Eric Idle

Eric Idle0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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On our Desert Island this week is a writer and silographer who is also programme chief of Rutland Weekend Television. It's Eric Idle. Eric, have you ever daydreamed about being alone on a Desert Island?

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Well yes, a lot, especially in the summer in France. Have you ever experienced loneliness?

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Not loneliness. Being solitary, yes. Where was that? Well, I suppose i in

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In France, I mean you get to live very much on your own in the country, as I do. You go to Wright in France. I go to Wright in France, yes. I'm very primitive. Far away from anywhere? A long, long way away from anywhere. Even your friends can't find you. You have to send them maps.

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What's the first record you've chosen of the eight you're going to take with you into isolation? I've chosen the Haydn concerto and C for cello.

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conducted by Benjamin Britton.

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A friend of mine introduced this to me.

Eric Idle1:22

Yeah.

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many years ago, and I've always loved it, and it's very Sunday morning music. I feel we should always have good Sunday morning music.

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Why Sunday morning music in particular? Something to play when you have a glass of sherry.

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The closing passage of Haydn's Cello Concerto in C, Rostopovich, a soloist, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britton. How much does music mean in your life?

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Oh a lot. Um

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I'm always playing music. Have you ever studied it? No, never. Do you play an instrument? I

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I've plucked away at a guitar for many years. Ever I played it professionally. Without ever being paid for it.

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Do you play music while you're working?

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No, I I must have silence while I'm working, but uh I I like it round the rest of the day. What's your second record? The second record is uh Randy Newman, um whom I'm very fond of.

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It's a wonderfully sentimental song called Marie.

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Love you the first time.

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I saw you.

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And I always will love

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I love you the first time.

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I saw you.

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Randy Newman

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What part of the country are you from?

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Well, I was born in South Shields and I've sort of drifted southwards ever since, via Wallasey and Wolverhampton and exotic places like that. You went to Cambridge. What did you read? I read English. With a view to what?

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I suppose I used to fill in forms and write down journalists, because everybody would pest you, and I could never think of what to be, and that seemed to satisfy them.

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Apart from your studies, what did you do?

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Oh, I spend most of my time in Cambridge writing and performing comedy. Um in a

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Lovely club called the Footlights Club.

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Yes, um, a a celebrated club called Footlights Club. Were you co-opted or did you gravitate naturally? I was sort of co-opted. Uh but it it the Footlights Club had its own club room and a bar and

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One spent most of one's time uh having lunch there and writing sketches and with with

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people performing in smoking concerts and doing cabaret indeed for the most of the three years I was there. Were they vintageers? Who were your mates in in the Footlights? Oh well, when I first uh joined the Footlights Club there was John Cleese.

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Um, Bill R. D. Timbrook Taylor, that sort of people were all

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Graham Garden also.

Eric Idle4:59

Pretty good, right?

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Did your productions go on to or outside the university?

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Uh well the the review of m when I was there the first year, the review went to the West End and eventually went to Broadway. And in fact that's how I got to do my first

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public performance. The the main show couldn't go to Edinburgh Festival because they were on the West End, so I was with the replacement cast that took all their material to Edinburgh.

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What did you do when you came down?

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Um well, I did cabaret at the Blue Angel for a disastrous fortnight.

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and then went into Oh, What a Lovely War in Leicester Rep, which was

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Very cold winter, I remember. So you had decided that you were going to keep on just as if you'd never left the footlights? That sort of thing, yes. And I've managed to keep it going. Right, record number three. Record number three is Joni Mitchell.

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And uh it's a song called Carrie. Why do you choose it? Uh well I have a song called Carrie. Well that's a very good reason.

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And is in from Africa.

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Last night I couldn't sleep Oh you know it sure is hard to leave you Carrie But it's really not my home

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My fingernails are filthy, I've got beach tar on my feet And I miss my clean white linen And my fancy French glow Oh carry get out you can

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All right, you had left Cambridge and started your career. Did you get your piece of paper when you left? I took my piece of paper with me, although I never actually went and kissed the Chancellor's fingers. You did? No, I took it in proxy'cause unfortunately we were doing a matinee in Oxford at the time.

Eric Idle6:37

You don't

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What happened after Leicester?

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Uh well, I sort of started to write and scribble, especially in the dressing room during performance of One for the Pot they kept me on for, a Christmas production. And I started to write sketches for a radio show called I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and they they bought them and uh I became a writer after that, really.

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You did a lot of work for David Frost. Yes, it wasn't long before the Great Frost Empire came and seized a hold of anybody writing at all for television in the Frost Report and subsequent Frost programmes. How did you get on with the Great Man?

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As well as anyone could, really. Uh he was very good at bringing people in. Did he give you encouragement? Well, he gave us money.

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Which is probably the most encouraging thing if you are a writer.

Eric Idle7:28

That's probably the most encouraging.

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Yeah.

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What was the first writing you did under your own steam, as it were, away from the frost umbrella?

