Chapter Five: B Day.

A sweet Valentine’s Day spent saying goodbye to the wife and daughter. This is the hard bit, saying farewell and leaving home.  Tania and I wept copiously through the last episode of War and Peace.  Lily went off to see a strange group which had Tickling in the title.

Now it’s D Day. Or Bidet as the French call it.   For the next three days I shall be in the air.   I take off Monday night and I arrive Wednesday morning.   What happens to Tuesday?  I cross the International Date Line (named after Jerry Hall) and magically Tuesday disappears.

It all seems so unfair.   I am told I shall get it back on my return, but will I have to apply for it?  Or will I have to fill in some government form to claim it?   And if I do get it back, will it still be a Tuesday or just some other random day, like a wet Wednesday or a soggy Saturday?   These things worry me.  I will have to write to Deepak.  I’m sure he’ll have some advice about the Quantum of Qantas.

While I’m gone what will you all do? Wait anxiously by the phone for news?  Lovingly search Twittergram for snaps taken by fellow passengers?   Binge watch something nasty and violent on TV, like the Republican debates?  Well, you’re just going to have to man up, or woman up, or, alright transgender up, and face this absence on your own.  I can’t do everything for you.  Although I have prepared a little something for you.   Think of it as a light repast or late supper in case you are starved of news from the Tour.

January was a rotten month when I lost another friend.   I have been thinking a lot about David Bowie.   We shared a very unlikely friendship in the eighties and nineties, with many great times on holiday.  People don’t know that he had the greatest sense of humour.  He loved to laugh.  And he laughed loudly and often.

In 1991 he was kind enough to loan me his beautiful Balinese home on the island of Mustique for six weeks while I wrote a movie. (Splitting Heirs.) I can’t begin to describe the beauties of this house, or the amazing views, perched high on a hillside overlooking the Caribbean.  But this is the cheeky letter I wrote to thank him for our delicious stay…..

Britannia Bay House,

Mustique,

West Indies.

April 10th 1991

Dear David,

Just leaving the house.  One or two things.  The fire is nearly out.   I think the hillside looks better all bare and black, and Arne agrees.   It’s a sort of Japanesey look, but post-Hiroshima.    About twenty minutes post, but at least it’s not radioactive, unless there was something toxic in the Octagonal Room, which is still blazing nicely. It’s almost a shame to put it out.

The open air dining area will be much more pleasant too, as soon as we clear the rubble from the remains of the roof.  Fortunately we had concreted over those smelly old fish ponds to give you a nice cement patio area, for disco dancing or barbecue, and we were able to get some real artificial straw umbrellas in red and yellow, so there is a nice Spanish “feel” about the whole entrance place now.  And the little straw donkeys are very welcoming instead of all that Balinese Buddhist bullshit, if you’ll pardon my French.  As a special gift we’re going to get your name on a bullfight poster – don’t ask us how, it’s our treat.

We made one or two other slight “alterations” while we were here.  No need to thank us, it’s been our pleasure modernising the place and making it look a bit more like it belongs.   Tan and I had just visited the Ideal Home Exhibition so we are “up” on the latest developments in home improvements.     First of all, all that old wood had to go.    It had little holes in it, probably made by woodworm. It looked like it had come from Thailand or some other unfortunate third world place where they can’t get decent hardboard.

“Thighland, more like,” laughed Doreen, who has been helping us with the decor. Anyway, we made a nice big bonfire of that and have replaced it all with top grade washable white Formica.   It looks as clean and nice as Lionel Blair. And about as useful Doreen wanted me to add.

The rest of the woodwork we have painted a cheery orange, and there really is an Ibiza-during-German-Week feeling to the place.

“David’s going to like this” said Doreen, “it has all the warmth of a Berlin detox ward, with none of the company.”

