Interview: Eric Idle Talks “The Spamalot Diaries” & All Things Python

Courtesy of Eric Idle.

Eric Idle has had one of the most enviable careers that you can have, as a truly multi-faceted talent. He’s a comedy legend, but also a prolific author, playwright, actor, performer, and songwriters. He’s a founding member of Monty Python, he created hands-down the best Beatles send-up - The Rutles - and even won a Tony Award for turning Monty Python and the Holy Grail into a Broadway musical, Monty Python’s Spamalot. With the latter, you may not realize just how much work goes into writing a musical.

Fortunately, Idle is now giving us a front row seat to the process of how that is done. In his new book, The Spamalot Diaries, Idle guides us through what it takes to mount a new musical, which he did alongside the late, great Mike Nichols. What’s so fascinating about the book is that it’s raw, mainly because it was never meant for public consumption. It was only done as Idle had been in the habit of journaling at that time. So there’s an honesty to the form, whether he’s talking about an idea he can’t seem to get right or exchanging tense words with Nichols during their collaboration.

For anyone that has ever created something with a village, this is the process we all know to be true. To have it in book form allows the audience to be invited into the process in a way they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. And this book only came about when Eric Idle was cleaning out his house during a move and discovered the long-forgotten diary 20 years later. With the blessing of Nichols’ widow, he’s published the book that is a must for any Ifor, theater, or Python fan.

We recently spoke with Idle about the process of publishing the diaries, how blizzards bonded the cast, his relationship with Mike Nichols, how he approaches songwriting, reuniting with his fellow Pythons’ in 2005, and his appearance on the infamous Saturday Night Live episode where the show went to Mardi Gras.

I’m so glad we’re getting to connect. I was actually at one of the last Chicago performances of Spamalot, before it went to Broadway. And you write about it in the book, as it was the Friday night where they had this really bad blizzard.

Did I go onstage? No, I came on stage on that Saturday.

I missed you by one day!

It was the matinee, I think. I was supposed to leave and I couldn’t get out. I was supposed to go back to LA.

So you just decided to play the Historian. 

Yeah, I did. Well, we had an extra costume. So I thought it’d be funny if I came on instead of him and just started to talk. But I forgot that the audience would recognize me and go nuts. So it took me about ten minutes to start the joke! I stood there like a lemming. Anyway, it was fun. Christian [Borle] just told me to fuck off, which was funny. It cheered them all up on a blizzard-y afternoon.

I remember had bad the weather was that weekend. But there was so much warmth in that theater! 

You know what? There were three blizzards that we had in Chicago. And it completely bonded the cast. They loved it. You’re all together. You’re in this thing, in these conditions. You can’t go out and wish you weren’t here. You were here, warm, you did the show. Previewing in Chicago - which was my idea - was the best thing. Chicago is a real place with real audiences. And I found in my touring that they were the most receptive audiences to comedy. If you made them laugh, they really laughed.

Now what drove you to write a diary? Because I know you had done it with the Greedy Bastard Tour right before Spamalot. Was it just to keep all the thoughts fresh for yourself?

I think I was just in the habit of doing it. I had only just come off the Greedy Bastard when we started the first read. Five thousand miles we were on the road. And I had been in the habit of blogging in the morning, when I woke up. And I think I just continued. I think it’s a way of communicating with yourself when you leave home. It’s a nice form, the diary form. It’s a very honest form. Because you can write what you think. It’s not going to be published, so it’s a good way of unloading what’s in your mind or if you’re angry or fed up or whatever it was, you can write about it. I think that’s what makes the diary such an interesting form.

You even say at one point “It’s not like I plan to do anything with it.” 

Right. And also, Mike (Nichols, the director) made it very clear at a dinner party that he hated people that kept diaries about him. And I went “Oooh.” Well good thing I’m not going to publish it. But I didn’t stop. I was in the habit and it was nice. I’m in a hotel room, I’m in New York, I’m away from my loved ones and home and background and comfort. It was just me and trying to solve these questions that arose all the time, and do when you start to mount a musical. They’re endless questions.

Once I had gotten into a working relationship with Mike and Casey (Nicholaw, the choreographer), it was just us against the world. It was fabulous. Things arose. We pretty much agreed about a lot of things. Act two was never obvious. “How do you bring it home?” I thought I got it solved, had done some three drafts before we’d even got to rehearsal. But when you got it on its feet, it wasn’t working. It was clear things weren’t working. So the writers job is to find ways to make it work.

