Monty Python news and features

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PYTHON LEGEND BATTLES CANCER
Exclusive By Gary Anderson And Martin Fricker

MONTY Python star Terry Jones is fighting cancer and will have surgery within days. Doctors say the 64-year-old comedian and TV director has bowel cancer but believe they have caught it at an early stage. Dad-of-two Terry was last night at a private hospital in London with his 21-year-old Swedish girlfriend Anna Soderstrom.

His agent Jodi Shield said: "He is having a routine exploratory operation in the next few days. His surgeon is fairly confident - they think they've got it early enough. He's in great spirits. We're having to make him stop working." Python co-star Carol Cleveland said: "I'm just praying he is going to be fine. Terry is a strong Welshman - I'm confident he'll beat it."

Doctors told Terry he had cancer a few days before last week's West End premiere of the Python musical Spamalot. But he insisted on being at the show and posed for pictures alongside Python pals Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam. Terry was a creator of the Monty Python team that revolutionised British comedy in the 1970s - and became a household name along with Palin, Idle, Gilliam, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He is best known for playing Python's bizarre female characters. His most famous creation is Brian's mum in The Life of Brian - in which he yells at his son's devoted followers: "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy."

Terry has directed three Python films - Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life. He has also made popular history programmes for the BBC, published books on the ancient and medieval periods and written numerous children's stories. In recent years he has been an outspoken critic of Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. Terry last year left wife Alison after 35 years of married life to live with Anna, who he met at one of his book signings. His daughter Sally, 32, declined to comment last night.

Bowel cancer is the UK's third most common cancer - claiming 16,000 lives last year. If detected early enough it is relatively easy to treat. X-Factor judge Sharon Osbourne successfully battled the disease after having surgery and chemotherapy. England's World Cup winning skipper Bobby Moore died of bowel cancer in 1993. Terry's fellow Python pioneer Graham Chapman died aged 48 in 1989 after a long battle with throat cancer.

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[Griffo]

Good that it has been caught early. Hope he can get it sorted.

[eefanincan]

Here's hoping his treatment goes smoothly and he's back making people laugh, soon.

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Click HERE to read a review in today's Sunday Times.

[Kezza]

Saw the original Broadway production of "Spamalot" last year. The three leads were Tim Curry, David Hyde-Pierce (Dr Nigel Crane on "Frasier") and Hank Azaria ("The Bird Cage", "The Simpsons").

It was freakin' hysterical and the first time I didn't have to beg my husband to go to see musical theatre!

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Just say Cleese
November 3, 2007
www.theage.com.au
The holy grail of musical success seems assured for Spamalot, much to the surprise of its on-stage deity. John Cleese tells Shaun Micallef why the re-imagining of some 34-year-old silliness still works on stage.

JOHN CLEESE IS ON the phone from Boston, Massachusetts. He's explaining the reason he's a bit late (it's only five minutes) was because the fire alarm went off and everyone in the hotel had to evacuate. He's back in his room now.

"Hang on, Shaun, I must listen to this announcement."

I listen with Cleese to the recorded message piped into his room explaining that it was a drill and that the hotel is not on fire. "American panic," he decides. I am seized with a nerdish instinct to bring up the fire drill scene in "The Germans" episode of Fawlty Towers (season one, episode six) but mercifully contain it.

"Now, is this interview about Spamalot?" asks Cleese.

Cleese has a bit on at the moment. He's in Boston to meet Steve Martin, with whom he is co-starring in the sequel to last year's Pink Panther. He's taking over the role of Chief Inspector Dreyfus from Kevin Kline. Cleese will start shooting the day after next and "I've got to go off and figure out whether or not I'm going to do it in a French accent", he says.

I confirm that we are indeed talking about Spamalot. Like Pink Panther, Spamalot is what the Americans call a "re-imagining" of a work; it's a stage musical version of the cult film success, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Australian production of the Broadway hit starts in a couple of weeks but must seem a million miles away for Cleese, who wrote the Grail screenplay with fellow Pythons Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam way back in 1973.