Fritz, the new Butler, is very friendly and knows some quite good marching songs from the War, where he served with distinction in the S.S.   I’m afraid we had to let Joel go, it wasn’t fair to keep him on. He just couldn’t “dig” the improvements.  Tragic really, but if you can’t “go with the flow man, you’re history babe” as Doreen said when she told Mr. Webb to leave.  He refused to serve fish fingers or baked beans.   Imagine!   So we’ve stocked up the freezer with Big Macs and the microwave’s been burning overtime.

After we finished the redecoration (and the Rangoon room looks stunning now we chucked out all that heavy furniture and livened it up with scatter cushions and bean bags, very Sixties…!) the floors looked kind of bare so we put down some nice Cyril Lord, with maroon flecks, that will “wear” well even though the basic violet takes a little getting used to.  But as Doreen says, if you’re gonna stay ahead in style you’re gonna have to take a few risks.  Personally I think the diamante dogs on the ceiling are a bit much, but Doreen said anybody who can appear in front of the British public wearing only carrot hair and a jock strap is not going to baulk at a few fey gestures on the ceiling.

Oh, curtains.  All that sliding screen business just felt too foreign for Doreen, so she’s run up some lovely fabric she had sent in from Beatty’s in Birmingham.    It’s called “Our Queen”, and I think you’ll be very happy with it.   The corgis too should remind you of the dogs, the last of whom, even now is burning in the Octagonal Room.   How we shall miss his yelping.  But as Doreen said, “I’m not risking these shoes just to save a dying animal.”

The rest of the staff have run away, but Chlorine and Mrs Reid are coming, and as Doreen said, they may not be any good, but they did work for Princess Margaret.

The plastic tiling will be here any day to replace the weedy “flowers” that had grown up everywhere.  “You could hardly move for bloody plants” said Doreen, and she ripped away for days,  and her with her back too.  But she’s a martyr to it when she’s got the bit between her teeth.

“And don’t ask which bit” she just cackled.   She does have a marvelous sense of humour for someone from near Birmingham.

Well must dash.  I have to leave before Basil and the Mustique company find out we’re going.   Our little joke on them:   we’re leaving without paying!   How they’ll laugh eh?   Naughty us.  But what with all the champagne and lobsters it was getting a bit too much…..!   If they come running to you just you tell them it was nothing to do with you.  They’ll only get spoiled if people pay all the time.   And I bet you that Basil has a bob or two tucked away.  If only that jellabiya could talk.  I said to Doreen, “I bet that’s seen some action.”

“Served under the Royals” she said curtly, and I think we knew what she meant. She was cheeky enough to ask him if anything was worn under the jellabiya, and he said “No, everything’s in perfect working order!”

Laugh?   We almost wet ourselves.

Oh the other night a Kitty Kelly was over for dinner and she wanted to know all the poop on you, “just for a giggle.”  It was just harmless gossip and she promised it wouldn’t go any further, so we let go a few ripe anecdotes.    Were your ears red?   Anyway, we tended to exaggerate, especially the bits about you and the llama, and she seemed very impressed and wrote everything down, but still, no harm done eh?

Well chuck, it’s been a pleasure, and we’ve certainly had some laughs.   The fire’s almost out now, and the whole place looks lovely, all orange against the blackened hillside.

Let’s hope we can come back again soon and really finish the job,

lots of love from Eric, Tania, Lily (and

Chapter Four: Still here. 

The fourth day of this damn Tour diary and I still haven’t left home.

Yes, I’m still here.

Pathetic isn’t it?

Apparently it doesn’t actually start until the 25th of February on the Gold Coast, and I’ve obviously been preparing to leave for too long. But at least my wife has noticed that I am leaving. She’s started saying things like “I’m going in to Beverly Hills. I’m really going to miss you.”

“But you’re only going to Beverly Hills.”

“No you idiot. When you’re gone.”

I really leave on Monday. Grammy night. Mercifully I shall miss the Academy Awards. There’s nothing I like more than missing Award Shows. I find them tedious. And of no value. In fact the only Awards of any value are the ones they give me. Although I do like the Grammys. At least they perform. They should make some of those bearded repeat Oscar winners (“This is his 32 Oscar for sound effects editing and he still hasn’t shaved…”) they should make them sing or something. Anyway for me this year it’s just an honour not to be nominated, although after 39 years I feel I might qualify for a wifetime achievement award.

