BrisVegas.  

Got in from the Gold Coast Friday and had a night off. I missed being by the sea and wished I’d stayed on a bit longer but time and tide… in this case a severe rip tide, the result of strong winds from a nearby cyclone, had closed all the beaches. So we took the Bruce Highway (yes honestly) to Brisbane, a city that has risen even faster in the eight years since I was last here. BrisVegas the locals call it although it seems to have very little to do with that sad artificial place in the Nevada desert. It’s a real city, with history, and old buildings and a lovely water front. It’s a far cry from the old corrupt Queensland, and is now multi-cultured with a huge Chinatown.
 Saturday night the young crowds seemed to be out doing what young people should:  getting out of their heads and replicating….

The most obvious thing about Australians, apart from their sense of humour, is they seem very fit. Also they all take their weekends off. There’s no question they’re going to skip out on not going to the beach, so they’re relaxed, and happy. It’s not the relentless American pursuit of happiness which seems now to equate only with fame and fortune, neither of which, incidentally, lead to happiness. The world seems to be watching the American election process and going “Really? This is what we are supposed to be admiring? But it’s nuts…” Although John did come out with a nice rant about Australians having a new Prime Minister every few days, but maybe that’s a good idea.
Or maybe no one wants to stay in Canberra that long.

John was tired and a little sick after our Gold Coast opening, and stayed in, while Camilla, his long, elegant daughter had booked herself into some comedy sets (at The Sit Down Comedy Club?) so Simon, our Passepartoutian tour manager, booked us into a very nice Italian restaurant, Tartufo, where we ate and I drank, very nicely. When it came to paying however the Chef Owner Tony Percuoco would not hear of it. He refused to accept our money and asked only that I sign a couple of bottles of wine. Most generous.
And he cleverly alibied himself, saying he was too busy to come to our show.  It’s not that bad Tony….

Saturday morning John was feeling much better and we attacked the opening of the show. We felt we hadn’t grabbed them sufficiently from the off on the first night, and so we cut and pruned and made the whole first act go a lot faster. In the event, this was the right thing to do. Of course the audience was a lot louder, and a lot bigger, 2,900 in a mini amphitheatre set up, and we had the benefit of close up cameras, so even those in the distant rows could see us clearly on the screens, but still we got them from the off, and the new running order is much clearer, and tells the story of our 53 years much more simply. So it was a tight, bright Act One. We do it again tonight, so we get a chance to see what more we can do. I cut The Getty Song, because The Goldies seemed to have no idea what that was about (art) and I replaced it with a short rude number from What About Dick. It worked a lot better. Almost all my songs seem to be filthy and thank heaven for Garfunkle and Oates coming along and performing much ruder songs than mine. Check them out on U Tube if you don’t believe me. Also they are a lot easier on the eye…
 

My son came by our hotel in the afternoon and gave John and I needles before the show, so we both felt good and ready. I had foolishly gone for a walk in search of a bookshop which I never found, and so by the time Carey arrived with healing ointments and well placed acupuncture pins I was Sir Limpalot. Too bad he isn’t coming with us on Tour.

Tomorrow we head for Adelaide, where I understand the Comedy Festival is in full swing. I heard The Umbilical Brothers were in town and we have always loved them in our family. Also the extremely funny Ross Noble, though I don’t think we’ll get time to go to other shows as we play two nights and then head off to Canberra. I’m looking forward to both these cities as I have never been to either, and we’re not actually staying in Canberra but in some animal lodge. I’m booked into the Wild Life Suite, which sounds like a room in the old Playboy mansion, when that was the place to be, and not a sad reminder of age and exploitation.

Talking of age I was in Maroomba or Maloomba or Maboomba or something of that ilk on the Sunshine Coast and I went in to an art gallery with Adrienne, my son’s lovely lady. The young artist in there took one look at me and said “Oh the life drawing classes are on Thursdays.” Clearly old men gather there for a chance to Iook at naked models and he mistook me for another one of them. Sadly I was busy Thursday.

It is a sad business getting old, not for the faint hearted as somebody observed, but one thing that never fades is the admiration for the young and beautiful. Of course you have become entirely invisible, but still, the admiration lingers on.

As I quote Tracey Ullman from my play What About Dick.

“I like my vibrator but I do occasionally miss the disappointment of a real man.”