And you seemed to instinctively seemed to know what wasn’t working. You’d write in the book “Oh, that’s gonna get cut.” Such as Castle Anthrax, the witch. And you were right basically every time. 

We didn’t get the score right. We wrote about thirty songs. There’s a lot of stuff that we recorded, even. If it’s a song, we’d demo it, we’d have people sing it. We’d have Tim Curry sing things and Sara Ramirez sing things. But things shifted because I suddenly realized that in the film, Galahad is the romantic lead. And of course in a play, I realized it can’t be Galahad coming down at the end with this lady. Because we hadn’t put Lady of the Lake in. She was a made up character (for the musical). I wanted a diva, and she was written as an African American diva because I wanted a great voice. I suddenly realized “Wait, wait. It has to be Arthur that discovers the lady and the Lady of the Lake.” And then finally right at the end, I had written all that, and then I said “It should be Guinevere!”

And then I went “Duh.” And that’s the reaction the knights have. “Holy shit,” they say. And that was my reaction, too! So a lot of the writing was discovering things that were in the play or in the film that were needed to help you resolve the story. And Mike said that there’s only three things about a musical that matter: the play, the play, the play. And he’s quite right.

Speaking of Mike, there is a rather tense phone call you recount where he says “Nobody has ever been so resistant to his ideas.” As that happens, are you really thinking that this could be it for the relationship and things might fall apart?

He was a great, great friend. We had been on holidays. I knew him fifteen years. But we’d never worked together. We’d exchange ideas, we’d send each other books, he’d send me scripts, Tom Stoppard plays and how he wanted to deal with them. But this was a very important moment early on. I hadn’t met the choreographer, and he’d been working with him. And they came up with something and I thought it wasn’t good. And I thought “Wait, wait, wait. I know what my responsibilities are.” So I just held my ground and he held his ground. “I’m the director,” he said. “And I’m the writer,” I said. And in the theater, that matters. In the films, the director has anything he wants, which is wrong with films. The writer has just as much weight in theater.

So I think it really was important, because we established our relationship. And it was a very honest exchange. It wasn’t like we were hiding how we felt from each other. We just said honestly what we were. “I’m here.” “I’m here.” And having established that, we could go forward. I kept it in the book, because I think it’s important to understand that. It isn’t all smiles and “Let’s have a cup of tea.” There are big arguments that can be roused, but you can resolve them and come back from that and work happily together. It happened in Python. We argued about what’s a funny chair. “That’s not a funny chair. This is a funny chair.” We’d argue about everything. And that’s part of the process.

It was important to not go through and cut all that. I think that’s what made the book. When I read it, all that time later, I thought “That’s what makes this interesting. Some of the moments of conflict.” Life isn’t just filled with happy smiling agreements. And creative life certainly not. I thought it was an important thing for people to understand. Some people have to be fired. It’s not entirely without blood in the water. I was glad I kept that in. I thought it made the book more honest.

And it works for the diary format. Had you been writing the book now about the making of Spamalot, you may not have even included that. 

Exactly. I would’ve probably forgotten all of that. In hindsight, you tend to wipe away all those memories. “We obviously agreed. We all got together. We wrote the show.” I don’t remember all the fights in Python. You don’t tend to remember those moments. That’s why I like the diary form. Because it’s much more honest than recollection and tranquility. I don’t think I’d have pulled that in. I don’t think I necessarily remembered that we had that conflict or that I had been depressed after the reading. Or all sort of things. That moment when he makes that big speech about this and that and what a Broadway show must entail and what’s wrong and what’s wrong with the script. I don’t know how to answer those generalized criticisms because I can only deal with a specific. So I was very depressed. And then the next day, he said “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I was wrong. I was up all night. I was anxious. I didn’t sleep. Please forgive me.” (Laughs). And we just hugged, and it was like “Phew.” So I think those are human moments that show us how we behave.

With Spamalot, you were going back to revisit something that became iconic that you had done 30 years earlier. I know some people may have that tendency to shy away from what they had done in the past, but you obviously embrace it head-on. Was there ever a moment when you perhaps weren’t so eager to embrace the legacy of Python? 

Well I think it was finished a long time. It was 30 years since we made the film, as you say. John Du Prez and I had written a musical that we had done on BBC Radio. We had written The Owl and the Pussycat, which we wanted to do as an animated film. But we actually ended up making songs in it. And we were looking for a subject for a Broadway musical. We were really looking for a subject, and we weren’t finding it. And then finally I was doing this CD-ROM game for Python. And I thought “Well, if they can adapt this as a CD-ROM game…” I suddenly realized “This is great!”

