If I may share a little of a Father’s pride, my daughter Lily graduated, cum laude, from Whitman College, Walla Walla, and should by now be safely in Sasquatch.   I had the great joy of handing her her diploma and receiving a daughter’s hug of delight.  I had earlier accepted an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities, and in my Commencement Address (it’s on the web if you care) I said my wife was thrilled she was finally married to a Doctor, and I was also thrilled, as I could now prescribe my own medical marijuana.

According to the College President a web site had ranked me Number Three in Commencement Speakers, behind Oprah and Obama.  But neither of them sang Always Look On The Bright Side of Life with a College Band, so an Oregon newspaper put me at Number One.   Sadly on The Huffington Post link you cannot hear the band or the crowd at all, only my voice and guitar.  Pity that as everyone was in splendid whistling form and the band arrangement was wonderful, written and conducted by a student (oh irony) by the name of Jesus.  (Not Brian.)

The day before I did an hour presentation talk with Q and A which went very well and is also on the web if you want.   I showed a clip of Philosophers Football including my goal as Socrates on the old Bayern Munchen Ground (!) and we sang The Philosophers Song and my kids presented a huge Holy Grail to Varsity Nordic, the Whitman College comedy club, for having the worst name for a Comedy Group since Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  There was a huge audience, some Q and A, and then a long signing.

I had a nice email from Doctor Cleese congratulating me on becoming a Doctor, and wondering what all the fuss was from that Doctor Chapman.    Actually I think I must certainly be the last Python to receive a Doctorate??

My son very kindly flew in from Brisbane to be with the lovely Tania and me, and we wine tasted and partied with the best of them.   It has been very sad to see him return to Australia last night, and my daughter head off to her new home in another town.   Proud tears, but sad ones.  The nest is empty.  The kids have gone.   Actually the nest isn’t entirely empty, as the dogs are here, and a bunch of rats seem determined to nest here too.   There are more rats in Hollywood….

Actually there are currently masses of the rodents here in LA since we are all namby pamby liberals and use humane traps, which means we simply release them elsewhere, and of course they multiply elsewhere and then come back.  We found one nest in my wife’s car.  They apparently love Lexus wiring.  Ah that Japanese wiring.   It’s like noodles to them.  Perhaps we can use the rodents for recycling, or their gases to power our vehicles.

I’m ambivalent about rats, having learned to love them when I played the Pied Piper for Faerie Tale Theater, and even had them crawl all over me.   I’ve had worse.   Some of those producers….don’t start me.   Actually they were specially trained Hollywood rats and were flown to Toronto for the filming, and when finished they were donated to the local zoo to feed the snakes.  I know.   Some kind of metaphor for the film business there.  Work with a Python and then eaten by one.

And talking of rats, back in Camelot The Grail on Sunday, (nudge nudge) has been preparing another gas attack. I don’t know what they are preparing to publish but from experience I’m guessing rubbish.  Lest their vile bile and poisonous untruths should sully the public record let me state quite clearly that I don’t recall a time when the Pythons have got along more harmoniously.  Last month we all met up and reminisced happily for a couple of hours about The Meaning of Life.   No, the movie.   This was an hilarious two hour re-union and I joined them at 3 in the morning from California via Skype in my pajamas.  I also had a cameraman filming me, and now it’s all cut together and it looks great and will be released in the Autumn/ Fall.   We also sensibly determined to undertake a review of all our holdings in the face of this never ending lawsuit by a greedy bastard.  The case has been with the judge since January and it has cost us a small fortune to defend ourselves against some large lies.  Happily the plaintiff is bankrupt so if he loses we are going to ask for the death penalty.  (Warning:  This is a Joke.  Jokes should not be read by unaccompanied journalists and in any case are highly toxic and dangerous to handle. They should be used only in the hands of qualified experts.)

So that’s it.  Jolliness and fun, and special thanks to Tasha, (I am her Dogfather), Alix and Katy, who came all the way with us, and made the Marcus Whitman Hotel a happy center of celebration.  Now I must put on my opera shoes on and head for New York.   But first a little visit from Professor Brian Cox and his lovely wife Gia….

Gillian Frew: 17 Funniest Lines from Monty Python Star Eric Idle’s Commencement Speech 5/22/13 8:27 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gillian-frew/17-funniest-lines-from-monty-python-star_b_3315378.html

Say olé to the lay of the lark

You may thrill to the rill

Of the nightingale’s trill

Which awakens your heart after dark,

But the song that you never will hear of

And alas and alack how I wish

That somebody somewhere would sing of

The glorious song of the fish.

