How good is Eric Idle – the man who exhorted the world to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – at following his own advice? “I think I’m pretty good, to be honest,” reflects the 82-year-old Monty Python veteran, when Weekend catches up with him at his London hotel. “I always say I’m an optimist in the morning and a pessimist at night. At boarding school, you learn that every day you have to start again. And I think that’s true of life.”
Written in barely more than an hour for the closing scene of Monty Python’s 1979 film The Life of Brian, Always Look on the Bright Side… has had a storied afterlife: during the Falklands War, the crew of the sinking HMS Sheffield sang it as they waited to be rescued, and 30 years later it took pride of place in the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics. But the thing that brings its writer the most joy is the fact that, for the past 20 years, it’s been the most played song at British funerals. “I find it very moving that people choose to do that,” admits Idle. “Because you need a laugh at funerals. Laughter and tears are very close together.”
It begs the question of whether he’d like it played at his own funeral? “Well, I know they’re going to bloody sing it at my funeral, whether I want them to or not,” he says. “But I don’t mind. The good thing about funerals is you won’t be there.”
Six years ago, Idle channelled the song’s stoic spirit (“life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true”) by managing to see the funny side of, of all things, a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. “Because I’m always looking for the most ridiculous thing to do next, I spent about 15 years writing a musical called Death: The Musical,” he explains. “And in the story, the man who’s writing the musical finds out that he himself is dying. So I asked my doctor, ‘what’s the quickest way to kill off a character?’ And he said ‘pancreatic cancer, every time – you may only have three years, you may only have three months’.
“So then, about 12 years later, I’m in the room with the same doctor, and we’re looking at a screen, and I say, ‘what’s that?’ And he says, ‘it’s pancreatic cancer’. And I laughed. Because it’s the person writing the book about the person writing the book about death. But it was good news: my doctor, who’s very clever, had diagnosed it from a blood test, which meant the cancer hadn’t broken up and gone all over my body. So 10 days later, I went into the surgeon, and had it whipped out. I feel like I’ve had a great reprieve,” he smiles. “I feel like every day now is a gift.”
This gift of life is one reason – there’s another, which we’ll come to – why Idle is heading out on his first UK tour since the Pythons hit the road in 1973. Called, naturally, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! the show – which he’s recently toured in Australia and New Zealand – is billed as an evening of ‘comedy, music, philosophy and one fart joke’.
“It’s not a greatest hits tour,” he stresses. “It’s more philosophical than that. I try to do things some of the audience might not have seen before – like film clips from [his mid-70s BBC sketch show] Rutland Weekend Television, as opposed to the same boring old things you’ve seen too many times before. I play the guitar, and sing a few of my songs – some filthy, some philosophical – and I talk about real life as well. It’s a mix of everything, really. I enjoy performing,” he adds. “It’s a nice job, making people laugh. And they seem quite grateful for it.”
Having lived in America for 30 years – and in London for 30 years before that – he’s looking forward to taking the show to cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. “When you get to my age, you don’t know if you’ll be back for another tour,” he says. “So I suspect it will be quite emotional – especially going back to the north, where I grew up.”
Born into a lower middle-class family South Shields, Tyne and Wear, in 1943, Idle’s childhood was blighted by tragedy. He was just two when his father was killed returning home from the war: having survived four perilous years as a rear gunner in a Wellington bomber, he was crushed to death by a lorry load of steel just outside Darlington.
While his mother ‘disappeared into depression’, young Eric was sent to live with his grandmother, and later to a ‘grim, terrifying’ RAF boarding school. Is this, perhaps, where the gallows humour of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life was forged?
“Yes – comedy for me was a lifesaver,” he nods. “It wasn’t a defence mechanism, it was an attack mechanism. I was 16 or 17 when I went to see [legendary 60s satire revue] Beyond the Fringe, and it just changed me. Those people – Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett – changed the way we looked at the world we were living in. I thought, ‘oh my god, you can laugh at this stuff’.”
He was bright enough to get to earn a council scholarship to Cambridge, where he joined the Footlights (as President, he changed the rules to allow women to join), and met future Python cohorts John Cleese and Graham Chapman.
Monty Python’s extraordinary popularity propelled him into a rarefied world of A-list celebrities. He counted Robin Williams and George Harrison among his closest friends, the latter famously re-mortgaging his house to pay for the Pythons to make The Life of Brian after EMI pulled out, branding the film ‘obscene and sacrilegious’.”
Musicians seemed especially drawn to him: not many people can claimed to have jammed with members of The Beatles and the Stones, while Elvis was fond of quoting his Python, ‘nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more’ sketch to anyone who’d listen.
