An audience with the great Eric Idle

For almost three decades it’s been my dearest wish to speak to a Python – now that I am, the thought that I might screw it up chills me to the bone.

Idle rebaduringly admits he knows what it is to be starstruck, and understands his own fans who are so afflicted. But “I think with comedy you can usually have a conversation with people quite easily, because you remind them that they’re there, it’s not a waxwork. If they get stuck for words I just put out my hand and say I’m Eric, what’s your name? Sometimes it’s easier if you have a conversation with someone and they don’t even mention Python.”

Idle has spent 50 years mentioning Python, and he notes that there really isn’t much more to be said about it. Scrolling through Netflix recently, he tells me, “I came across a documentary I’d never seen … it was called Before They Were the Pythons. It’s interesting that there are so many of these made, because I would rather watch Python than watch us talk about it. I suppose there’s a fascination for people.”

There sure is, though it’s a little unfair to keep focusing on Python. The sortabiography, which he will soon be hitting Australia to promote, chronicles a career that goes far beyond any one group, as groundbreaking as it might have been.

After Python he created the brilliant microbudget sketch show Rutland Weekend Television, from which spun off the pioneering moptop mockumentary The Rutles. He went on to star in films as diverse as Nuns on the Run, The Wind in the Willows and Shrek the Third, write novels and plays, and create the wildly popular, Tony-winning musical Spamalot – based on a Python movie but conceived and built by Idle and his collaborator John Du Prez.

It’s a prodigious CV to put it mildly, but one of the most striking things conveyed when he writes about his career is that clearly, what matters to him is the people he’s met, far more than the work itself. The greatest stories aren’t of film sets and script meetings, but all-nighters with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, getting drunk with the cast of Star Wars, and riding in the Tour De France lead car with Robin Williams. An extraordinary life, made possible simply by a knack for making people laugh – a noble way to exist if ever there was one.

“I don’t really like the word career,” he says, “it implies you knew where the f— you were going, whereas it’s just a series of random events. Life is the most important – it’s how you live it and love people. The best parts of my life are always having dinner with very funny people and then getting the guitars out and having a singsong.”

The creative process, however, still does excite him: “I could easily drop the public appearing, but I don’t think I’d ever want to stop that finding out what’s in your own brain.”

It’s turned out, over the years, there’s been quite a lot in that brain, from the genius of his sketches, to his books and films, to the cultural juggernaut Bright Side – so iconic that it’s the most-played song at British funerals. But just like Elvis, who was just messing around when he recorded That’s All Right, Eric Idle never set out to be an icon. He sums up Monty Python with a quote from Beatle George Harrison: “If we’d known we were going to be the Beatles, we’d have tried harder.”

I only have 20 minutes to talk to Idle. Twenty precious minutes that are nowhere near enough to ask him all I’d like to, let alone to tell him all I need to: that he changed my life, that he made the world a brighter place for me as a kid, and still does; that discovering him was like discovering that magic exists. All I do tell him is, “thank you for everything”. I hope he knows just how much everything is.

Eric Idle will appear at Seymour Centre, Sydney (November 27, 7.30pm), Llewellyn Hall, Canberra (November 28, 6pm) and Melbourne Athenaeum (November 30, 7.30pm).