Opening night. Jupiter’s Casino Gold Coast.
We are far too relaxed. This is the opening night of a tour and we ought to have been a little more tense. It’s good to be a bit scared before you start, but we’re not. We haven’t yet played any Australian audiences and before the curtain goes up at Jupiter’s Casino they are strangely quiet. Usually in America they are rowdy with expectation. Not so here. You can hardly hear them from backstage and this concerns me. We do get them a bit at the opening but then we make the mistake of putting another little film in about cats being scared by cucumbers, funny enough in itself but after our highlight reel way too much of us not being on stage. We’ll fix this by Brisbane on Saturday of course. Also we run long, a definite mistake in comedy.

When we come on we usually start by both talking at the same time but tonight for some reason John doesn’t speak at all, which leaves me high and dry, and so we confuse them. Eventually I welcome us to the Old Coast, which John corrects me is the Gold Coast, and we pick it up quickly enough but we’ll have to fix the front of the show, and we will. One of the things I love most about working with John is we almost entirely agree on everything and in about five minutes at the end we have it sorted. Personally I blame an enormous picture of Michael Bolton outside my dressing room door. He has the look of a man who isn’t quite sure he should have cut off most of his hair.

The show warms up as we get into it, and particularly once we start performing sketches. And the film clips work. There is some good stuff in here. Then again it is The Gold Coast and we I won’t know what that means until we have played Not The Gold Coast. Are they old, are they sober? Are they drunk? Not drunk enough? Too hot? Too cold? Don’t get me wrong, the show goes very well, the Promoters are very happy, we get a standing ovation, and we do an encore, and as Simon reminds me it’s way better than Sarasota where we started our Florida Tour, but we’re supposed to know what we’re doing by now. Incidentally Sarasota had one of the funniest questions when someone asked from the audience what it felt like to be two of the youngest people in Sarasota. They weren’t kidding either..

As if to make up for the slow start we end strongly, and John is particularly funny in the Q and A section, going on a rant about hotels folding toilet paper into little triangles, which he wonders might be some kind of Masonic thing, which is very funny and then another rant abusing Australians for having far too many Prime Ministers one of which was taken by a shark. Personally I think more politicians should be eaten by sharks, usually it’s them that are the Sharks. I think John is at his best when he goes off on rants like this. From somewhere out of the dim recesses of my mind comes the name Ainsley Gotto, who was blamed for the politicans demise: “It moves, it’s shapely and it’s name is Ainsley Gotto…”

Right off the bat in the Q and A John asks me if I know any poems, which is good as I like being put on the spot and I do know The Owl and The Pussycat which I do a bit of. He does Ogden Nash and I mean to follow up with my Australian mother in law’s (Madge Ryan) Ogden Nash favourite:

Shake and shake the ketchup bottle

First’ll come a little, then a lot’ll…

But I get sidetracked and go off somewhere else. This part of the show is always different every night and is dependent to a certain extent on the questions, one of which asks John for consensual sex with a 19 year old, but doesn’t mention the sex.   At this age, I say, who cares….

It turns out to be George Harrison’s birthday so starting off with a clip of him appearing on my old show Rutland Weekend Television goes over well, and I follow with another story of him, but on the fly I shorten some of what I was going to do in my solo spot as it’s getting late. There are far too many rude songs so I lose one. Olivia Harrison said of George’s appearance on that RWT show that she thought it was the bravest thing he ever did. Sadly I’m missing her and Dhani at George Fest in LA, though Tania and Lily are there and text me that it is a fabulous evening: a film Dhani has made of other people singing George songs with him. Hope I can get to see it soon.

I spent most of the day by the pool at the hotel getting relaxed for the evening. They have two pools, one of which has sand, and sea water and real fishes in a reef. This Marriot is a nice hotel and I’m glad I’m not commuting from Brisbane. It even has a circular bathtub in a triple window, where I sit running over my lines. But I don’t shave my legs. Or my chin actually as now I have a beard, which brilliantly saves me from having to use make up on stage. It’ll have to go of course when the wife gets here. She can’t stand it.

One of my regular tweeters – a Jonathan Trevithik – turns up and is very pleasant. He is a total fan, having been to O2 in London three times, and he is very happy with the show but also interesting, and it’s good to get a take from the audience. One over-ardent fan does not show up however. Some young lady has been faking letters from the Promoter to the venue, trying to get herself onto a Guest List with four backstage passes, pretending to represent us and even claiming to be driving us to the gig. Luckily various inconsistencies were spotted between the Promoter, the Tour Manager and the Casino security, as she made one or two mistakes, but she created false email addresses and false phone numbers and wrote to the Promoter and the theatre and they were all more than a little pissed off and concerned enough to contact the Police, so I hope this ardent con gal has learned her lesson and keeps her head down. I’d hate the plod to be knocking down her door.

