Eric Idle has not been living up to his surname of late. Spamalot, his Monty Python spin-off musical, has been staged in more than 20 countries, in 2014 he oversaw the triumphant Python reunion gigs at the O2 and this year he embarked on a live tour of North America and Australasia with John Cleese.
It’s been a while, though, since Idle had a show on primetime television in Britain, which might explain why he has crowbarred so much stuff into his new cosmic pantomime for BBC Two on Boxing Day, appropriately entitled The Entire Universe. Professor Brian Cox as the harassed straight man, Noel Fielding as Albert Einstein, Warwick Davis as Schrödinger’s cat, cameos from Stephen Hawking and Tim Peake, Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers about the speed of light and the big bang, Idle as the compere in sparkly purple suit — this is not a restrained return to the small screen.
The first conceit is that this is a serious science programme, presented by Cox, that’s repeatedly derailed by Fielding (who also appears as a pirate called the Higgs Bosun — geddit?) , the 3ft 6in Davis (cue gags about white dwarfs) and bowler-hatted chorus lines jazz-handing about the Universe (“It’s so damn big, it’s so damn vast”). The second, more obscure, conceit is that it’s the second Christmas special from Rutland Weekend Television — Idle’s post-Python sketch series of the Seventies, set in a fictional provincial TV studio — a mere 41 years after the first.
“You get a glimpse of what the Universe is about, the strangeness of it all, and at the same time giggle at Brian being trapped in a musical he didn’t know he was in,” says Idle. At 73, he still rivals Michael Palin as the most affable Python. “It’s nice to have a serious subject to be silly about, isn’t it?” he says of The Entire Universe. He did that with the Pythons for years, of course — in fact, he pinched Galaxy Song from The Meaning of Life for this show (“Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving/ And revolving at 900 miles an hour . . .”).
Although Idle read English at Cambridge, he has been interested in science for years, he says. He met Cox at a reading of Idle’s play What About Dick? in Los Angeles and he has appeared as a guest on The Infinite Monkey Cage, Cox’s Radio 4 show with Robin Ince (who also appears in The Entire Universe). Cox has “been virtually giving me a private education, so I have some vague idea of what quantum mechanics is,” Idle says. “We always have very good discussions about the Universe because, as I know absolutely nothing about it, it’s perfectly OK to have conversations about it.”
Advertisement
Complex scientific theory aside, the tone of The Entire Universe is rather broad and retro. Idle was always more of a light-entertainment man than the other Pythons and he flexes the showtune-writing muscles that he built up doing Spamalot, whose composer, John Du Prez, co-wrote this show. For every clever line about Pluto’s new status as a dwarf planet (“Pluto’s not a planet — it’s been relegated, dammit”), there’s a smutty, end-of-the pier one about Uranus.
So enthusiastically has Idle embraced the Seventies-style primetime vibe that the show also features Jonty Stephens and Ian Ashpitel as Morecambe and Wise (albeit explaining quantum mechanics). There’s even a whiff of Seventies sexism: the only woman in the main cast is Hannah Waddingham, star of Spamalot, whose role mainly consists of slinking around in small, shiny outfits.
“That’s it for Python. Michael doesn’t want to do it any more
That was deliberate, Idle insists, slightly unconvincingly. “The whole idea of Rutland Weekend Television is retro,” he says. “Desperately trying to keep up with things but failing miserably.” He points out that Waddingham also appears as a Bee Gee alongside Fielding and Davis in a song about gravity set to the tune of Tragedy.
You sense that Idle enjoys being numero uno on The Entire Universe, having been one of the less heralded Pythons. He was the only member of the Flying Circus who wrote on his own, so he had to battle against the egos of Cleese and Graham Chapman to get his sketches featured in their TV show each week. Yet he never felt sidelined, he says. “My job was very much editorial, and encouraging, and even ideas. My ideas led to [Life of] Brian and The Meaning of Life.”
His most celebrated role was as the Pythons’ chief songwriter. He is the proud author of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, which was sung by sailors on HMS Sheffield as it was sinking during the Falklands conflict and at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. “Last year, England were beating Germany in Berlin at football, and the German crowd started to sing it in English,” Idle says. “I thought that was f***ing perfect!”
Advertisement
He’s a big Europhile, he says (“I prefer Europe to England”), although he spends the winters in California, returning to the UK in June and September and spending summers in France. Lucky him, although his nomadic existence has meant losing his voting rights: “I’m a foreigner everywhere, it turns out. I can’t even vote in England.”
Had he been able to vote in the referendum, he’d certainly have been a Remainer, he says, unlike the Brexit-supporting Cleese. However, we shouldn’t take this as a sign that they hate each other, as some reports have claimed. “We’ve done 60 shows this year,” Idle says. “They like to put you at each other’s throats, and we just call each other up and go, ‘Do you see what they just said?’ and we laugh.”
The duo’s show — there are no plans to bring it to the UK, alas — traces their parallel life stories and features new sketches alongside curios and offcuts from the old days. “We’ve got some very good red wine and we do two hours on stage,” Idle says. “We’ve had a lot of fun and we’ve had big crowds.”
He and Cleese don’t do any classic Python stuff; Idle insists that the shows at the O2 were the last time we’ll see the dead parrot et al. “That’s it for Python,” he says. “Even when we did [the O2], Michael [Palin] didn’t want to do any more. It was sort of understood that this was going to be our goodnight. And it was damn extraordinary.”
The main reason Monty Python are now an ex-comedy troupe, he says, is that Terry Jones has dementia. Idle first noticed it properly last year, when the team did press conferences in New York for the 40th anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “It was very, very hard for him to finish a sentence,” he says. Does Jones still recognise him? “Oh, absolutely. But when it comes to speaking publicly or finishing a sentence, he couldn’t do it.”
Advertisement
He doesn’t see a lot of Jones or the other Pythons these days, given that he spends most of the year abroad with his wife of 35 years, Tania Kosevich, a former model. They have a grown-up daughter, Lily, and Idle has a son, Carey, from his first marriage to the actress Lyn Ashley.
His sun-kissed dotage contrasts sharply with his Dickensian-sounding childhood in Wolverhampton, where he was sent to an RAF orphanage after his father died in a car crash at the end of the war. “I think that’s one of the essentials of having a good life: an unhappy childhood,” he says. “Nobody had any fathers [at the orphanage], which is really interesting psychologically. That made me comfortable with gangs, and I could fit into the Python gang quite easily.”
Not just the Pythons — Idle seems to mix just as smoothly with scientists such as Cox as well as musicians and movie stars. He tells a great story about a party at his house in St John’s Wood. Among the guests were Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, who were in London filming The Empire Strikes Back.
“The Stones were there and it was an epic party,” he says. Eventually it wound down and everybody went home to bed, except Ford and Fisher, who had to go straight to Elstree to shoot a scene. “They had to come out of the spacecraft, and they’re still high,” Idle says, giggling. “I’m very proud of having ruined a scene in Star Wars.”
The Entire Universe is on Boxing Day on BBC Two at 9.30pm