always look on the bright side of life by eric idle

As he says, it’s just how life has worked out. It should be insufferable, but he manages to get away with it. Rarely does a sentence pass without a reference to one. Idle collects celebrity friends like stamps. Photograph: David Newell Smith/The Observer Monty Python in 1969 … (from left) Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones and Eric Idle. My favourite Idle project is the mockumentary The Rutles, a brilliant parody of the Beatles story, featuring Paul Simon, Mick Jagger and George Harrison.

His estimated worth is $70m (£63.3m), but he describes this as “laughable” and insists he still has to work. He made his fortune as the writer and lyricist of the musical Spamalot, based on the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Idle was often at his funniest as the sextet’s song-and-dance man. Perhaps Idle is best known for Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, written by him and sung by his character Mr Cheeky as he hangs from the cross in the Python film Life of Brian. It’s one of the few Python sketches with a punchline, and was apparently Elvis Presley’s favourite. One of Idle’s most memorable sketches is Nudge Nudge, in which he asks a stranger in a pub about his sex life via a series of terrible double entendres.

Upper-class twits, deadly bureaucrats, oleaginous salesmen, pedantic bores, establishment perverts, heroic stoics, Panglossian optimists: Python gave all these British stereotypes a surreal twist. Idle, 79, has lived in Los Angeles for decades, but few understand Britishness like him. I’m British! You try not to show emotions in the face of danger.” And when it’s on yourself it’s even funnier.”ĭid he really respond with laughter or did the tears come first? “No, I didn’t cry till I knew I was going to live. That was the fucking plot! So I had to laugh. “I said: ‘What’s the quickest way to get rid of a character?’ and he said: ‘Pancreatic cancer.’ This is the same doctor who ended up diagnosing me. (It hasn’t been.) The basic plot was simple – a man writing Death: The Musical finds he is dying.

Death: The Musical became his obsession, even though countless people told him it didn’t work and would never get made. About 15 years ago, he started working on a project. His medical team has now told him that thanks to early diagnosis and surgery, he’s likely to be around for the foreseeable. Idle revealed that three years ago he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and that he has come through it. But it was only last week that we discovered what a survivor he is. After all, it’s 53 years since Monty Python formed, and the bunch of absurdist jokers are still regarded as the Beatles of comedy.

Always look on the bright side of life by eric idle