Whose heart hasn’t stirred at the call of a bird

Or the purr of a cat that’s well fed?

And if the lone strain of a far distant train

Doesn’t move you, then frankly you’re dead.

But there’s one thing you never will hear of

A song that is long and delish

From the soul of the sole

In the sea or the bowl,

The heart breaking song of the fish.

Oh maybe they hail the young dolphin

Or tell a tall tale of a whale,

But nobody sings of herrings and things

Like whiting, or sea bass or snail.

No one sang of the pang of the penguin

As he sat on the long winter ice,

There’s no news of the mews of the poor kangaroos

As they waits for their mates to be nice.

It’s only the birds

Who get all the words

Those poets go on and on,

For the rest of the animal kingdom

Lyrics and songs there are none.

c) Eric Idle  2013

“Life is like a yacht in the Caribbean….  it’s alright if you’ve got one.”

Also I came across this piece of unused Python material, in my handwriting.  It might have been written for one of the records.

MAN

Just where do ideas come from?

Indeed where did I get the idea to ask you just where do ideas come from?

What is an idea?

Is it an idea to ask you “what is an idea?”

And, if so, where did the idea to ask you what is an idea, come from?

Well, we could have the idea to look up idea in the dictionary, but where did the idea to look up “idea” in the dictionary come from?

Not to mention who had the idea to write a dictionary with the idea of defining the idea of ideas in the first place.

And is it a good idea anyway?

Do I have ideas?    Or do ideas have me?

Do I think or do I merely think I think?

Who am I?

Am I the I who asks who the who is?

Or am I really the who, the object that the subject “I” is asking about?

Indeed in the question, “who am I?” who the who is who?

Am I a member of The Who?

Which came first the egg or the mayonnaise?

How many roads must a man walk down before he knows he’s a man?

Why do fools fall in love?

What does become of the broken hearted?

How deep is the ocean?

Where have all the flowers gone?

How much is that doggie in the window?

Am I nuts?

Should I be locked up?

Would you like a nice nut?

Shall I show you my nuts?

I should leave now.

13 Burn Her

Sometimes even nicely done things can bite the dust. For instance this song, which I always loved and was originally in Act One of Spamalot in Chicago.    It was a song for Sir Bedevere and followed the witch scene from The Holy Grail.  “We have found a witch, may we burn her!”

The problem was that having taken the trouble to reduce the play to consistent characters who run all the way through, the audience were suddenly faced with Hank Azaria and David Hyde Pierce on stage as not Lancelot and not Robin.  In other words it became revue.

Sara Ramirez was fun as the witch, and at the end while she was being burnt, she flew off to safety, since she was a witch! But at this point the play simply lost all semblance of having a real plot and Mike Nichols felt strongly that it should go, and I agreed with him, and when we cut it the story was much easier to follow.   Nice song though!   (I’ve updated it a little.)

 Burn Her!

BEDEVERE

When I was just a young chap in me nappy

Me pappy said “Son life can be quite cruel.

If you do not want to be unhappy

Never marry witches that’s a golden rule.

There is only one way to survive ‘em

They will always play you for a fool

If you find a witch then you must take the silly bitch

And string her up

And turn her into fuel.

Burn her!

Burn her!

Put her on the barbecue and turn her,

Scratch that itch before that bitch can spurn yer

Grill her that won’t thrill her but it certainly will learn her,

If you burn her

Burn her

Burn her till she’s cooked all the way through.

String her up and try her

And then fling her on the pyre

And then light the fire and toodle-oo!”

WITCH

Burn me

Spurn me

I have learned that men are all the same.

One minute they are hot

For everything you’ve got

Then they try and fry you

And they’ll even crucify you

Beat me

Eat me

I don’t care what nasty things you do

It is godforsaken

Turning me into fried bacon

Au revoir, goodbye cia ciao adieu.

BEDEVERE

Burn her

Burn her

She is on the menu for today.

Just like Joan of Arc

We’re gonna light the spark

Fricassee her then let’s see her

Maybe we’ll rotisserie her

Oil her, boil her,

Broil her till she’s done all the way through.

We’ll burn her and we’ll baste her

And perhaps we’ll even taste her

When we’ve turned her into good witch stew!

