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What’s your enduring image of Eric Idle? Is it him cheerily singing Always Look on the Bright Side of Life from a crucifix? Nudge-nudge, wink-winking Terry Jones down the pub? Or struggling with his habit alongside Robbie Coltrane in Nuns on the Run?
Now 82, Idle is one of the most beloved comedians Britain has produced, an alumni of Cambridge Footlights, Monty Python and the Rutles, who became perhaps the most Americanised of the troupe after moving there permanently in the 1970s.
Post-Python he was in films including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Splitting Heirs (1993), Casper (1995), The Wind in the Willows (1996), An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (1997), Ella Enchanted (2004) and Shrek the Third (2007).
In 2005, Spamalot, his musical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, debuted on Broadway to enormous critical and commercial success, adding Tonys and Grammys to Idle’s already busy mantelpiece.
A vocal critic of the current US administration on X, Idle is returning to the UK for a tour in September – his first for 52 years. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live! is a nostalgic one-man musical including “comedy, music, philosophy and one fart joke”.
Idle was born in South Shields in 1943, and raised largely by his grandmother, after his mother fell into a depression following the death of her husband, who was killed in a road traffic accident while hitchhiking home after the second world war in 1945. Idle went to a tough boarding school in Wolverhampton aged seven, where he was unhappy but became head boy and got into Cambridge.
As 1965 Footlights President, he was the first to allow women into the club, and became the Pythons’ musical specialist and also its only solo writer – John Cleese and Graham Chapman preferring to pair up, alongside Jones and Michael Palin.
Their comedy series Flying Circus ran for five years until 1974, while the films (Holy Grail, Life of Brian and Meaning of Life) extended the run until 1983. Idle’s affectionate Beatles parody, the Rutles, was a huge success in the US, where Idle was also a frequent host of Saturday Night Live.
Other projects included voice work on the likes of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, a staged reading of his play What About Dick?, the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, US tours, assorted Gilbert and Sullivan productions, and season eight of The Masked Singer (as Hedgehog).
Idle was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019 and has since made a full recovery. He has an asteroid named in his honour – and has fronted shows alongside the scientist Brian Cox – and objects to the term “atheist” as it suggests there may be a God not to believe in.
In 2022, he spoke to the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone about his relationship with the surviving Pythons, as well as the deaths of his great friends George Harrison and Robin Williams and his concerns about the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election.
“We’ve gone back to the time of the dictators,” he said. “You need to have presidential candidates subject to psychological testing. ‘You’re an insane narcissist; you have no business being in charge of a teapot.’ They are undiagnosed monsters, that’s the problem.”
Send us your questions for Idle by 20 June and we’ll publish his answers – alongside responses by some famous friends and colleagues – on 11 July.
