Fifty years ago today I met John Cleese.\u00a0 That\u2019s odd isn\u2019t it?\u00a0\u00a0 I suppose most of you can\u2019t even imagine what fifty years looks like. \u00a0It\u2019s hard for us to imagine time.\u00a0 Only the mirror tells its relentless tale.\u00a0 But yes, half a century ago, in February 1963, \u00a0John Cleese walked into my life and, although I didn\u2019t know it at the time, my life changed.\u00a0 Not immediately, but \u00a0irrevocably.<\/p>\n
Even odder was that I was performing his material when he first saw me. I had no idea who he was, or that, at 23, he was a senior member of The Footlights<\/i>, for I was just a 19 year old freshman at Cambridge University and I had been chosen at the start of my second term to be in the Pembroke \u201cSmoker.\u201d\u00a0 A Smoking Concert is a College revue, \u00a0in this case held annually in the Old Hall, and the only reason that John wasn\u2019t on stage was that though he wined and dined in Pembroke nightly and everyone assumed he was at Pembroke, he wasn\u2019t actually a member of the College.\u00a0 Pembroke had a great comedy tradition and it was not long since the great Peter Cook had reduced everyone to giggling heaps.<\/p>\n
So, February 1963.\u00a0 This is even pre- Beatles!\u00a0 They are still getting hammered in Hamburg and we have never heard of them.\u00a0 Indeed we are only into \u201ccool\u201d jazz, Miles Davis, John Coltrane that sort of groove.\u00a0 Imagine, then, a not particularly large room, an ex-19th<\/sup> Century Library, with gabled windows and leaded glass, packed with tables and candles, undergraduates and their dates dressed to the nines, a lot of wine and a great deal of smoke.\u00a0\u00a0 A small raised platform in one corner was the stage and on it performed the cast, led by Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie (later to become The Goodies).\u00a0 There was one very funny girl (Carol), Jonathan Lynn, a pianist and one fresh faced young newcomer: \u00a0me.\u00a0\u00a0 One of the sketches was an Old Testament Newsreader played by Bill, called BBC BC.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cGood even.\u00a0 Here beginneth the first verse of the News.\u00a0 It has come to pass that the seven elders of the seven tribes have now been abiding in Sodom for seven days and seven nights. There seems little hope of an early settlement.\u00a0\u00a0 A spokesman for the Tribes said only a miracle can save us now.<\/i> The news in brief :Lamentations Four 18-22 and 2 Kings 14\u00a0 2- 8<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n And now a look at the weather\u2026<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/i>I played the Biblical Weather Forecaster.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know it at the time but that part was written by John Cleese for himself and afterwards in the euphoria a very tall man in a thick tweed suit with dark hair and piercing dark eyes was introduced to me by Humphrey Barclay.\u00a0 He was very kind and complimentary, and indeed encouraging, for both of them urged me to come along and audition for The Footlights<\/i> at their next Smoker.\u00a0 I had never heard of The Footlights<\/i>, A University Revue Club founded in 1883, but it seemed like a fun thing to do and a month later Jonathan Lynn and I were voted in by the Committee, after having faced the ordeal of performing live to a packed crowd of comedy buffs on the slightly more glamorous Footlights stage, in the private Footlights Club, above fishy smelling MacFisheries.\u00a0\u00a0 I remember the sketch played surprisingly well, and one strange detail: in the front row, lounging on a sofa laughing rather drunkenly with some Senior Fellows was Kingsley Amis.<\/p>\n I soon adapted to Footlights Club life.\u00a0 We had our own private bar which opened at ten at night and stayed open as long as we wanted.\u00a0\u00a0 (Pubs closed at 10.30) \u00a0\u00a0Lunches were provided inexpensively on the premises and twice a term there were Smoking Concerts where one could try out new material.\u00a0 I soon learned a very valuable lesson in performing, for one day I picked up a headmaster sketch by John and read it and didn\u2019t find it very amusing.\u00a0 That night he performed it and killed.\u00a0 Brought the place to a standstill. \u00a0So much is confidence, and how you do it.