She may be a good looker

But you still have gotta cook her

For a hooker ain’t no good for you.

c) Eric Idle & John Du Prez.  Rutsongs & Ocean Music.

 I began to write this movie around 1976.   I always loved Gilbert & Sullivan.   Especially The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance.  I thought the latter might make a good movie and I went on location around Penzance scouting St. Michael’s Mount and various beautiful locations, and then I wrote the screenplay for the locations I had found.  As you see I was foolish enough to have the opening scenes printed in Victorian handwriting.   Good luck there with Hollywood!   Jim Beach tried for many years but we were never able to raise the funds.  It was indeed a very eccentric looking script.   With many fine pre-Raphaelite paintings to show the kind of look I wanted. 

We went up to visit Ken Russell at his home in the Lake District and interested him in directing.  I wanted Michael Caine for the Major General and Bette Midler as Ruth.    But we still couldn’t find the funds.

When we had almost given up we had a late surge of interest.   Joseph Papp had a famous production in the Park in New York, with Kevin Klein and Linda Ronstadt.      Ed Pressman picked up my rights and then eventually ditched us for the Papp team, which was a pity as they were forced to film their version on a Studio Film Stage in London,  wherein it lost all it’s original charm and became a huge flop.  

For best effect reading this you might want to play a recording of The Pirates of  Penzance Overture while reading the “silent film” just after the fake opening.

Oh and Dr. Roy Strong was far from flattered to be invited to appear and turned down his big screen chance…. 

I was anxious to open the film on the 100th anniversary of the play’s first performance in New York,  though as you see there was a brief performance in Paignton to  establish copyright before the whole company shipped to America.   They wished to avoid repeating the experience of five Pinafores on Broadway, none of them paying royalties.

The movie proper starts inside a Victorian Theater in London with a huge coal-fired steam driven projector.   But after we establish the Victorian cinema filled with Victorian celebrities, and we see shots of Victorian London,  and the plot is established as a silent movie then the red plush curtain rises and we are into a full reality shot of a Pirate ship under full sail.

And so on….

For the ending of the movie I lifted another song from Pinafore, which I felt was a much better song.

For the big finale I shot the British army marching down the Mall at The Trooping of the Color.  We got magnificent footage for virtually nothing.    Of course I couldn’t shoot any film of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and they both watched me, a long haired hippy, running around on the Victoria monument, totally ignoring them and shooting only the soldiers and horses at their big show.     They both sat on their horses staring at me.  They simply couldn’t understand why I was ignoring them!  I sort of smiled and shrugged.   What could I say?   Thanks for the use of your army?

Seventy is the new black.

All sorts of people wanted to talk to me on the occasion of my Seventieth birthday, as if for all the world I was having a Parade down the Thames or launching a new Product.  Even the silly old Daily Mail wanted to interview me, as if they haven’t done enough damage to old friendships.  Thankfully John Cleese and I have taken a lot of care to repair the harm they did to our relationship and I don’t care to give them an excuse to revive a story they invented in the first place.  Python’s at War!    Really?   I’ll tell you what a war is sonny.   I was born during a war.  A motherfucker of a war.  By March 29^th 1943 Great Britain had struggled through three and a half long years of an impossible war against Hitler.  The nightly aerial bombardment of cities, the terrifying U boats sinking convoys of vital food,  the sense of isolation that we stood alone against a Continent entirely enclosed by Nazism.  We should never have survived, but thanks to the indomitable will of Winston Churchill we fought on alone, until eventually Hitler declared war on the US, a few days after Pearl Harbor.  Only then could we be reasonably hopeful of survival.   Still another two more years of terror and terrible bloodshed would pass before Hitler finally committed suicide in his Berlin Bunker.  Then the nightmare years of the Cold War, Stalinism throughout much of devastated Europe, the Iron Curtain, the Nuclear Nightmare of the arms race, and at home, rationing, shortages and devastated bomb sites everywhere.

And you think your world is bad!

Oh no, the internet is down…..

It’s as though I was born on a completely different planet.

• No food.   Spam for meat and food rationing until we were ten.
• No TV.    I didn’t even see it until the Queen’s coronation in 1952.
• No computers of course.  Not till 1990 did I get mine.
• No internet.
• No Cell phones.  Actually no phones at all.
• No videos or recording devices of any kind.
• No cars.   I didn’t own one until I was 24.
• No India.  Until 1947 partition.
• No Israel.  Until 1948.
• No passenger flights.  (See Luftwaffe)
• No Space flights.   (Except for incoming Rockets fired by Werner Von Braun.)
• No Satellites.
• No Black Holes.
• No immense Universe.  We are still scrambling to understand just how big the damn thing is.
• No Dark Matter.
• No sex.

