There is a palpable end of term feeling here at Fawlty Tours. It\u2019s not just me that\u2019s on his last leg. Tonight we play our final gig in Melbourne. It\u2019s been cold and rainy for days but as if to break our hearts Australia has turned on the sunshine. That\u2019s nice for the Grand Prix which will be roaring away less than a mile from our hotel. I can never quite make up my mind about F1. Sometimes I think it\u2019s very interesting and at other times I think it\u2019s incredibly boring and just loud valet parking. My friend Martin in France watches every moment avidly, all the testing and the various Q\u2019s, which I don\u2019t understand at all and he emails me from Provence that he is watching live at 3.30 a.m.and is disgusted and amazed I show no interest in being there. John is hooked on the cricket and watches late at night, until convinced that England are going to be thrashed and then finds out to his chagrin in the morning that they turned it all round and won.
\nHis wife announced something wonderfully bonkers in an interview in the UK. She said that everyone knows that John Cleese is her husband but what most people don\u2019t know is that Eric Idle is her father. That\u2019s a wonderfully silly quote and I use it on stage to remind John that as his father in law I order him to sit down and start the show instead of ranting on about marriage. Fish, as he calls her, is clearly very funny. I just hope that Momma Fish is happy with this, and that Poppa Fish is not coming after me for something I would have had to have done in the late 80\u2019s. John\u2019s in laws are actually younger than he is. In this club they join Terry Jones\u2019 in laws. Michael meanwhile celebrates 50 years of being married to Helen in April, but as John points out cynically he hasn\u2019t been home much. \u201cHe\u2019s always on the road making those\u2026\u2026.travel\u2026.programmes\u201d he yawns naughtily.<\/p>\n
While we are waspish about the other chaps there is quite a surprising degree of affection that comes through, and I think they would be surprised.<\/p>\n
Melbourne has some nice late-night spots for food and drink after the show that we failed to find in Sydney. I guess they have curfewed Kings Cross. The first night we squeezed into The Supper Club and last night we met our friends Jo and Glenn Shorrock at Cumulus Up, where the food and drink was excellent. We had far too much fun as they had been \u201cdoing a Corporate\u201d entertaining toy manufacturers and sadly not sex toys. Yes of course I asked. I ran away from our show early, skipping the vast line that has started to form outside the stage door with endless stuff to sign and selfies to take. Let\u2019s make this clear. We don\u2019t do selfies. We have banned the buggers. They are intrusive and annoying and take for ever, and then everyone wants one and then they take fucking hours because no one can operate their stupid I-things, then they give it to someone else who has it backwards and all this time you are grinning like a lunatic so you won\u2019t come across like a cunt\u2026 So no more.<\/p>\n
I was writing a little song backstage and I started to ad lib it on stage and John added the last line..<\/p>\n
I\u2019m the elf who invented the selfie<\/p>\n
I\u2019m an egotistical prick<\/p>\n
I\u2019m the elf who invented the selfie<\/p>\n
Be in my picture click click\u2026<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more which I haven\u2019t quite finished but I think it\u2019s time to fight back against this rampantly rude and intrusive waste of time. One guy pursued us through the airport and even ran ahead to snatch a selfie. What is it with these people? Don\u2019t they believe they exist unless pictured next to some old celebrity fart? Oo look who I bumped into on Instagram. Get a fucking life.<\/p>\n
I have been reading the questions from the audience at the intermission while John does his racist jokes lecture and I must say they are not terrible nice at all. Apart from the predictable tedious and boring ones \u2013 how did you get the name \u2013 will there ever be another Fawlty Towers \u2013 can you do the silly walk \u2013 there is quite a lot of abuse about showing up at all. They seem to think we are millionaires, that I am the wealthiest of them all, showing a profound misunderstanding of the nature of show business, but also that we are somehow gouging them by entertaining them for two hours. Have they never heard of \u201cearning a living?\u201d Ungrateful bastards. Not only that but the Melbourne audiences show a marked reluctance to stand up at the end. They do at the back in the cheaper seats, but the closer ones just sit there. Finally we get them after the encore, but we are used to a much greater degree of sycophancy if you don\u2019t mind Melbourne. If you\u2019re not careful I shall tell them your city was founded by Batman. True. A Mr. Batman who was famous for being a racist bastard who killed off most of the aborigines in Tasmania.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sitting looking out at the sinister Gothic pile of St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral. Was it a coincidence that on St.Patrick\u2019s day this hotel was filled with drunken clerics at the same time as they were holding a Boy Scout convention?. Perhaps they were the party favours. It\u2019s true I don\u2019t like the Church. Any Church. It attracts the same kinds of people. A civil service for fantasists. And the damage they do to young people, their lives, and their knowledge of the universe. It\u2019s shameful. Of course I would never say these things in public\u2026.<\/p>\n
For what it\u2019s worth I think people of Melbourne are more formal and behave more like New York while the Sydney-spiders are a bit more bonkers and behave like LA.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow we move on to New Zealand where we play two nights at Auckland, some seats still available nudge nudge, before we travel overland, I should imagine by sleigh, to Wellington, home of the boot. Where all ends and we shall celebrate a Missa Solemnis and bid farewell to the antipodes. My wife deserts me to pop up and visit my son on the Sunshine Coast but we shall be reunited on the beaches of Tahiti where my personal tour continues, while poor John flies for 33 hours to Amsterdam, making his way up to Malmo, the home of the suicidal Swede in his filmed monologue. That should go over big.<\/p>\n
Now it\u2019s time to get out and see something of Melbourne. We\u2019re going up the Tower to see what it looks like from a distance. So if you spot us, no fucking selfies, or we\u2019ll push you over the edge\u2026.<\/p>\n
Now the bloody bells are banging away\u2026Oy Oy. Time to play the Python Sketch Church Bells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a palpable end of term feeling here at Fawlty Tours. It\u2019s not just me that\u2019s on his last leg. Tonight we play our final gig in Melbourne. It\u2019s been cold and rainy for days but as if to break our hearts Australia has turned on the sunshine. That\u2019s nice for the Grand Prix […]<\/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-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","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=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":627,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions\/627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}