and I wanted to be able to do other things,” he says. “I wanted to be part of the group, I didn’t want to be married to them – because that’s what it felt like. I began to lose any kind of control over my life and I was not forceful enough in saying no.”
What’s more, he says, “the Pythons didn’t really hear my objection when I said I was not happy about one or two aspects of the show. It was like, 'Cleese is on some strange trip of his own’ and they never listened. We never really communicated. And I also had the burden of working with Chapman during his alcoholic phase when no one else would work with him. So my writing consisted of sitting with someone who couldn’t remember in the afternoon what we had written in the morning.” Cleese did return for the Monty Python films, however, including Life of Brian in 1979, but they involved far less of a time commitment.
There will be those who say that the reason Cleese and the others are regrouping now can be summarised in one word: money. Certainly Jones did little to dispel that idea when he declared before the press conference, “I hope it makes us a lot of money. I hope to be able to pay off my mortgage.” But when I ask him now, he offers a different explanation: the Pythons enjoy working together. Idle also identifies “fun” as the main motivation behind the reunion. “I couldn’t really believe it. We sort of agreed in August,” he says, though he worried that the others might change their minds. “But no, everybody’s getting more and more into it.”
Idle, Palin and Jones appeared together in public at the start of this year to give evidence in court after Mark Forstater, the producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, sued for a share of profits from the spin-off stage musical Spamalot. Forstater won the case and Idle says the group have also had to pay lawyers $1million over the past year and a half. “We’ve had to deal with all this… Somebody said, 'Oh God let’s do something funny.’”
I can’t help wondering whether, after all these years, they all have the same sense of what makes a good joke. I ask Gilliam, whose post-Python career has included directing blockbuster movies such as 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, what the chemistry’s like today. “I don’t know, because we’ve gone much further apart,” he says. He’s in no doubt that, for the new stage show, “the bulk of it’s got to be old material. Everybody’s comfortable with that.”
But, he adds: “It’s going to be interesting to see how much more we can add to brighten it up; whether everybody’s as anarchic or dangerous as we used to be when we were doing Python. Everybody’s become more comfortable. We need more money to live – and we’re just older. We’re not as a group as outrageous as we used to be – and that’s why I keep trying to push it.”
Brought up in a dirt-track property outside Minneapolis, Gilliam beat a pathway to the Pythons through working briefly with Cleese in New York. As an American, he felt like the outsider – “the monosyllabic Minnesotan farm boy” – and was in awe of the others. “Because of their command of the language and just their general intelligence. But over the years I’ve realised they’re really stupid about the real important things in life – they’d been coddled by Oxbridge for so long.” He laughs.
The other five all went to either Oxford or Cambridge. None the less, Monty Python provided Gilliam with a platform for his sense of humour. “I got here and felt, 'Ah, the Brits get this.’ And we connected very quickly. When we do get together sparks start flying.”
For the new stage show, Gilliam will be reprising his role as animator, creating, I imagine, giant surreal projections. In the original days of Python, the writers were Cleese and Chapman working as one pair, Jones and Palin another and Idle on his own. Idle has come up with a structure for the live show and will be directing it, too: “I spent three weeks writing and we just read it last week. Everybody laughed and laughed and we then attacked it and made it better. That’s what’s great about Python – this is a writer’s group and the acting’s secondary so you try to make it as funny as possible and then you perform it.”
The new show, which will run across 10 nights at the O2 Arena in London next July, will be choreographed by Arlene Phillips and extravagantly staged. Will a world tour follow? “Already there’s [talk of], 'Oh well if it works there, maybe we’ll go to America,’” says Gilliam. “I don’t know. Python is very bad at long-term planning. We’ll see how it goes.”
If there is one word that comes up more than any other, it’s “democratic”. “One person may take the lead in certain things but it’s democratic,” says Gilliam. “Once the momentum is started then everybody picks it apart, pulls it this way and that.” Idle says the group were able to be honest with each other. “People would argue and fight – it was always about what size chair it should be in the sketch – [but] we could say anything we wanted to about anybody else’s work without them going out of the room crying.”
So was there no ego involved? “Not in the writing stage,” says Idle. “Actually I don’t think even in the acting stage – people have always been very generous. In The Meaning of Life Jonesie [who was originally playing Mrs Blackitt – a role later taken by Idle], came up to me and said, 'I think you’d be much funnier in this part.’ There were no ego problems at all.”
“John’s quite a dominant personality,” Palin concedes. “Not only is he taller than anybody else but also he has a quite incisive way of putting a point of view forward. On the other hand, right from the very beginning it was pretty democratic. John did not want to be the leader of the group. Nobody did.”