What has left is my guitar, in its brand new custom-made shipping case, which I had specially made. . It looks like this:
  

 Beautiful isn’t it? 
I wish they could make one for me to be shipped in.

I shan’t meet up with this lovely Taylor until the appropriately named Gold Coast.

I was given my first Taylor guitar by Clint Black after he recorded The Galaxy Song. He didn’t like singing “Whenever life gets you down Mrs. Brown” and he asked me to write him a new Intro. I wrote him a kind of cowboy opening and we recorded it together in his home studio in his marbled palace in LA.

When you’re feeling inside out and insecure

And life keeps getting you down

When all life’s daily worries

Hurry through your head

You don’t wanna even get up

You just lie around in bed

When you feel you just can’t take it anymore

And you wonder what on earth it is all for

Your love life’s like a war zone

Your TV’s on the blink

It’s enough to drive a drinking man

To stop and take a think.

Recorded with Clint Black for Delectrified in 1999

I think we even sang it together at a Grammy event on a tennis court for Music Cares. Later he flew me down to the Taylor factory, in a tiny private plane, where we were shown around the factory and then taken to the board room to meet Bob. Here they broke out the guitars and we played. It was the nicest corporate experience. We got to try a variety of their latest instruments.

Taylor have always kindly looked after me on the road, and they supplied two very nice guitars for JCAEITAALFTVFT which is the handy little acronym I have invented to remember our tour title: John Cleese and Eric Idle Together Again At Last for The Very First Time.

It has been nominated for longest title in an old farts on the road tour.

In case you are having trouble with the acronym here’s an easy way to remember it.

Julius Caesar always eyes Italian totty and adores lovely females to very frequently touch.

That will help you remember JCAEITAALFTVFT and then it’s a simple matter of substituting letters.

As well as the guitar I have shipped shipping three outfits for the stage and a Tour travel bag filled with Teas*, Tea making devices, make up and two outback corky hats, because of course we shall be doing the Bruces for the very first time in Australia.

*Lapsang Sou Chong, Buddha’s Cup, Genghis Khan and another first flush Darjeeling.

We may have to censor ourselves a little as I think Rule 4 “No Pooftah’s” is probably incorrect. I certainly cut it from my 2003 tour. Yes I know it’s satire on the then (70’s) over blokish culture of the drinking Australian male, but things have come a very long way since then, and thank heaven for it.

King Lear to Jester: Shut up that’s incorrect.

Which reminds me that once Prince Charles asked me to become his jester. He really did. He was choking with laughter at Billy Connolly’s Scottish house over dinner, with Robin Williams and Steve Martin so I must have got off a good one.

“Eric” he said with tears in his eyes “You should become my jester.”

“Now why would I want a fucking awful job like that?” I said, which set him off even more.

I actually think it was a perfect jester’s response. Reminding the Prince of how unenviable his position really is. Even the fucking jester doesn’t want the job….

Chapter Three:   False Alarm

Excellent news. I no longer have a snapped tendon.  It has healed.  Being flat out in bed for fifteen days with the flu seems to have it sorted.  Jeff, my physio, a man of enormous pessimism, looks puzzled at my ankle.   “There’s nothing wrong with you at all. The reason you are limping so badly is that stupid surgical boot, now take it off and walk.”

Not since Jesus so swiftly Lazarated the healing process has there been such a quick turnaround. Shortly we were both walking down the road and he was shaking his head about Doctors.  I know what he means.  LA consists of two large black holes called Cedars Cyanide and UCLA and slowly people are sucked inside the Dr. Schwarzschild radius, rarely to emerge with a full complement of organs.

Graham always warned us to beware of Doctors. “They’re just ex Medical students” he said.  And he should know;  he was a fully qualified alcoholic.

So the boot isn’t on the other foot.   It’s in a corner of my closet where I flung it. A thousand dollars of health care down the drain.