It was done on a shoestring; a contrast to the spectacular budget for the lavish stage version he saw premiere in Chicago at the Shubert Theatre on March 17, 2005. We guess at how much money Spamalot cost to mount; I'm way off, suggesting a mere 10 to 15 times the cost of the film.

"Well, I think the film was made on a budget of ?240,000 and I don't know what the Spamalot one was but I think a lot more than 20 times more than that," says Cleese, cheerily but with a pang of envy. "I mean, we had so little money that we only had about four or five umbrellas and it was raining all the time so we all got wet every day. Then we were staying in a hotel where only half the crew got hot water because there wasn't enough, so there was this terrible scramble. The first assistant said 'It's a wrap', everybody was sprinting for the cars trying to get back to the hotel. And just before we went up there the producer rang me up and said 'Do you mind sharing a hotel room?' I said, 'I thought I was supposed to be a film star. I don't think film stars share hotel rooms.'"

Of course, since that film, Cleese has become a very famous film star. But suppose Monty Python and the Holy Grail had not been a low-budget film and had been a musical in the first place. If he'd auditioned for the roles he wrote for himself - Sir Lancelot, Tim the Enchanter, the French Taunter - would he have got them?

"Nope, not at all because I am so terrible at anything musical," he admits. "I mean, this is how terrible I am; I was asked in 1965 when I was in New York to audition for a musical called Half a Sixpence with Tommy Steele. And I went along and I read the script and made them laugh, you know, but then they asked me to sing and I said 'I can't sing.' And they said 'Well, you know, sing something.' I said 'I don't know anything.' They said 'Well can you sing your national anthem?' and I said 'Probably - how does it go?', which got a laugh.

"Then I sang it and went off thinking how hilarious it was and the next I got a call saying 'You've got the part.' And I called my agent and he said, 'Well, you'll only be on stage for the chorus numbers, it won't matter.' "So I went there and learnt the dance movements, you know, which weren't difficult, thank God, because I have no talent for that, either. And I was just galloping around on stage and mouthing. "And after about six weeks I joined in one evening just for fun because I was loosening up a bit and that night the musical director was waiting for me outside my dressing room when I came out and he said 'John, are you singing?'"

His appalling singing led to Cleese's sacking from Half a Sixpence, which was a good thing because he went back to England, worked on The Frost Report, met Idle, Palin and Jones, reunited with Chapman, called up Gilliam, who he'd met in the US, and a few years later they all gave birth to Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Like a lot of Python output, Spamalot was born of conflict. Jones told me in 2003 that Idle's nose was out of joint with them all because they'd agreed to put on a Python reunion show in Las Vegas but then Jones and Palin and then Gilliam decided they didn't want to do it and pulled out.

Idle didn't participate in the BBC 35th anniversary reunion show in 2004 (apart from a recorded piece) and went off by himself across the US doing a Python show on his own. It was quite successful for him and in his downtime he conceived Spamalot, a musical stage version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was itself in the first place a bit of a nod to the musical Camelot. He downloaded the script from the net and began tinkering, contacting the others in the team by email and getting their views. Cleese had his doubts.

"I mean, I wasn't sure if it was going to work but when I discovered that Eric had got Mike Nichols (The Graduate) directing it, that was the moment that I thought OK because, you know, I knew Eric was going to write good songs and funny lines but you need someone who knows how to shape it."

Unlike Grail's first screening to investors, which received very few laughs and required a re-edit, Spamalot was greeted very warmly by the audience. But what did Cleese think of seeing other people perform Python material?

"I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it," he says. "I was surprised at times that the longer dialogue scenes seemed to work on stage. It surprised me because the audience was laughing a lot at them and I would have cut them myself because I would have assumed they wouldn't have worked at the original length.

"I thought the songs were excellent. I'd heard them before on tape that Eric had sent us but it was the atmosphere that I loved. It was a really fun, silly, sort of pantomime evening with everyone having a wonderful time and I think it was something about being in New York at that time, with everyone being so depressed about George Bush - you suddenly thought, 'My God, silliness is still viable.'"