Gilbert and Sullivan, you’re doing a small version of The Grand. It’s the same Wagnerian thing, only they’re all behaving silly, like in a Python way. And that was a great thing to put onstage. There were no horses, and it had three songs already. I didn’t go “Oh, and therefore, we won’t do this.” It wasn’t like Python was doing anything. I mean the last thing we had done was the Meaning of Life in 1983. And this was in the late-90’s when we started it. A lot of time had passed. It wasn’t legendary when we opened it in New York. It became this thing that people loved and kept seeing and seeing and seeing. The musical is best if it’s adapted from something. And if people can adapt Shakespeare - Brush Up on Your Shakespeare, Kiss Me Kate - they can adapt Python.

I wanna ask about something you write about that I absolutely love, which was the Python reunion onstage for Opening Night in 2005. In the book you write about, “The real greatness was being onstage with the Pythons again.” Now despite what the relationship might be like now - which you’ve previously talked about -, can you still put all of that aside and look back fondly on that night now and what it meant to be with those four other guys again? 

Yes, and I think that’s an interesting thing that I wrote and value. I really meant it. It was really moving that they were all there and we were all backstage and all about to go onstage again. It felt very familiar, and still the same bickering. (Laughs). I feel that, and I feel that now. That’s how I remember those guys. What people have become and what they are now is of no real interest. It’s not creative. And I haven’t seen them for ten years. I’ve known these people 61 years. So which person are you talking about? I met Cleese when I was 19. I’m 81. Obviously I’ve changed a bit. We haven’t done anything creative, really, for 40 years. The last thing we did was [the 2014 reunion in London at the O2 arena], which I wrote and directed.

So I don’t like to disappoint people who love the Pythons. But on the same token, if you look at the Beatles, they were always arguing. They were always fighting. Any group of men will fight at some point. That’s what they are. They’re men. (Laughs). I think this is just the time. I don’t get drawn into it. I am lucky to have survived cancer. Pancreatic cancer. And I feel really grateful to have an extra bit of life. I should be dead five years. So I don’t waste any time bickering or talking to the newspapers talking about things. I think that’s a waste of time. We’re not the same people. But that is still the same body of work, and I think I am still as proud of it as one ought to be. It’s really extraordinary and remarkable that it exists, and people like it and care about it.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s not about what the relationship is like now. It’s about this revolutionary thing you all did that impacted comedy. That’s where the real interest should be. 

That doesn’t mean that you are the best of friends. That means that you were very good colleagues at a certain time in your life. Still with a lot of rouse. There was quite a bit of shouting and screaming. “No, that’s not funny.” (Laughs). I mean, really. Hey, it wasn’t as unhealthy as Saturday nights on the Saturday Night Live’s I’d been in. (Laughs). But I think it is in the nature of creation. Manet and Monet fought. But then they’re the best of pals.

This is life. We’re not very perfect at it. We have our own little moments of resentment and bitterness. Then we’re human beings. I do have to look on the bright side. I afraid that’s my job, to be cheery-uppy and cheer people up. So I’m just grateful I can still make people laugh. I did Seth Meyers [show] last night. The night before I talked at the Symphony Space and we made people laugh. I like that. It’s a nice thing to do. It’s a good job to have to make laugh. It’s instantly rewarding. By making people laugh, you can get the reward right there.

And you do such a good job at it. 

Well, touch wood. I’m about to go to New Zealand to find out. I love the process of going back again, writing something new, and trying it out. Then if it doesn’t work, you change it. And that, I think, is the tradition of the Footlights, which I love. Which is the writer/performer. You take something and you mold it to the response of the audience. The audience will tell you whether it’s working or not.

Jumping around a bit. I am a big fan of musical comedy. What is the process like for you? Do you start with the joke or the music? 

For a musical play, it’s the play. You have to start with the play. It’s the play. We have to watch the play. The music - which I learned from working with Casey Nicholaw and Mike - is that the music advances the play. As soon as there’s a song, we stop and sing the song. And that’s the first thing we learn is that it must be continuing the play in some fun. We’re learning about the character, they’re moving over here, it begins a song, things change by the end of a song. And that’s a very important thing, otherwise the songs are just hanging there. So jukebox musicals don’t work as well as musicals that actually advance the plot.