In order to make up for my return to health my Doctor ordered a series of tests. I was scheduled for a morning of prodding, bleeding, and peeing, plus a date with the machine that goes ping.   Actually the MRI makes a far louder noise than a ping.  It’s more like a lion’s roar.

So I had a heart scan: check, there is one.

A lung scan: “And there’s the pneumonia…”

“The what? I thought it was flu.”

“That too.”

And an ultra sound. (I’m not pregnant.)

So physically I’m ready to face the Australian bowling. And literally too, because as a happy result of some Twitter misunderstandings the great Thommo is coming to see us on the road downunda.  And he still scares me.  John too is looking forward to meeting him.  We are both cricket nuts.

Major Cleese seems in good form, and after spending six weeks on a beach in Mustique with his aquatic wife he ought to be. He says he likes his new rank, so Major Cleese it is.  I’m not sure where that leaves me.  Lance-Corporal?  Squadron Leader?  I used to be Sergeant Idle in the school CCF, but they hated me because I went on the Aldermaston March.

“Then you shouldn’t be in the CCF” said the School Padre, shocked to learn I’d been on a Pacifist rally.

“Then I’ll leave” I said

“You can’t, it’s compulsory.”

My Dad was Sergeant Idle too. In the RAF.  But I think I like something a little more romantic.  Group Captain Idle?  Now, that has a ring to it.

Mentally I’m ready and looking forward to the show. It’s a nice change from writing.  My shrink has cleared me for duty. Two of the Pythons have had shrinkage and four haven’t.   Luckily I’m on the road with the other one who did.  I think it helps, and I’ve had about twenty years of it now. Of course I live in California where it is compulsory, but if you don’t look under the hood now and again how can you possibly see what’s driving you?

The unexamined life is a dangerous thing.

The British, who are mentally and dentally retarded, look on all forms of analysis with fear and loathing, though no nation needs it more. Especially some of their newspapers, which do seem to be utterly bonkers.

It’s the weather of course. And I love and adore the English. Well not all of them. I hate the smugly sentimental Upstairs Downside world of the Upper classes and their nostalgia for country estates and servants. You know those television series about fat faced, smug, fucking upper class twits where happy and kindly aristocrats, are lovingly and gratifyingly served by contented, sexually available domestic servants.

“It’s an honour to work for you sir. Really there’s no need to pay us. I would do this for nothing. Oh would you like to fuck me sir, I know how an upper class gentleman gets when he’s had four bottles of claret. Or would you rather fuck my daughter? She’ll take it sir, and be grateful for the spare change in your pocket, but please only in the ass, she’s working class and we can’t afford no children….”

It’s crap. It’s condescending and inaccurate and panders to the worst kind of Americans who see the British as some kind of Butler owning democracy. It’s as if the Yanks did a series about the Antebellum South where contented slaves sing happily about their kindly owners.

“O we is happy pickin cotton all de live long day…”

Alright. Rant over. I’m a lower class Northern oik and proud of it lad.

Chapter 2. Packing Backwards

It’s a King Lear kind of a day in LA with lowering winds pushing down trees and tipping over telegraph poles and the remains of shredded parasols lie in shrouds by the sides of pools. I’m preparing to set out on the road, on an Expedition with Major Cleese, in search of intelligent life in the Antipodes.

Currently I’m packing.

No, sorry, Yanks, I don’t mean I’m carrying concealed weapons, I mean I’m packing as in Suitcase.  Packing up clothes and books and guitars.  And of course meds.

That’s the nice thing about age: in the old days we had drugs. Now we have medication.

I have a whole shitload of bottles and vials and injectables, whose sell-by date is hopefully ahead of mine, and most of whose functions I can only guess at. However if World War Three breaks out while I’m downunda I’m covered.  I’ll be On The Beach with a copy of Neville Shute and a bag full of emergency suppositories.

Meanwhile I am discussing with the wife who should play us in the movie of our lives.

“Angelina Jolie” she suggests.

“And who will play you?” I ask.

I have also been trying to write some new gags for the road.