Silliness was and is the chief ingredient of Python but the thing about "re-imaginings" is that sometimes, as might be argued in the case of last year's Pink Panther, it's like taking the ingredients for the recipe of a cake you like and using them to make a risotto. The flavour might be there but it's all rather odd.

And Spamalot is an odd musical. Most of the audience will walk into the theatre knowing the dialogue but not the songs. Usually it's the other way around with musicals. Stephen Hall, a talented young comedian who plays Cleese's roles in the Australian version (Hank Azaria did them on Broadway), says he had his lines down 20 years before the audition.

Cleese laughs, "Yes, well it was like that when we used to do the stage show. I mean, there was a time once when Michael Palin broke me up - he ad libbed something - and by the time I had recovered from laughing I'd forgot where we were and I just said to the audience 'What's the next line?' and about 60 people shouted it out."

All the film's famous set-pieces are in the stage version and the dialogue is mostly left alone. But there is added dialogue and some of these new bits may rankle Python purists. As they've been added by Idle, one can't be heard to complain too loudly but I do so with Cleese anyway about a new line added to Cleese's own Tim the Enchanter scene.

It's where, after Tim has been exploding things and being eerie in an eccentric Scottish accent, introduces himself as "Tim". Idle has Sir Robin (his character in the original film) turn around and say, sarcastically, "Ooh, what a scary name." It's a line that just seems wrong to me and I ask if Cleese could please get Idle to remove it.

There's a moments pause on the end of the line and then: "Well, I think you're right, actually. That's very smart of you, if I may say so - if it doesn't sound condescending - because you're right. I did notice that line at the time and I remember thinking it sounded strange because it's sort of explaining the joke. Tim is not a very scary name and I think because it makes you think of timid and timorous, you see what I mean? Very good point, I'll have a word with Eric about it."

I leave off recommending any further revisions. The show has been doing perfectly well without me, let's face it. Without Cleese and the others, too.

"We don't have to do anything at all. We just can sit here and count the money," says Cleese. Although, in a way, Cleese will be casting a watchful eye from above during the Australian production. He plays the Voice of God (albeit in recorded form). New Yorker critic John Lahr wrote that it was a part Cleese was born to play. And Cleese is particularly pleased with the casting of Bille Brown (The Judas Kiss, Exit the King) as Arthur.

"Well, Bille's a terrific actor you see. Bill was in Fierce Creatures with me and I just thought he was marvellous and then when I did a little stage show in New Zealand, which was about 15 months ago, Bill directed it, so he's an old friend. I wrote a note and I recommended him because I think he is a terrific performer."

Just as Martin took over Peter Sellers' Clouseau in the re-imagining of The Pink Panther and made it into something else again, the Australian cast of Spamalot will no doubt make the Grail characters their own.

And while this happens Cleese will be making Chief Inspector Dreyfus his own, too. "I'm looking forward to it because I love those old movies" he says. "And I knew Sellers when he was doing them."

I nerdishly gabble on about The Magic Christian, a film he made with Sellers in the late '60s; it's the only time the two comedians worked on screen together and it's one of my favourite films. Cleese is a snooty Sotheby's art expert selling a Renoir to Sellers, only to watch in horror as the latter instructs his son (Ringo Starr) to cut out the nose because "he only likes the noses".

"Yeah, but I watched it the other day and I played it much too slowly," says Cleese. He agrees there's a special way to perform revue material that isn't like real acting. "Oh yes," says Cleese, "it's got to be much more energetic."

Still, I hope he plays Dreyfus in an English accent.

Listen to the interview

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I was just sorting out a dvd-rom full of Python movies from old discs I had saved and noticed that the version of Meaning of Life which I had was only 1h30 long. I remember from years back that it was longer than that when I saw it, so on checking realised that they'd removed the entire section near the beginning where the clerks take over the bank they work in.

I looked on wiki and found this

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I think it's still banned here too!