“I was lucky, I started playing guitar aged 12, so I could hang out with musicians and play with them,” he says. “Most of my friends are either comedians or musicians. The comics and orchestra pit have always been very close – the comedians think they can play music, and the musicians think they’re funny.”
There’s a theory that he and George Harrison bonded so closely because they were both outsiders in their respective groups… “I think there’s probably something in that,” he says. “He had Lennon and McCartney, and I had Graham Chapman and John Cleese and Michael Palin and Terry Jones – two very powerful writing partnerships, with me kind of in the middle. And two things happen from that: one is that you learn from them how to be better and funnier. And the other is that, when it breaks up, you have lots of individual ideas to pursue.
“So George and I had a lot in common, and he really helped me. He was a great spiritual adviser. He cheered me up by telling me I was going to die. He said, ‘you can have all the money in the world, you can be the most famous person in the world, but you’re still going to have to die’. That was his mantra. He lived by that – and I was there at his deathbed, and he died by that.”
‘So what if someone’s rubbishing you in the papers? I don’t read them’
Three years ago, Idle appeared on the US version of The Masked Singer, singing The Beatles’ Love Me Do, while dressed as a giant hedgehog – a performance for which he sought Paul McCartney’s personal permission. “I wrote to ask him if I could do it, and he said, ‘yes you can, providing you tell me what day and time it’s on, so I can be sure to miss it’. I played him, of course,” he adds, of his role as ‘Dirk McQuickly’ in the Beatles spoof All You Need is Cash. “So we have a slightly odd relationship.”
Talk of odd relationships brings us, inevitably, to the Pythons, whose often strained alliance appears to have been stretched to breaking point in recent years by a row over the handling of the group’s business affairs. On social media, Idle has made no secret of his unhappiness at the decision, attributed to John Cleese, to fire their manager and replace him with Terry Gilliam’s daughter, Holly – a move he says has left their finances in such bad shape, he is unable to retire. [In 2023, he sold his £5.4m mansion in the Hollywood Hills for a smaller place he calls ‘Downsize Abbey’.] Cleese, for his part, wrote on Twitter how he and Idle had ‘always loathed and despised each other, but it’s only recently the truth has begun to emerge’ – which he later qualified was meant to be a joke.
“People say, ‘are you having a spat?’ But I’m not spitting,” says Idle. “If I have to turn any more cheeks, my pants will fall down. I think they’ve messed it all up. But that’s just my opinion – and only the figures back it up,” he laughs. “I would have thought it was impossible to screw it up, but they’ve managed it. But I don’t care. I haven’t seen them in 10 years. [In 2014, a million pound legal bill brought the surviving Pythons out of retirement for a series of sold-out reunion shows at The O2 in London.] So what if someone’s rubbishing you in the papers? I don’t read them. It’s such a very long time ago that we were close, and did our best work.
“And like I say, I’m lucky. I’ve had this reprieve. I’m alive. I have people who love me, and who I love. The biggest joy in my life are my wife and children [he has a son, Carey, from his first marriage to actress Lyn Ashley, and a daughter, Lily, with his wife of 44 years, former model Tania Kosevich]. I’ve got great friends. And I can go out and make people laugh, so I don’t mind that. It’s nice being a comedian.”
Can he really not afford to retire, though? “No,” he insists. “They’ve fucked it up, totally. And so I have to earn a living. And there’s nothing wrong with that – everybody in America has to earn their living, because there’s no social security, no healthcare.”
One aspect of American life Idle has embraced wholeheartedly since moving to LA in 1994 is therapy – something he thinks Brits view as ‘a moral weakness’. “I was 50 when I emigrated, which is quite old to be going to a new country,” he recalls. “And I think I was a bit depressed. So it was really helpful to have someone ask, ‘Why do you think like that? What sort of effect did losing your dad, or being in a boarding school for 12 years, have on you?’ I think it’s helped make me a better parent, and a better husband.”
A new life in the new world also opened up new opportunities – not least Spamalot, the Tony Award-winning musical stage comedy Idle adapted from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which has so far grossed more than $175 million around the world. “It’s 20 years now since we won the Tony,” he says. “I’d never have dreamed that.”
As for the moment when his good luck finally runs out, Idle might not have any control over the song they sing at his funeral, but he has got some idea of what he’d like his last words to be. “A few years ago, I bumped into a guy from the Telegraph, who said, ‘oh, I’m just writing your obituary’,” he recalls “I said, ‘thanks very much – do you want to know my last words?’ He said, ‘yeah, what are they?’ And I said, ‘say no more’.”
It’s a last laugh of which Elvis would surely approve.
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! tours the UK from 10 September
A version of this article was published in Waitrose Weekend on 17 July, 2025
Interesting Media 