I was a newcomer. Well, I wasn’t entirely a newcomer. I got into it because I was doing The Mikado for Jonathan Miller at the English National Opera. And every night - there’s a song called I’ve Got a Little List - and there’s a tradition in Gilbert and Sullivan that you can change the list. And then, I would write, every night a different list. The whole chorus would look up because I was making them laugh, too. I loved that. That’s how I got into writing the musical comedy format. I love that form. This happens, there’s a bit of romance, a little bit of that. And then there’s comedy. So that was my beginning of writing musicals.

But you had been comedic writing songs for years prior to Spamalot. 

But one-off things. They don’t have to advance a plot, except maybe Always Look on the Bright Side of Life had to end a plot. Then it’s ironic. You’re being crucified [in the film]. Not much of life to look on the bright side of left. So I have been writing songs since Cambridge and I’ve been playing guitar since I was 13. But I’ve been writing comedy songs since the Footlights. And then Do Not Adjust Your Set. Python certainly started to write songs. I think the first one Mike [Palin] and Terry [Jones] wrote was The Lumberjack Song. It’s wonderful! It goes from a barbershop into a lumberjack. You just don’t expect it or see it.

Python wrote a musical. The Meaning of Life is a musical. It’s got 8 songs in it. But they don’t necessarily advance the plot, because there is no plot. Sometimes he comes out of a fridge and then he goes cosmic and then he goes “You can have my liver.” But it’s a sketch show in a way. It doesn’t have a through line.

It’s like a revue. 

Yeah, it’s revue-y. It could’ve [had more of a plot]. I think if we had done another draft, I think you could’ve made it about the same character, going through birth and through the different time periods - even backwards and forwards in time - but at a different age. I think that would’ve been interesting. It would’ve had a through line.

All of your songs are so catchy, though, whether it’s Sit on My Face or Bright Side. And that’s why they work so well I think. 

I seem to have a knack for writing catchy songs. I still write them. I write new little ones for my new show. I wrote one for Robin Williams and I wrote one for George Harrison. There are moments where I think you can step out of making people laugh and remind them of the people we miss. And I like doing that at this age. That’s a risk. I’ll find out if it works. I did it at Sketchfest.

I was there. It was a wonderful show. Nobody had more fun onstage that weekend than you. 

It was very exhausting, though. Because we did all those sketches. It was endlessly exhausting. I couldn’t go on the road with that show. So I had to set it back a bit. We actually did a new Python sketch, and that was really interesting to do. The pilots sketch. I love that. That was for a Python film that never got made. It was called Monty Python’s Fourth Film. And I think it turned into the fish film which turned into The Meaning of Life. It was an early stage in the evolution of The Meaning of Life. It was fun that show. I loved doing that show. It was great.

Final thing. Anytime I talk to someone who was part of this, I have to ask about it. What do you remember about being part of the SNL Mardi Gras special? 

Ha! Well I was one of the only few - me and Randy Newman - were the two who came out with our heads high. Because Lorne [Michaels] had asked me to do the gay ball live. And what happened was - which only we found out in hind sight…. well, the parade never arrived. In the plot, it says “We’ll just cut to the parade.” And Buck [Henry] and Jane [Curtin] will just talk about the parade. Well, there wasn’t any parade. So now we’re desperate, scrambling trying to do the sketches.

And I had written a scene from the Mardi Gras, but everybody had gone that minute. So it was just like people slumped over and dead and sleep. And I’m going “Just a minute ago, it was here! It was all happening!” It was just a parody in advance of what was actually happening. I could hear them in my ear from the huge auditorium laughing. Then I realized I had to slow down a bit because these huge laughs are coming. So it was fabulous to do. It was this four minute piece. And I really enjoyed it, because nothing could go wrong. It was in this closed environment.

For me, I do love watching that show. But it’s a crazy thing to want to do. You’re trying to do a live show from a mass drunk. It was really hard. You had to go on the back of police motorcycles to be funny. It was kind of nice madness to try that. But thanks for asking. I enjoyed that. I was with Tania [his wife] and we were romantically involved very recently. So it was a honeymoon for us, and we were having a nice time.

I once interviewed Lorne about it, and he told me “Eric Idle says it’s the best show I’ve ever done.” 

(Laughs). It was certainly ballsy. It was certainly a brave show to do. Before he did the Rutles with me, of course.

Are you going to the 50th anniversary of SNL next year? 

I may. I’ve got a bit of a clash, so I may not get over here again. I wish them well. I did an Alan Zweibel the other day. He’s one of the early writers. We’ve been great friends ever since. I love the show. I think it’s a university of comedy. Just the people he found. He has an extraordinary eye for who’s funny and who’s great. I shall try, but I may have to be in another country for my other duties on Spamalot.