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John Cleese: Don't mention the divorce...
John Cleese has spent his life trying to understand women. Now, as he and his third wife divorce, he is relishing being a single man
By Andrew Billen

It's a don't-mention-the-war moment, or for those who favour current cliché over classic Fawlty Towers, it's an elephant-in-the-room thing. My interview with John Cleese comes with a condition: “Please do not ask about Mr Cleese's divorce.” That would be his divorce from his third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger, the divorce with which his friend Michael Winner has taken to regaling readers of his Sunday Times column: “There's no doubt John's hurting”; “I knew Cleese shouldn't have married that grim girl”; and so on. But keep reading. The divorce elephant is soon rampaging - goose-stepping, perhaps - all over the room.

And I don't even rattle its cage. I just ask the comedian, who made £7 million from the sale of his training film business back in 1989, when will he be wealthy enough to stop working and pursue his intellectual interests. Cleese, you see, with his over-long, comically hinged body, may look a figure of fun, but he is an homme sérieux. In less than an hour's chat he references the Polish epistemologist Alfred Korzybski, the quantum physicist Christopher Isham, and the 13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart. His take on life is thoughtful, Freudian and, although he admits to having no direct experience of the numinous, spiritual. When this week I ask him to comment on the scandal of Jonathan Ross's and Russell Brand's phone call to Andrew Sachs, Manuel to his Basil on Fawlty Towers, his response is almost philosophical.

“I'm uneasy about censorship,” he e-mails me from California, “so I think that it's important to hire people who have good enough taste to censor themselves. I've always thought that Jonathan would have fallen into this category.” It is a statement that recalls, perhaps, being on the wrong end of a similar row when his 1979 Monty Python movie Life of Brian was accused of blasphemy. There are, as he says, memoirs to be written and conclusions to be drawn about a career that stretches back to 1963 and That Was The Week That Was. Yet, at the age of 68, he has spent most of the year working on a stage musical of A Fish Called Wanda, writing screenplays, voicing an animated movie and making new commentary for a Fawlty Towers box set. He has also - and this is the excuse for us talking - filmed segments for a new show on the digital channel Dave called Batteries Not Included, in which the Bond movies' chief geek, Q, asks inventors about their most fantastic gadgets.

So when can he turn his back on this toil? “I don't know about that,” he says. “People would think I'd have enough money, but I do have a very expensive, or comparatively expensive, divorce. When I divorced Barbara [Trentham, wife two] in about '88 that cost me £2.5 million then. And now this divorce with Alyce Faye - I mean, I'm paying more than £1 million a year right now. And we never had children.” Alyce Faye Eichelberger, a psychoanalyst, has described their lifestyle as “opulent” and may have got used to it. In contrast, at the Covent Garden Hotel this afternoon, Cleese is frugally wearing a rather magnificent but tatty jacket he bought for £200 in Clifton.

“When I got divorced from Connie [Booth, wife one], with whom I had dinner on Sunday, and when I got divorced from Barbara, I didn't need lawyers on either occasion, because I just sort of said, ‘Why don't I give you this?' And they said, ‘That's very fair, very generous. Thank you.' End of story. This woman now was asking my old St John's Wood accountants for 60 boxes of documents, so many documents that they had to send people out from California to go through them.

For Alyce Faye? “No, not really. In fact, Alyce Faye I think is losing money by doing this. But it's not possible to get that idea to her because I've been told that if I speak to her directly her lawyer will take out a restraining order, which would not look very good when we got to court. I mean, it's insane.”

The lawyers probably make her sound more bitter than she is? “It's hard to know, because I haven't spoken to her. I mean, we broke up in the marital therapist's office. We'd been seeing them for a couple of years. And we agreed to break up and three weeks later I heard about the lawyer that she was using and I rang her up and said, ‘Do you know this lawyer's reputation?' And she said, ‘I hear that yours can be pretty nasty, too.' And I said, ‘OK, here's an offer. You get rid of yours. I'll get rid of mine. I'll appoint someone you're comfortable with, you appoint someone I'm comfortable with and it could be fairly easy.' And she said, ‘No, I'm not interested. I would like to stay with the present situation.'”