 So there we are, up and running, and tomorrow and Sunday we play Brisbane, at the same venue where we played Not The Messiah back in 2008. This time we won’t have an enormous orchestra and a full choir, so please do make some noise to make up for it….

Surfers Paradise.
This is rapidly turning into the Magical Luxury Tour. I go from the calm and peace of a cabin in the woods in the lovely rolling hills of the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast into a Louis The Four Star Palace in the sky.

I had not visited Surfers Paradise before but it’s somewhat like Miami, though the high rise buildings are more modernistic. Less Miami than Fort Lauderdale. And not a trace of Art Deco. (The most famous hair dresser in Miami.)

Not for the first time I bless the saintly Major Cleese for including me on this expedition. A journalist yesterday tried to get me to dump on him, and I genuinely couldn’t think of anything nasty to say. Anyway that’s their job. My job is to not read them.

From my enormous luxury bed I have the balcony windows wide open to catch the fresh air from the rolling breakers of the Pacific Ocean. Not a surfer in sight. It’s more a surfer free paradise. But they’re probably all still in bed with each other. Through the enormous luxury bathroom with hot tub and spa there is an enormous picture window that shows me the entire range of coastal hills. Two perfect balloons float gently by.

There are two pools here, one of which contains fresh sea water, has a beach and includes a reef with real fish, which they feed every morning. The fishy buffet was excellent last night although my son and I got stuck into the Caiparhino’s so we were in a pretty good mood to begin with.

No wonder they call it the Gold Coast. It must cost a ton putting us up here.

Luckily we’re sold out at Jupiters, which is where our tour opens tonight and which turns out to be a huge Casino undergoing refurbishment. John and I are also undergoing refurbishment as we try and remember what we are supposed to do on stage. It’s a gentle afternoon run through of our strange show, and our promoter tries not to look too panic stricken as we wander around on stage pretending we know what we’re doing.

The amazing Simon, who is not a magician, but close, makes everything perfect before we get there. Lighting, sound, guitars, video cues, all perfectly in place. He is our stage manager, a Canadian, whom John relentlessly teases and who is as good natured as could be.

My son Carey, who kindly drove me here, manfully sits through our stagger-through and is surprisingly encouraging. He may give both of us acupuncture before the Brisbane show…

What sort of show is it? Well it’s an odd beast, a feathered camel, a flying donkey, a floating piglet, an underwater eagle, gourmet spam, somewhere between Jerry Lewis and geriatric..… hard to describe, but quite fun to do. It’s never the same twice, or as John puts it “It’s never the same once.”

We have called it sit-down comedy, because there are large leather arm chairs in which we sprawl, but don’t worry, we do stand up from time to time, and we do try to make you laugh. It’s somewhere between a discussion, a clip show and a revue. There are a few sketches and I do a few songs, and that is why today’s entry will be very brief. I must work on my words. One of the sketches is a Memory sketch and for about the first two weeks of our Florida Tour people couldn’t tell whether we had genuinely forgotten our lines or whether it was part of the sketch. A very useful cover, because of course it was the former, but they laughed anyway believing it was the latter.

This time I’m trying something new in my solo slot – what, you’ll remember your words? No. I’m going to use a clip of George Harrison and sing along with him in the only song we ever wrote together. Comedy buffs will know what this is, but it is a genuine Harrison/Idle song and I won’t give away the joke. We each have a 20 minute solo slot in Act Two before we reunite for the Q and A. I asked if this time it could be T and A, but sadly it’s not that sort of show.

So now I genuinely must stop and rehearse. Well perhaps a swim, and then a huge breakfast, and then a massage,.. No I must be strong. You wouldn’t catch Michael Palin enjoying himself on his tours. I must prepare for my audience. The show must go on…. It all starts at 8!

Sphincters crossed.

    It’s dawn in the rain forest and all is clear and still except for the echoey calls of large birds, in the woodwind range, who natter and chatter around the still damp woods It’s not yet steaming hot. Screened windows open to the morning freshness.