Jones, though, sees himself as having been “sort of” in charge. “I directed Life of Brian and Meaning of Life and Terry Gilliam and I directed Holy Grail. I think Terry got p----- off with me when we were directing Holy Grail – we did it on alternate days.” The Monty Python television shows, he tells me, were edited by the late director and producer Ian MacNaughton and himself.
Palin says that everyone brought a different perspective to the writing. “John and Graham were quite angry. Eric was very witty and funny and verbal, Terry and I were a little bit more surreal and whimsical,” he says. “There were no rules. You could put in what you wanted to.” An important factor in its success, he says, was the artistic freedom they were allowed by the BBC. “The thing about Python was our determination to control our own material. We weren’t easy to dictate to.”
In the third series, though, Palin says, the BBC started making some “fairly ridiculous censorship decisions”. A battle over one particular sketch saw all six Pythons in a heated argument with the head of comedy. “We fought them for the right to say 'masturbation’,” he says.
Did they say it? “It was cut out. We recorded it. It was the man in the Summarise Proust Competition whose hobbies were strangling animals, golf and masturbating. They just cut the word, so you had: My hobbies are strangling animals, golf… short pause, huge laugh… So what was so funny about golf?”
Palin is the Python who makes Gilliam laugh the most. “Mike’s the funniest. John is the most spectacular. There’s something about Mike, it’s done with such ingenuousness, such innocence. There’s no edge to it, it’s just unbelievably funny. In the real world he’s not like that at all. Once he goes into character, it’s just extraordinary to watch him in action.”
The group have been friends “from way back”, as far as Gilliam’s concerned. “I don’t like ’em but we’re friends,” he says. “No, no, it’s family, it’s more than friends. This is family. With all the things that family means – the good and the bad. There was this combination of six characters and it just was the right chemical balance. The molecule fitted. It worked.”
So what were these five Oxbridge graduates and a Minnesotan attempting to do when they started the Flying Circus all those years ago? According to Jones they were trying to subvert the Establishment. “It was so stuffy in those days, in the Sixties. The class system had a stranglehold on society.” In his view, it’s even worse today. Palin says he feels lucky to have “creatively” grown up in the Sixties when, he says, it was de rigueur to push the boundaries. But, he says, rattling the Establishment wasn’t his goal.
“I think that’s overrated. We were just trying to do something that would be very, very funny and would also have a shape and a form which was different to anything that had been done. Of course, we came very close to Spike Milligan’s Q5” – the influential sketch show that ran on BBC Two from 1969 to 1982 – “So there was surreal television around, but nothing quite like the way Python put all these things together.”
Palin, of course, is now most often seen presenting travel documentaries. But, in the post-Python years he also won a Bafta for his supporting role in Charles Crichton’s 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, which was written by and co-starred Cleese. Doing sketches with “Cleesy” has, he says, probably given him the greatest pleasure of his career. And he’s still reluctant to leave silliness behind.
“I can’t stop being silly really. It’s just inbuilt. I have two grandsons now and we got on wonderfully when they were about three years old. Their capacity to do the odd, the unexpected and the totally daft things reminded me of being with the Pythons. It comes very easily to me and, actually, I worry about being too silly sometimes. I have to be serious – I was president of the Royal Geographical Society for three years.
“Silliness is about a way of dealing with things you perhaps don’t want to do or when life gets rather, not exactly boring, but the way life is organised and the way people behave rather pompously and rather self-righteously and assume that they run this, that or the other – then you need silliness. It’s very, very important.”
Idle thinks there was another influential factor in the creation of Monty Python: radio. “We were the last generation to grow up with a radio,” he says. “There was no television, not until we were 12. So all of that surreal comedy, that’s radio. It’s much more surreal and imaginative than TV, which paints everything for you. It’s always created in your own mind and that was quite an important thing for us.”
Idle grew up in the North East of England. His father, who had served in the RAF, died in a car accident while hitchhiking home at the end of the war. Idle was two. “I learnt about grief and absence and loss early. A lot of my songs actually figure death,” he says and laughs. “And then I was in a very bleak boarding school for about 12 years and life was s--- for many years. I really have had the dark side and then the rest of my life has actually been rather lovely.” It was Idle who wrote Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. He has lived in LA now for 35 years but returned to perform the song at last year’s Olympic closing ceremony.
So, what is the meaning of life? He pauses. “Well, I don’t think the question has any meaning. Why should there be a point? What is the point of chocolate? You’re fortunate in this tiny blink of time to be alive. We’re only here for 45 minutes.”
In fact, the Pythons have now been with us for 44 years and tickets for the first of their new shows sold out in under 44 seconds. Since then, a further four performances at the O2 have sold out, and another five have been announced. The time I spent in their company suggests Monty Python have lost little of their old magic; in July, they’ll have the chance to prove it.
Monty Python Live will be at the O2 Arena, London, in July, 2014. Tickets: montypython.com or 0844 856 0202
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