Her attitude would not shock Michael Winner who, despite being a guest at their wedding in Barbados, has made it clear he never liked her. Among his complaints is that her voice could “tear the testicles out of a rabbit”.

Cleese says he understands why friends are angry on his behalf. “I feel angry sometimes. But my anger is not so much about sharing the property but having to go on working hard to provide alimony for someone who's already going to have at least $10 million worth of property, and who's getting £1 million this year. At some point you say, ‘Well, what did I do wrong? You know, I was the breadwinner.' The system is insane.”

So, I check, his anger is not at the failure of the relationship? “It's about the fact that in my 70th year I will still be spending two months a year doing work that is of no interest to me and which is probably slightly spiritually depleting in order to feed the beast.” (The PR from Dave looks a little crestfallen at this.)

Winner's theory is that Cleese was never “madly in love” with Alyce Faye but married her 16 years ago because he thought it was “the right thing to do”. The closest I get to an explanation from Cleese for its sticky end is this: “It's very important for me that my friends have a sense of humour. To me it's the kind of touchstone of communication. Alyce Faye's sense of humour was not very European, because she was from Oklahoma and I used to joke that the Oklahoma Sense of Irony is one of the world's short books.” How did he cope? “Well I just didn't make certain kinds of jokes around her.”

Here's one she might not get: he is considering writing a movie called May Divorce Be With You. Winner may think Cleese is hurting. To me, he exhibits the euphoria of a man who has escaped a life sentence. His spirits are almost inappropriately high. He says he is so happy he can hardly concentrate enough to meditate. “This is the happiest I have ever been and I feel that at 68 now I want as many years as I can get.”

The great contrast, he says, is when he broke up with Booth, his co-writer on Fawlty Towers who played the maid Polly (like the wives who followed, Connie was blonde, wholesome and American; like Alyce Faye, she now works as a therapist). Their divorce, between the first and second series, when their daughter, Cynthia, was 7, depressed Cleese profoundly.

“Two and a half years of depression, certainly. Connie and I really genuinely loved each other very much, and it was wonderful to have dinner with her [recently]. I mean, we've known each other since probably October 1964. That's a long time, you know. And there's a real fondness there and we get together and we laugh and she talks about her work in therapy. We talk about movies.”

He calls the divorce “a terrible loss” exacerbated by his labouring under certain “romantic attitudes” later extirpated by his therapist. “I'm much more practical about it now.” He discussed these attitudes in a self-help book, Families and How to Survive Them, co-written with his shrink, the late Robin Skynner. He looks pleased when I praise it.

“I don't know. I sometimes think that my main task in this particular existence has been to get to know and understand women better.” I smile. The sentence seems to pack a couple of jokes.

But he is serious. “Truthfully. Because I had a very, very difficult relationship with my mother, who was supremely self-centred. She was hilariously self-centred. She did not really take interest in anything that didn't immediately affect her.” The woman who ran the old persons' residence where she spent her last years before her death in 2002 aged 101, called her an “id on two legs”. Alyce Faye, he adds, called her “a killer”, and, he points out - it's the only positive thing he says about her - she is a highly trained analyst.

What he does not address is a prognosis by Alyce Faye that John would end up just as “utterly selfish”. It seems unlikely but I can see that empathy is not Cleese's strongest point. Not only does he take no account of how the divorce may be affecting Alyce Faye emotionally, he fails to acknowledge how hard it must have been for his mother to miss out, as he claims, on the experience of parental love. Nor does his sense of irony engage with the fact that the author of books on family survival has reached the end of the road with yet another one. When I ask if he really feels he has benefited from all his therapy, he replies: “Tremendously.” He is happy. He has his old friends. He has two of the “best daughters in the world”.

And a new girlfriend, reportedly a 34-year-old blonde marketing executive named Veronica Smiley? “Oh Smiley's great fun. She's helping me with a speech I have to do on marketing. But that all got blown up.” He does not want a partner right now. His reasoning is revealing. “I don't want to have to start being unselfish again. The great thing about being on your own is you do what you damn well like.”