It rained in the night. Huge gushing drops shredded through the leaves of the trees and ran down the tin roves into the gutters which collect the fresh rainwater and pour it into the cement water vats and the metal overflow vats.

I’m hiding in the hills. Sorry, holidaying, which for me is the same thing. I’m staying with my son who lives up here and it’s a dream escape into the hinterland hills inland from the Coast, away from the crowding mad. He has built a wonderful guest house in the bush and I get all manner of birds and calls and cries. I have named one The Buildabird because it sounds exactly like a near-by power drill, and I am very disappointed when my son tells me it is indeed a near-by power drill.

I have a few days off before the tour.

Yesterday’s we went hunting for opals at Opals Downunda off the Bruce Highway. The nice lady there asked me if I was Richard Attenborough. I thought it impolite to say poor Dickie has been dead a couple of years, and in any case I think she had me confused for Michael Palin and she had him confused for David Attenborough. That’s the best explanation I can offer I’m afraid.

One of the worst approaches to celebrities is “Are you who I think you are?”

I mean that’s just impossible to answer isn’t it. One can waste a lot of time coyly sorting that one out.

Usually I say “No I am not Kylie Minogue” which slows them down a little as they wonder how I could possibly imagine they had mistaken me for the plucky Aussie chanteuse.

If they say “Are you Eric Idle?” I usually say “occasionally” in the hope of delaying the inevitable selfie. John is brilliant at this. “Can I have selfie” they ask. “No,” he says “I don’t know you.”

 I usually pretend I have to hurry up to be with him and that of course normally I would stop for hours while they fumble with their I Things but just today I have to run and join John.

My son has been an assiduous guide taking me to a host of small places with improbable names. We passed a road sign outside Brisbane which said “Nudgee, Nudgee Beach”. We have been to a variety of Nambours and Mooloolabas and Caloundras. I am perpetually lost but my son dashes us around to unlikely places, where we meet very nice people.

We visited the Eumundi Saturday market, where a large lady all in pink was selling hula hoops. Elsewhere were hand made items and gems and rocks. I was tempted but I am rather overstocked with tie-died crocheted bikinis. It’s not a flattering look for me in the first place because sagging is a problem, and that’s just me. Once the crochet gets wet, well it’ll look like the last surviving oldie at a Burning Man festival.

There were however some nice comedy flags for sale, however, one of which is definitely worth nicking:

    “The trouble with political jokes is occasionally they get elected…”

I shall definitely ad lib that answer to any Donald Trump question on the tour.

There is an excellent bookshop too in Eumundi called Berkelows with plenty of lovely second hand books too heavy to haul on tour, but there in the window was Gilliamesque Terry Gilliam’s autobiographical attempt to turn himself into an abstract noun. It’s a nicely designed book with lots of his drawings and I couldn’t resist autographing it with my name and replacing it on the shelf. Was this an act of pure comedy vandalism or does it increase the value of the book? We shall see. I have a very rare copy of an unsigned Michael Palin book somewhere, but I doubt Terry G. will be down here to sign his. So I think I have done him a favour.

Then we visited Chinresig, a large Buddhist retreat (for large Buddhists) where the Dali Lama came to visit a couple of years ago. For that occasion my son and his pals built a shrubbery in our family name, complete with a plaque.

 I hope his holiness appreciated the joke.

 When John Cleese came face to face with the Dali Lama they both laughed heartily at each other for five minutes.

You can’t go very far in Australia without some example of humour. One ducks crossing we saw said “Slow down for ducks sake.” And a Church we passed said “Early Service 8. Not that early really..”

We leave this paradise Wednesday for the Gold Coast tomorrow and the real start of our tour. But this has been a sweet retreat, and a delight to see my lad. We have played guitar loudly till late at night, when one of the neighbors asked us to turn it up! They couldn’t hear properly they complained… We even make more noise than the flying foxes who are surprisingly vocal. I am assured they are bats but they don’t seem to have bat attitude, since they make a lot of noise communicating and go to roost at night. The very opposite of a good battitude. Perhaps David Attenborough will enlighten me.

Two nice moments of humour. I got a surprise Twitter note from Mark Gattis who said:

“You really suit that beard, maestro! X”

To which I replied: “it’s beginning to grow on me.”

And I was happy at the airport the other day to see that the very attractive young woman from the Telegraph had put in a gag I’d ad libbed which I’d forgotten.

“I’m having my dick cryogenically frozen, in case someone can revive it in a future life.”