Well a bit, obviously and not for me obviously because I was far too young, but there was quite a lot of sex during the war, or we wouldn’t be here.  Sexual liberation didn’t begin until the Sixties, which themselves didn’t begin until 1963.   They too were late.  And the Sixties are over rated.   Everyone seemed to be having a much better time than me.  Still they brought us all the fun things like rock ‘n roll, and drugs, and of course The Pill freed young women from the terrors of abortion and unwanted pregnancy, only to face them with the terrors of randy young toads like me, fresh out of 12 years of Boarding school.

It was all a very long time ago and I shan’t bore you, or even disgust you, with my memories.  I’m just a grateful customer of consumer planet Earth.

This isn’t an Award show but I’d like to thank (cue playoff Music) my wife, my son and daughter, my ex-wife, my family, my in-laws, my many friends and my Python colleagues.  In fact everybody except that short, twisted little bastard suing us…(Mercifully the music brings him to a close.)

It’s been a great time and I have enjoyed myself.

It is still an amazingly unlikely privilege to be born on this planet.  I treasure it every day.

Thanks for the memories.

Thanks for the ride.

And thanks to all you Fans, Trolls, Tweeters and Bloggers for all your kindness and good wishes.

Pope Eric of Redditch.

Anyway to keep my three loyal readers happy I thought I’d share a lyric I have been working on.  It’s from the non-existent musical Rack of Ages by Irving Boleyn.   It’s not quite finished but you get the drift..

The Tudors

No one wooed like the Tudors

Or screwed like the Tudors

Or rudely chase girls in the nude like the Tudors

No one as rude as the Tudors

Or as crude as the Tudors

Or came quite so quickly unglued as the Tudors.

No one ever had such a bad attitude

They exude turpitude and ingratitude

Nobody ever behaved quite like that

They’d chop off your head at the drop of a hat

They were proud they were loud, they were vain they were mean

One hysterical pregnancy, one virgin queen.

Their quarrels were frequent

Their morals were low

But nobody ever dared to tell them so

No one dared boo the Tudors

Or dared sue the Tudors

Or, except in the bedroom when bare, screw the Tudors

Heads were hewed by the Tudors

Thumbs were screwed by the Tudors

Who was ever in such a bad mood as the Tudors?

The Borgias were gorgeous but not on a par

And don’t even think of a drink at their bar

They made killer cocktails which went far too far

But compared to the Tudors who do they think they are?

Girls were used by the Tudors

And abused by the Tudors

And accused of adulterous views by the Tudors.

First amused by the Tudors

Then confused by the Tudors

Their intimate body parts bruised by the Tudors

The Caesars were geezers

Who killed just for fun

The Romans read omens

And killed by the ton

But compared to the Tudors they weren’t number one

To conclude with the Tudors

Not one dude since the Tudors

Has ever produced such a brood as the Tudors

No one chewed, as the Tudors,

So much food as the Tudors

Or brewed so much beer and then spewed as the Tudors

No one lewd as the Tudors

Could feud as the Tudors

Or had such a bad attitude as the Tudors.

Wives accrued by the Tudors

Lives rued by the Tudors

No one so psychologically screwed as the Tudors!

What do the following have in common?

The Unforgettable Syd Gottleib. 

A film producer so hated there was advance booking for his funeral.

The Writer’s Cut.

The first novel ever written in colour.

A Victorian Musical.

The First Film Ever Made, a feature film shot in Victorian times, recently discovered behind a wall in an old vault in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

They are all projects I wrote which never saw the light of day.

Like all writers I have trunks full of things which never were.  Some for good reasons.   Some for bad.  I have learned a lot over the years. I have been lied to, stolen from, cheated, misled, robbed, screwed and betrayed, but this is not a tale of revenge, for I have also received some of the greatest support from some of the finest creative people on the planet.  This is a story of self-exploration not recrimination.

I’m interested in the art of art.

How do some things become wildly popular and others sink into the sand never to be seen?

Two tips:

1: Work Harder.

2: There is no such thing as bad work, only unfinished work.