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Well, we we

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I wrote for Ronnie Corbett for a little while and then I I did a children's show called Do Not Adjust Your Set with Michael Palin and Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam eventually joined us for the then programme company Rediffusion which went out of business shortly after we did this show.

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But we were kept on and inherited by Thames and we did another series of Do Not Adjust Your Set.

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And then what?

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Well that led into Python. We've got to your fourth record, what's that?

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Mozart, Symphony Number Twenty Nine. I love Mozart and I

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Almost any piece of moat site is suitable for a desert island.

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The end of Mozart Symphony number twenty nine, and it was conducted by Carrion. Now, Monty Python's Flying Circus, something completely different. How did it evolve?

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Well, we were working for Thames and uh they came to us and and offered us a a proper grown-up series, forty-five minutes every week, but

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Then they came back a week later and said, Well, yes, they'd still like this show that they'd asked us to do, but uh Huey Green was going to do another.

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Sirius, so he'll be he'd be using the studio for a year, so could we come back in a year?

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And in the meanwhile Graham Chaplin and John Cleese came over and said, We have this offer from the BBC. Why don't we all get together and do a silly show? Mhm. And the silly show with that wonderfully silly title How did you get that title? Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Eric Idle9:58

Oh

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A lot of soul searching. Each script in the early days had a different title on. The first six shows had different titles, such as Bun, Wackit, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot, Owl, Stretching Time, A Horse, a Spoon, and a Basin. Each show would and the BBC would come back rather crossly and say, You can't call a show a horse, a spoon, and a basin. They wouldn't put it in the Radio Times. A very descriptive title. I thought it said a lot about the show, actually, but ultimately they kept calling it The Circus, so we just doctored up their contract title, The Circus, and made it a bit more interesting. How many did you do for a start?

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We did eventually forty-four. Yes. But we did them in a series of thirteens. Thirteen, which which was a lot. How many of you were involved?

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There's five writers and Terry Gilliam, who's an American and doesn't really get to count'cause he does the animation and he

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How did you set about writing them? Did you just write a lot of material and sort them out into programmes, or did you write it programme by programme? No, we we'd we'd go away and produce an enormous mass of material and then all get together and do pace and paper jobs and Was there a lot of argument? Who was the great arbitrator about what went in and what was out?

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It's a very good balance. I mean, almost everybody likes something that the other person has done, and there's always one person who doesn't like something that somebody else has done. So it's done very

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Committee where you get a vote.

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There was hardly any acrimony.

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Not no, hardly any academy, no physical violence at all. That's good.

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With everyone changing makeup so quickly and such a wild, fast-paced show, it was difficult for any of the performers to establish themselves really as personalities. They were just Monty Python performers. Didn't you feel that? Well, I think this is one of the the things we were going for basically, to sort of get away from the awful showbiz thing where you have to have your name up and your picture up at the opening of a show so people know who you are. I mean the object was to keep people slightly puzzled.

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I think you succeeded. I think we did, yes. Even now I don't know the names of some of the rest of them.

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How long did it take you to do that first thirteen?

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Oh, I suppose we started in the summer of nineteen sixty nine and I think we probably finished about the spring of nineteen seventy. Now it has become, of course, a kind of worldwide cult. Had you any idea that it was going to develop to that extent? Not at all. We didn't really have much idea what we were doing either. I mean

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I still remember feeling ambiguously about doing the first early shows. It was just that they were somehow quite different from something else we'd done. Quite different. It's very big in in the United States, isn't it? Yes, it's very popular. They still think we do it, in fact. They've they're shown nineteen sixty nine shows and they think that we've just made them.

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This is the BBC deceiving slide there.

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Any idea how many countries it's being shown in?

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I've no idea. It really boils down to the fact that only France doesn't show it on television. Japan loves it. Japan it's was number one in Japan just recently. Do they dub it into Japanese or It's dubbed into Japanese and then they have a discussion group of four people sit around afterwards in grey suits and discuss it seriously. Dead seriously.

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Well, maybe that's the funny bit, I don't know.

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What was the motivation? Absolutely. And of course you turned it into a stage production which was played very successfully in London at Drury Lane.

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And in New York, it must have been very hard work to do all that live.

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Yes, but it's very exciting. I mean, the the nice thing about the show is on stage is that we only do the oldest material and everybody knows it. So literally they s they talk along with you from the audience. You can get a prompt from the audience. It's about the only show you can. Yes, that's handy.

Eric Idle13:36

Yeah.

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And you've made two feature films.

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Yeah.

Eric Idle13:40

Yes.

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The first one was called A Now for Something Completely Different, and the second was called Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And there's one in the pipeline. There's one at the moment we're writing, yes, which won't be out for a long while yet. And you don't want to talk about that yet. Or bad luck. Yeah.

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Is it ever coming back on television? No, I don't think we'll ever get together and and do a new series of television because

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We've sort of done it really. And you've all wandered off to do other things. We wander off and we wander back together again when we want to do specific projects. Mm-hmm.

