By Linda Fite
Times Herald-Record
Eric Idle is an honest guy – funny and honest.
Want proof? He called his 2000 tour "Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python." And this year's tour is titled "The Greedy Ba$tard Tour," with a dollar sign instead of the letter S. On Oct. 17, the tour comes to the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie.
By telephone from Toronto, Idle spoke about what he had in store for the Hudson Valley audience.
He described the show as a cozy sort of production, with the set arranged like a living room, with a chair, a rug and a lamp. The framework of the show is casual, something in which he can "plug in things I think are funny."
Idle said that he enjoys touring.
"It's adventure and fun, going into new territory, talking to people." The current tour is traveling cross-country on two big buses, and Idle is keeping a diary as they go, which he then posts at www.pythononline.com.
"I just relax and talk to them," he said.
Idle re-enacts lots of the characters he created over the years, including one of his newest, the intrepid explorer and amateur anthropologist Nigel Spasm. Spasm talks about the Rutland Isles, "a chain of extinct masonic islands at the West Pole … created millions of years ago when Norway rammed into Costa Rica and then went south for the weekend."
Also on stage will be Sir Robin and the Taunter from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and various other Python/Idle characters.
Wondering if Idle was always so witty, we asked if he was the cleverest chap in, say, his sixth form? Idle answered that if he was the cleverest person it was because he was practically the only person in his sixth form, the others having been sent to reform school, or worse.
"Oh, yes, it was a bleak childhood," he said. As a result, going on to Pembroke College at Cambridge was a real eye-opener.
"I found out that it was possible to have a happy life," he said.
The show's program includes a comedy sketch, written by undergraduate John Cleese, which was one of the first performances Idle gave at Cambridge University in the famous Footlights Club. In the sketch, he plays a weather forecaster for the Biblical News.
"You know, 'We're expecting a plague of locusts coming out of the east later this afternoon,' that sort of thing," said Idle.
The audience is encouraged to join in on the singing of naughty and irreverent songs, accompanied by Idle, a pianist, a guitarist and a couple of back-up singers who are part of the tour's nine-person crew.
Idle seemed delighted with the previous night's show in a small Canadian town, where he had the entire theater audience singing along to the Monty Python song "Sit on My Face and Tell Me You Love Me."
"Oh, yes. We put the words up so that every one can sing," Idle said. That audience included a few sweet-faced old ladies who, as Idle put it, looked just like the ones so often featured on the Monty Python's Flying Circus show, making faces of disapproval at the outrageous hijinks of Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam and the late Graham Chapman.
Idle said that his audiences should feel free to dress strangely, "whatever makes them comfortable." And be sure to "bring extra money for the merchandise" like the new, 2004 Rutland Isles calendar, which includes holidays like Elvis's Birthday and many celebratory references to sheep.
You may need more money, too, for Idle's "encore bucket." The encore bucket is placed on the edge of the stage, and Idle points out that it's where audience members can come up and put money in order to pay for an encore.
"No more free encores," said Idle, "which is fitting for the Greedy Ba$tard Tour."
If the postings on a couple of Web sites devoted to Eric Idle are any indication, some women find the Python irresistible. Idle said that he was a bit flustered by that kind of attention, but he did rather enjoy informing his wife of the fact that he had a bunch of excitable female fans. But some of these women have been using the encore box to transmit hot messages and phone numbers.
Caught up in the Python whimsy, one fan in Rutland, Vermont, put a rubber ducky in the encore bucket. And several loving fans at one recent show threw masses of coins down at the bucket from the balcony.
"I told them to stop that," said Idle, "They didn't want a one-eyed encore, did they?"
Before there was Spinal Tap, there were the Rutles, and the mockumentary "The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash," an affectionate parody of the Beatles phenomenon. Idle became great friends with George Harrison, and he tenderly remembers the time when he and Neil Innes (co-creator of the Rutles and a regular Python contributor) were visiting Harrison. Ringo was there, too, and Harrison and Ringo impulsively started singing a Rutles song, "Ouch." The next thing Idle knew, he and Innes were singing along, sort of becoming the two missing Beatles, or Rutles, or whatever. Idle said it was disconcerting and touching at the same time. "It felt so natural," he said.
Idle talked about the newly released movie "Concert for George," a tribute to the late Beatle and Monty Python movie producer George Harrison, at which four of the Pythons performed a couple of songs and showed their bare butts to the audience. A Broadway version of "Holy Grail" is in the works for 2004, to be directed by Mike Nichols.
Nowadays, Idle said, his shows attract many fans younger than the original Monty Python audience.
"We get all ages," he said. "We get a lot of parents bringing their kids to the shows, and they'll say they introduced the kids to Python and that now the kids are fanatics themselves."
Idle's casual style is a reflection of his California living. He said he loves Los Angeles, especially the weather, and thinks it's a great place to raise a child. He has a 13-year-old daughter (as well as a 30-year-old son from a previous marriage), and he said he is enjoying being a parent very much at this stage in his life.
We talked a bit about a just-published, huge coffee table book, titled "The Pythons," which is a sort of picture book with biographies of all six of the Pythons, plus the history of the Monty Python show and its offshoots. Idle said he himself hasn't seen the book yet, but (and remember that it is a very, very big book) that "Michael Palin told me it's impossible to put down, because you can't pick it up."