Would he not have liked to have spent the past 40 years with one woman? “No. I think it should be like dog licences. I think you should have to renew marriage licences every five years, unless you have children. And I think before you have children you should have to go and pass various tests and get a licence to have a child. Because it's the most transformative and difficult thing of your life.”

More important than work? “Far more important. People don't understand this, and some people who are highly motivated by work, but when I worked I was always motivated, funnily enough, by the fear of being bad. Because it is so humiliating to make a joke and have no one laugh.”

Was it this fear that led him to sue the London Evening Standard six years ago after it reported the cancellation of an American sitcom in which he had a small recurring role? “The Standard ran a piece saying my career was in ruins. And it was a flat-out lie and an invention which they didn't even bother to check remotely. And I went after them because I didn't think they should be lying to their readers. But, of course, I'm not allowed to go after them on those grounds because the law doesn't recognise that, so I had to pretend that my reputation was hurt. Which it wasn't. I could tell you that straight. It wasn't hurt, because nobody in America cares what somebody in the Evening Standard writes.”

You would not, I think, call Cleese a forgiving man. But making jokes, as Cleese acknowledges, always invites humiliating failure. “I'll tell you something quite funny,” he says. “When [Alyce Faye] had her hip replacement I realised that there was a chance for a little humour and I sent a bunch of flowers to her lawyer's office saying, ‘Would you please inspect these flowers and see whether they are acceptable and would you please vet the greetings card that comes with these and see whether that is also legitimate. And if you are satisfied that both of them are not harmful, would you be good enough to send them on to my wife as soon as possible?'

To which the lawyer replied: ‘As the trade papers say, he's not as funny as he was.' The sort of leaden, nasty - what's the word? - black-hearted response to a little conceit.”

I can sense John Cleese's disappointment. He lobs a joke into enemy territory; it fizzes like a damp squib. But the story at least contradicts the prediction that Cleese is on the road to utter selfishness. He remembered, after all, to send Alyce Faye flowers, and that's not bad for a man who can't stop mentioning their war.

Batteries Not Included begins tonight on Dave at 10pm

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This is the new updated and interactive official Python site.

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The full Monty... why Eric Idle is happy to revisit his Python past
12 July 2010
By Sarah Freeman
Yorkshire Post

At the height of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Eric Idle made a promise to himself. When the performers went their separate ways in 1983, and when the Ministry of Silly Walks had been closed for good, he would in the spirit of the show prepare to do something completely different. As it turned out, things didn't quite work out that way.

He did try for a while to shake off the Python legacy, but wherever he went there was always someone ready to ambush him with one of its many catchphrases or plead with him to do the "Nudge Nudge" sketch just one more time. In the end he gave up.

"In the late '70s I think we all wanted to escape into the shadows for a bit," says Idle, now 67 and blessed with the healthy glow that comes from having lived in California for the last 20 years. "As the show drew to a close, of course we all wondered what the future held. It had been such a big part of our lives, but I suddenly became aware of how difficult it was going to be to break away from it.

"In the early 1980s, I ran off to France, but that didn't help. While I was out there, Monty Python and the Meaning of Life won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, which well and truly blew my cover. I'd been happy as the eccentric British guy on holiday, but then everyone started asking for autographs again. At that point, I realised Python wasn't something I was going to be able to put to one side, so I thought I might as well embrace it."

Having reconciled his name always being mentioned alongside Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese and Graham Chapman, Idle was never short of work and quickly acquired an eclectic CV. There was his own sketch show, Rutland Weekend Television, a lead role in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado at the Royal Opera House and he earned decent reviews for his roles in films from Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to Casper. There were also some less wise choices and shortly after Burn Hollywood Burn, in which he played a beleaguered director trying to take on Hollywood, won an award for worst picture of 1997, Idle went back to doing what he has always done best, writing.

While the other Pythons had collaborated on sketches, Idle had always preferred his own company when it came to refining the kind of one liners and the songs for which he was best known. For a while he had toyed with an idea for a musical "lovingly ripped off" from the Holy Grail and, free from other commitments, he went back to the drawing board.