\u00a0 That was the most valuable thing about The Footlights<\/i>: learning the art of writer\/performing by watching and doing.\u00a0 That year\u2019s Annual Revue, which ran for two weeks during May Week at The Arts Theatre, was the funniest thing I had seen since Beyond The Fringe<\/i>.\u00a0 It was called A Clump of Plinths<\/i>, a very Cleese kind of title, and John stood out head and shoulders amongst a great cast.\u00a0 The thing was that, unlike the others, he never ever let on that he was being funny.<\/i>\u00a0 He was always deadly serious, the deadest of deadpans.\u00a0 I watched in amazement and sheer joy.\u00a0\u00a0 The show toured the UK and then was picked up by Michael White and put into the West End under the title Cambridge Circus.<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0 (How could I possibly imagine Spamalot<\/i> would open at the same theater 44 years later?)\u00a0 By then the gangly pipe-smoking Graham Chapman had joined the cast and they would take the same show to Broadway, and then run off Broadway for several months.<\/p>\n This gave me my big break, for they were supposed to go to the Edinburgh Festival in mid-August and urgently needed a replacement cast. Humphrey Barclay sent me a telegram which, amazingly, found me hitch-hiking around Germany.\u00a0 I was requested to report immediately to Cambridge for rehearsals.\u00a0 We took that same material to Edinburgh under the title Footlights \u201963<\/i> and were a smash hit, attracting rave reviews from the top London critics.\u00a0 \u201cThey attract admiration as effortlessly as the sun attracts the flowers\u201d (Harold Hobson, Sunday Times.)\u00a0 Amazing how you never forget those first reviews!\u00a0 By then we were living in a cold-water walk-up flat six stories up and girls were beginning to play songs by something called The Beatles\u2026..<\/i><\/p>\n At that same Festival we checked out the Oxford Revue (our rivals) and there I first met the lovely, funny, Terry Jones.\u00a0\u00a0 A year later at the same venue I met the unforgettable Michael Palin.\u00a0 Albeit unknowingly by September 1964 all the future Pythons (save for the wild card American animator) had met and admired each other.<\/p>\n A couple of years later we were all writing professionally for The Frost Report<\/i>, a very funny live TV show in which John starred.\u00a0\u00a0 And the rest is history.\u00a0 Well social history.\u00a0\u00a0 Well comedy history.\u00a0 Which may very well not actually be history at all but which changed the face of my life.<\/p>\n And now we\u2019re still here, and it\u2019s amazing to look back and think about it all.\u00a0\u00a0 So thank you John, for all the laughs, all the funny material, all the support and great lessons in comedy which you generously gave to all of us who had the pleasure of performing with you.<\/p>\n You were always the funniest, and always the most serious.\u00a0 I am eternally grateful for the trip.<\/p>\n Happy Anniversary.<\/p>\n Love<\/p>\n Eric<\/p>\n L.A.<\/p>\n February 2013<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifty years ago today I met John Cleese.\u00a0 That\u2019s odd isn\u2019t it?\u00a0\u00a0 I suppose most of you can\u2019t even imagine what fifty years looks like. \u00a0It\u2019s hard for us to imagine time.\u00a0 Only the mirror tells its relentless tale.\u00a0 But yes, half a century ago, in February 1963, \u00a0John Cleese walked into my life and, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions\/322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cGood even.\u00a0 Well it\u2019s been a pretty rough week in the Holy Land hasn\u2019t it? Anyway let\u2019s just take a quick look at the scroll. We\u2019ve got a plague of locusts moving in here from the NW they\u2019re going to be in the Tyre and Sidon area by about lunchtime tomorrow. Scattered outbreaks of fire and brimstone up here in Tarsus and down here in Hebron oh and possibly some mild thunderbolts force two to three in Gath.\u00a0 Down in the south, well Egypt has had a pretty nasty spell of it recently 17 or 18 days ago it was frogs followed by lice, flies: a murrain on the beasts, and last Tuesday locusts and now moving in from the SSE –\u00a0 boils. Further outlook for Egypt well two or three days of thick darkness lying over the face of the land – And then death of all the first born.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i><\/strong>Sorry about that Egypt.”<\/i><\/strong><\/h5>\n