“There are two types of people, and I don’t much care for either of them.”

“I’m a 72 year old man embarking on a mid- life crisis. It should be over by the time I am 145.”

That sort of thing. The kind of one liner I used to be paid by David Frost to churn out, when I was just a writer. I love saying Just a Writer.  It’s a bitter writer’s gag.

Shakespeare?   Just a writer.”

I have decided to announce I am working on my Autobiography. It’s title?

“Are those my underpants? “

My wife finds this spectacularly unfunny.   My assistant Alana howls with laughter.

I’m not really working on my Autobiography though I was asked to write it in the year of The Python Final Farewell Show at O2.  (2014)  Publishers offered me a ton of money, but I worried that John Cleese was shortly coming out with his own memoirs and it seemed to invite odious comparisons from the insidious Daily Mole.*  So I declined.

*name changed to protect the guilty.

The point of autobiography is that it’s your last chance to be rude about people you love, especially old wives, and friends and work mates who never did you any harm, but sadly I find that with age I have become more forgiving. I know.   I apologise.  If you can’t think ill of your fellow man then who are you?   But I don’t.  I can’t be bothered to carry a grudge any more. Even on Twitter where the ground rules invite abuse I find it much more fun to forgive people.  It’s far more effective.  They can’t stand it. Turning the other cheek that’s fucking asking for it.  Look how many people Ghandi annoyed by fasting and being forgiving.  It’s far and away the most annoyingly passive aggressive thing  you can do.

I’m not much of a diarist. I think we can leave the detailed daily form to our good Mrs. Dale, Michael Palin, who is constantly painting the Forth Bridge of his life a day at a time.   I’m going to stick to blogging.  A series of self-indulgent essays about how wonderful I am.  Think of it as the equivalent of a morning dump, cleaning out the shit in my mind.

So yes I’m packing.

Will I need that frilly nightie?   How about an emergency garter belt?   You never know.  Spanx?  Yes or no?  And what colour eye-liner?   Panties?  Shall I take a selection?  Lip gloss. Check. You see the thousands of decisions that we people in showbiz have to make.

As it happens I have a Degree in Packing.

Twelve years of boarding school, three terms a year, there and back, is six packs a year.  That’s 72 packings.  Then there’s College, and then there’s filming,  oh the whole thing is endless.  I’m either packing, unpacking or preparing to pack of unpack.   If you count the arrival in Sydney for a hellish day of publicity we’re going to be in ten different cities in a little over a month and a half.

So I have pioneered a whole new packing technique. It’s called:

Packing Backwards.

You just visualize the last place you will be visiting on your travels and then start with that.   Since I will be in Tahiti that’s easy.  A pair of Speedo’s, a travel guitar and a hat.

Before that we’re in New Zealand, and that could be tricky. Is Wellington at the end of March chilly?   Ought I to wear wool close to the skin?  Is Mourhino a sheep?  And how about Auckland?   Do they still get quite so drunk?   Will I need a special garment to protect my clothes?  And what  if we have to visit a sewage farm?  Will they provide Wellingtons in Wellington?   I know they named a sewage facility after John and it is my ambition to have one named after me.

Before that we’re in Melbourne, and by the look of it it’s deucedly hot there.   In fact all Australia looks like it will be very hot.    Perth is boiling and we start up on The Gold Coast.  It’s a quandary.

In Sydney, the first stop, we are scheduled to appear on breakfast TV and basically give interviews all day.   This is a typical Australian joke.  They get you jet-lagged off the plane and ask “What do you think of Australia?”  Since you’ve only seen the frigging airport and you’re so bleary eyed you can’t even remember your own name, it’s tough to come up with a funny response.

How I miss the days of Norman Gunston when he greeted celebrities with his brilliantly bad questions…

To Linda McCartney:   “You don’t look very Japanese to me.”

He pioneered a whole new school of celebrity interview, where the interviewer is not real.   Sacha Baron of course nailed it in many disguises.

Ah well, Time to go shopping…. so wellingtons, Spanx, and special undergarments….