"I could feel I was being pushed down the film route," he says. "It would have been easy to keep picking up parts here and there, but I knew it wasn't making me happy. I had always loved the feeling of a joke or a sketch you'd written when it was performed in front of a live audience. There is something very special about that, so that's what I decided to do."

This time, Idle wasn't completely flying solo. John du Prez, who had played trumpet on Always Look on the Bright Side of Life and with whom Idle had co-written The Meaning of Life's Galaxy Song, came on board and quite quickly the pair pulled together a rough draft for a show, which would eventually become Spamalot.

"John and I always seem to be singing from the same page," he says. "It's really nice having someone there whose opinion you completely trust, but in the early days of writing Spamalot I wasn't entirely sure how it would work out.

"I always thought it might be a risk. In fact, everything I've ever done I've thought was a risk. With a project like this it's always going to be a bit of a rollercoaster. There have been plenty of times when I've sat back and thought, 'I think we might have cracked this' and the very next day I've had dreadful cold feet. But you know what? The day you're not prepared for failure is the day you stay at home and do nothing."

Idle need not have worried. Premiering in New York in 2005, Spamalot, a Pythonesque parody of the King Arthur legend, became an instant Broadway hit. Nominated for 14 Tony Awards, it won three, including Best Musical, and went on tour to Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe. It has finally arrived in Britain and Idle admits it's a slightly different production than the won which wowed American audiences.

"On Broadway, everything costs $10m," he says, a slight US twang very much in evidence. "When people are spending a couple of hundred bucks on tickets, they expect something spectacular and it's a foolish man who doesn't give it to them.

"Since we left Broadway, we've had the chance to play around with it a little and I guess it is now more quintessentially Python than it was originally. But as well as being quite silly, it's also the story of a quest and a tale of romance between King Arthur and the Lady of the Lake and I hope those elements lift it above the status of simple revue or panto.

"Python was an emotion-free zone, any sketch which talked even vaguely about feelings or dealt with the human experience would be shot down by Gilliam or Cleese. Women hardly featured in the show, which was fine, but when it came to Spamalot I knew we had to introduce a female character. I didn't want it to be a boys only show."

To that end, comedian Marcus Brigstocke, who has recently taken over the role of King Arthur, is joined on stage by Emmerdale's Hayley Tamaddon.

"Each of the cast bring something new to the show. They leave the stamp of their personality on it and we can also adapt little bits to suit them," says Idle, reaching for a piece of paper. He had seen the new cast on stage for the first time the previous night and wants to remind himself to talk to one of the actors about a particular scene.

"That's what's great about theatre, you can tweak lines or rewrite whole scenes as you go along. Marcus had never sung in front of an audience before, but he's perfect. He has a natural kind of puzzled dignity which you need to play King Arthur."

Born in South Shields, Idle went to boarding school in Wolverhampton and says studying was the only way to alleviate the inevitable boredom. It also secured him a place at Cambridge University where he was invited to join the prestigious Footlights Club. It was 1964 and with Chapman and Cleese in the year above, it was, he says, a incredibly creative time to be at university.

"My generation were very lucky," he says. "We already had the Beatles and we already had the Rolling Stones, comedians came in the next wave. I guess I was in the right place at the right time. However, you do have to recognise, comedy is a young man's business, which is why I've enjoyed doing the musical so much. Broadway is much more suited to old people. You have to learn so many different skills to put on a musical, so the people at the top tend not to be fresh out of college. It's a place I feel very comfortable."

While Idle is still very much involved with each new Spamalot casting, he also has another project in the pipeline. He won't give any details, except to say he's been working on it for two years, but it will probably be another three or four before it comes to fruition.

"In the business you always have to change the goal posts," he says. "There is always someone there happy to knock you down, but you just have to ignore them. The whole point is always to bite off more than you can chew. John always says, 'Eric think of something very silly and that shall be our starting point'."

As Idle himself admits, once a Python, always a Python.