I’m not a very good writer but I’m not a bad re-writer.   This is a most valuable skill and something I learned in my years as a Hollywood screenwriter, where I was paid a fortune to re-write films that were never made.

Another tip:  Persistence pays.

I discovered early, from the Monty Python film writing experience,  that if you put scripts away and then come back to them a few months later it is much easier to see what is wrong, what is not working, what needs cutting, what needs extending and what might be done to improve them.

For instance, the Monty Python film The Holy Grail in its original draft had only a few medieval scenes with King Arthur, but three or four months later it was obvious that this was what the entire film should be, and we dumped about two thirds of the first draft to create the second.

I always adopt this practice in writing.  Even this simple opening chapter has gone through many drafts and revisions.  Ars Est Celare Artem.   The art is in concealing the artistry.  That’s the motto of The Footlights, a Cambridge University comedy club founded in 1883, where I and many others first learned our trade.

Writing and doing.  It’s still what I love to do.  To go to your chair first thing in the morning with a blank piece of paper and a pencil and find what is lurking in the depths of your unconscious.  It’s fascinating.  I always compare it to fishing.   You never know what you’re going to catch but you must go regularly to the river bank and wait.

Once you’ve caught something there’s a secondary skill set in deciding what exactly it should be.  I have discovered that projects frequently morph into something else.  For instance:

The Road to Mars began life as an original screenplay in 1982, for Robin Williams, Dan Aykroyd and David Bowie, about two comedians on the road in the future and their adventures with a robot dresser (a 4.5 Bowie).   Science Friction I called it, and many years later (1999) it ended up as a novel about a robot, Carlton, trying to understand the nature of comedy, and write a thesis about it.  He discovers the great parallel force to Gravity is…..Levity.

The Rutland Isles started out as a mocumentary about a group of islands that didn’t exist: Revoluçion, Poluçion, Contracepçion, Paranoia, and the British West Rutland Isles: Flagg, Scab, Muck, and Dull.  A series parodying TV travel documentaries and documentarians with their breathy voices:

FADE IN: FULL SHOT GLORIOUS ISLANDS — DAY

Coconut palms, white sand beaches, gentle roll of the surf, tropical breezes gently lift the fronds.

WIDEN TO REVEAL MELVIN HALL.

He is a very silly man with glasses and unruly hair.

MELVIN

Ever wonder where comedy came from?   Where rock and roll began or who invented the French?   The answer is right here….

He points to a bit of sand.

….in the legendary Rutland Isles.  In the next hour we shall show you the cradle of shopping, the birthplace of dental hygiene, and the home of the multiple orgasm.  We shall take you to a magic land where barter is still a way of life….

EXT. CLEARING IN THE JUNGLE. — DAY

A tradesman with a stall has a large female customer.  She is holding a camel.

FRED

Norm you got change for a camel?

NORM

How much does she owe you?

FRED

About half a dog.

NORM

I can give you two parakeets and a frog.   Or can you break a goat?

EXT. PIER — DAY

Several man are preening, some women are “shopping.”

MELVIN

…a faraway place where women come to buy husbands, and where the men are down by the sea fishing for compliments…..

MAN1

Hello do you like my ass?

MAN2

My legs are nice aren’t they?

LARGE WOMAN

How much for the pair of them?

FRED

Two donkeys and a rottweiler.

EXT. CAMP FIRE — NIGHT

MELVIN

…and we shall show you the cradle of comedy…

A cradle. Parents watch admiringly. A tiny hand comes out of the cradle and gives them the finger.

And so on.

The Rutland Isles began as a TV series before unexpectedly becoming a Hollywood movie,  And Now This,  about a TV News Crew lost and adrift in a mysterious world.  Several drafts and many years later it ended up in 2003 as a CD of songs from the Rutland islands, which sold nearly twelve copies.

The Owl and the Pussycat  was an attempt by me and John Du Prez to write an animated musical for kids, based on the drawings and poems of Edward Lear.  We even got to pitch it to the legendary Stephen Spielberg though he kept going on about Barbara Streisand.  It finally ended up as an Audio Book for Dove, with about ten songs by me and John.  (Still available.)

Shopping we’re always happy when we’re shopping!

We’re always happy when we shop until we drop

In search of bargains we will never stop,!

When God created the Universe

He pulled out all the stops

First He created all mankind

And then She created shops.