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Record number five. This is Rod Stewart, which is probably the only way you can really follow Mozart.

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And it's a song called I Don't Want to Talk About It.

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I can tell by your eyes that you probably been crying forever.

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And the stars in the sky don't mean nothing to you they

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Rod Stewart.

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You've now branched into a different form of madness. You've invented Rutland Weekend Television.

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Is this pure fun or are you crusading in any way about television in general? No, no, no, it's pure fun. I mean, it's it's a a useful media to criticize television, but um it is pure fun. And you write all this yourself? Yes, except for the songs which Neil Innis writes.

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How do they feel about it in Rutland? They don't like me in Rutland.

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Um I'm sad to say and uh they won't take my book in book shops and I'm banned in Rutland. Really? Yes, I'm in.

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I think they they think I don't take them seriously.

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Now you've carried collaboration through

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Not only a lot of your television work, but also your published work. You have, according to my list, four published works, but you only claim one-fifth of Monty Python's big red book, one fifth of the brand new Monty Python book, but nearly all of Hello Sailor, is that right? Nearly all of Hello Sailor, yes.

Eric Idle15:44

Yeah.

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And your latest one, the Rutland Dirty Weekend book. Yes. That's all yours. No, it's ninety seven percent mine. There was a guest page by Michael Palin in it.

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Mm-hmm.

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It's the first time we've people have had guest pages in their books. I think it's a

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habit that Graham Green and people should pick up. You must have a a lot of collaboration and and and help with things like typography because it it's a typographer's joy.

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Absolutely. Half of the work is putting it into book form and making sure it's if you're doing a parody that the parody looks right and is on the right paper. Exactly. You've got an examination paper which is virtually a real examination paper and for the joke to work it has to be physically right.

Eric Idle16:17

Yeah.

Eric Idle16:21

That's true you can't.

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Record number, where have we got to? Number six.

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This is

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Raikuda and uh it's an old stones number called It's All Over Now in a very Caribbean way.

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Baby used to stay up.

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Oh man, don't

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Made me cry, virtue did me roam.

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She had my nose. Oh, let's get going.

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Rai Kuda

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Apart from work, Eric, what are your interests? Do you collect anything, make anything, indulge in healthy sports, anything of that sort? The healthiest sport I indulge in is chess and dummies.

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I've decided I used to play football and I found that I was just running around kicking waiters in Hyde Park and I ought to give it up really. How about this rugged desert island life? Could you cope with?

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Uh well, I've been trained slightly by France, so I could cope with the plumbing.

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But apart from that, it's a very important part of any island.

Eric Idle17:39

It's a very important point.

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Could you get some food? Could you grow food? Could you hunt? Oh, I think fish. Um well, I suppose writing's a bit like fishing. One could combine the two.

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Just hanging around waiting for something to happen.

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Would you try to escape? No, no. I'm far too cowardly for that.

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I should sit there and try and hide when ships went past.

Eric Idle17:58

So

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Record number seven.

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Record number seven is uh George Harrison.

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Uh from a new album and this is called Dear One. Yes. Any particular reason for choosing this?

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Uh yes, well George has a been a very good friend of mine and uh was around when this album was was made and he's

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It was very

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helpful to me.

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during a difficult time in my life and in fact my book is dedicated to him so

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I'd like to choose one of his songs.

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Shore me.

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See

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George Harrison, dear one

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Monty Python being now a a worldwide project, it enables you to work quite a bit overseas, doesn't it? I mean, you you've worked in the States. It has opened up a North America for us, which is very nice. And you were in Australia quite recently? Yes, I like Australia. What were you doing there?

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Well, they asked me to go and do a commercial for a a biscuit product called Nudge and I couldn't really turn it down, the idea of going all that way just to sell a biscuit called Nudge.

Eric Idle19:22

Wait, just to smell the risk of calling.

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Oh, it's well worth it. It certainly is worth it. I hope they ask you back to do some more.

Eric Idle19:26

It certainly is worth it.

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They have

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Uh

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Let's have your last record.

Eric Idle19:32

There we go.

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The last record is Algar, something nice in English.

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This is the only English music and uh it makes a very good close to a desert island. Something to run the credits over really.

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Nimrod from Elgars and Egma Variations, conducted by Colin Davis. If you could take just one disc of your eight, which would it be?

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I think I'd take the Haydn, just because I'd like Sherry.

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And Sunday mornings. And Sunday mornings. And one luxury to take with you to the island? Oh, well, it's an essential really, it would have to be a guitar. Mm, nice acoustic guitar. And plenty of spare strings.

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And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

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Um I think I just like a huge

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Compendium of world philosophy to really get my teeth into. One to assemble yourself, or one that you know about?

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I don't know one, but if you could get me the largest book with everybody's thoughts in that you could find, I'll happily settle for that for a few years. Thank you, Eric Idle, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

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Goodbye, everyone.

Eric Idle21:49

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.