The Life of Brian was of course a Monty Python movie, but then in 2005, for five drafts and nine months, it became a Broadway musical, before an unexpected and unanticipated Python veto brought it to a halt.  It ended up as an Oratorio: Not The Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) that opened in Toronto in 2006 and after many performances including the Sydney Opera House and the Hollywood Bowl, was finally filmed at The Royal Albert Hall in 2009. (On DVD.)

The Remains of the Piano was first a film in the mid-eighties, a Merchant Ivory parody, and then finally became a live Radio Musical play from the Forties called What About Dick? which we filmed last year (2012).

I told you I was persistent.

And persistence pays off.

But not always.  For instance:

The Pirates of Penzance  was a Victorian musical movie, which I began writing in 1978 on a beach in Tunisia.   The original screenplay was printed in Victorian copperplate hand writing with full colour Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Victorian photographs.  It purported to be the first film ever made, only recently discovered in a vault at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  I not only did location scouts to Penzance and St. Michael’s Mount, and found my Pirate ship, I also shot footage of the British Army in their red coats and busbys marching down the Mall, and The Queen’s troop in Victorian hussars uniform firing off field guns in Hyde Park.

The Meaning of Life was first a Monty Python movie, then eight drafts and many lovely songs for a proposed Broadway musical called Spamma Mia!” and then nothing.

Death The Musical began life as Monty’s Requiem, a Requiem Mass for the soul of Monty Python (deceased), then Monty’s Vespers, a sung version of many of the most famous Python sketches turned into lyrics:

Is your wife a goer?

Know what I mean?

Know what I mean?

Know what I mean?

Your wife does she go eh?

Know what I mean?

Nudge nudge wink wink

Say no more.

It then lost the Python element and became In Memoriam, Albert’s Memorial, Closure (Five drafts)  Sadly Missed, Freddie’s Funeral, Just Passing Thru, Say No More! and finally Death and Shakespeare,  which contained a Shakespearian play in Shakespearian verse about the death of Shakespeare.

And now it’s still nothing….

All these musicals had some wonderful songs by John Du Prez and me, all fully demoed, before ending up orphaned in the graveyard of dead songs.  Some of them are really quite good.  But still they languish like lost maidens in a pond.

So persistence helps but a bad idea is still a bad idea.

The difficulty is you can’t always tell whether the idea itself stinks, whether it’s in the right form, or whether it simply hasn’t been done properly.

A writer’s lot is not a happy one.

So this is the story of orphans, a brief history of uncompleted projects, things that were never made, children who refused to grow up and leave the nest.

It’s been bitter sweet.  But that’s another chapter.

A Primer

A for America Home of the Brave

B is for Boehner who looks very grave

C is for Congress who cannot agree

D is for Democrat, also DC

And E’s for Expenses which no one will see…

F is for Fiscal whose cliff is alarming

G is for Gun Control which is disarming

H is for House which is full of hot air

I is Iraq but we no longer care.

J is for Justice of which there’s a lack

K is for Kerry who has just come back

L is for Lobbyist, the systems afloat,

M is for Money which pays for the vote

N is for Nuclear and North Korea

O is Obama who was not born here

P is for President  who’s doing fine

Q is for quote, all the sound bites on line

R is Republican what a discovery

S is Sequester which threatens recovery

T is for Tea Party also for Trump

Whose hair was born here and who’s like Forest Gump

U are the unemployed of whom we don’t speak

V is for voting  (empowers the meek?)

W is Wall Street which cost us a lot

X is the mark, where we vote marks the spot

Y is for Youth who we hope will be heroes

When trying to sought out those billions of

Zeroes.

Eric Idle

We were entering a time of the most fertile expansion of human knowledge.  Indeed the last century has seen the biggest expansion of our knowledge of our cosmos ever.  But back then Black holes were considered dangerous ideas, the Big Bang was a very new theory and there were three main contenders for the ultimate end of the universe: the continued expansion for ever idea, the steady state theory, and the ultimate contraction of the universe, where gravity pulls everything back into the singularity from which we seem to have sprung, where Time’s arrow reverses itself and goes backwards.  Hubble had shown us clearly that the Universe was expanding but for how long might this go on?  We had of course no knowledge of dark matter or dark energy, which we now believe comprises over 80% of the whole rapidly expanding universe….

It was fascinating for me to discover that, with no science or mathematics whatsoever, I could still understand the nature of the debate.  Even join in.  So I collected a series of known knowns and wrote a lyric.  The Galaxy Song would appear in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which we filmed in 1982,  and is still a reasonable sketch of our state of knowledge of the Universe at that time.

We’re thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point/ We go round every two hundred million years…

While contemplating these incredible facts I made my own scientific discovery.  I was simultaneously self-educating myself about Earth science and Biology and the origins of life on the planet and I became interested in mass extinctions, which have occurred fairly regularly in pre-historic times.  In particular the Permian extinction, which caused the loss of almost 98% of life on this planet.  What caused that?  The extinction of the dinosaurs was getting a lot of traction in public interest, although not yet proven as a cometary event.  I knew the earth passed regularly through cometary debris fields, which caused the amazing and spectacular shooting star showers that I observed with such joy in the clear summer skies of Provence, and I wondered if the sun itself might pass through similar galactic debris fields.  Might this not cause mass extinctions on our planet?   I was seeking some kind of regular pattern and was wondering vaguely if there might not be seasons of the sun: spring when life emerged, summer, fall and then winter when extinctions occurred. In order to see if that might be remotely possible I wanted to know how many times the sun had been round the galaxy and nowhere could I find such a figure.  So I made a very simple calculation.  I divided the time of our solar circumnavigation of the Milky Way Galaxy, “We go round every two hundred million years,” by the estimated age of our sun.  In those days 4.5 billion years was the accepted figure.  I was shocked by the result.  In a universe where extremely large numbers (millions of billions) were common the result of my simple maths was staggering.  The number of times the sun has been round the Galaxy is only twenty-two and a half!   That’s it.  That’s all!  I couldn’t believe it.  I checked and rechecked my figures.   4,500,000,000 divided by 200,000,000 is approximately 22.5.

A little later I was reading Timescale by the science writer Nigel Calder and on the 3rd March 1984 with much trepidation I wrote to him:

Dear Nigel Calder ,

I am enjoying Timescale very much and I know I shall continue to enjoy it for many years. On the strength of this unsolicited compliment I wonder if you can help me with a hopeless layman’s question which has been bothering me for years? If the Solar System is four and a half thousand million years old, and the period of our galactic orbit is two hundred million years, then we have only orbited the galaxy twenty two and a half times.  It seems such a ridiculously low number is it right?

He replied almost immediately on the 8^th March 1984

Dear Eric Idle

Right: it’s not many times around the galactic maypole, since the Earth began. The figure for the period of the Sun’s orbit still seems to be about 200 million years, so Mother Earth is indeed a flighty 22 galactic years old. And by my reckoning the universe itself is about 67 galactic years old, scarcely old enough to run a Coal Board. Perhaps I should have made something of this in Timescale.

I ‘m glad you like the book and it was very nice of you to write. To return the compliment: you must know that Python’s ECT has cured many a case of terminal earnestness in people like me. Seeing that science is a game played with crazy ideas, I sometimes wonder how much of the current breakneck rate of discovery is due to your cerebral anarchism….

He then went on to propose we collaborate on a musical about Halley, whose comet was due to return a year later.  He concluded:

I’d love to meet for a chat – about Halley if you like, or real science if you prefer.

I replied on May 13^th 1984

Dear Nigel Calder,

Thank you for your very kind  letter. I felt very proud that you were able to affirm my  tentative cosmological questionings.  I shall now proceed to bigger and better things – calculating the age of Fred Hoyle,  and the number of years it takes to circumnavigate  Patrick Moore.

I must also thank you for your book on Halley, which I very much enjoyed.  Your musical sounds interesting, though I personally have taken time off from delving into the past and am now optimistically researching the future.

(an obscure reference to The Road to Mars.)

I’m  sorry it has taken me  so long to reply.  Like the  comets I wander about a lot, except that  I can rarely  predict where I will turn up – clearly pre-Copernican  journeyings…. I do hope we can meet when I return…

So I was right!   And it’s possible that I was the very first to observe this.

I shared this correspondence recently with Professor Brian Cox and said on the basis of this I thoroughly expected to get my invitation to join the Royal Society.  He replied:

I will ensure that membership forms are dispatched.

So on the strength of that early discovery I think it’s time to update the figures.

We now believe the Sun is 5.7 billion years old. So to calculate the number of times our star has been round the galaxy take the age of the sun: 5,700,000,000 years and divide it by the time it takes to complete one circuit of the Milky Way: 200,000,000.

Result:   28 and a half circuits.

You get it all here folks….