In the early 1980’s I spent a fair amount of time learning about the Universe.  As a religious sceptic I found some point to mankind’s existence in contemplating this vast Universe in which we find ourselves, and some comfort for my own certain personal extinction in the study of cosmology.  We are just so tiny we can’t possibly complain, and can only wonder at the vastness of this enormous thing we are unexpectedly a part of.  I mean what are the odds?  And in this shape?  Gratitude seems the only sensible reaction.  Not pissing and moaning that it’s going to end.

We were entering a time of the most fertile expansion of human knowledge.  Indeed the last century has seen the biggest expansion of our knowledge of our cosmos ever.  But back then Black holes were considered dangerous ideas, the Big Bang was a very new theory and there were three main contenders for the ultimate end of the universe: the continued expansion for ever idea, the steady state theory, and the ultimate contraction of the universe, where gravity pulls everything back into the singularity from which we seem to have sprung, where Time’s arrow reverses itself and goes backwards.  Hubble had shown us clearly that the Universe was expanding but for how long might this go on?  We had of course no knowledge of dark matter or dark energy, which we now believe comprises over 80% of the whole rapidly expanding universe….

It was fascinating for me to discover that, with no science or mathematics whatsoever, I could still understand the nature of the debate.  Even join in.  So I collected a series of known knowns and wrote a lyric.  The Galaxy Song would appear in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which we filmed in 1982,  and is still a reasonable sketch of our state of knowledge of the Universe at that time.

We’re thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point/ We go round every two hundred million years…

While contemplating these incredible facts I made my own scientific discovery.  I was simultaneously self-educating myself about Earth science and Biology and the origins of life on the planet and I became interested in mass extinctions, which have occurred fairly regularly in pre-historic times.  In particular the Permian extinction, which caused the loss of almost 98% of life on this planet.  What caused that?  The extinction of the dinosaurs was getting a lot of traction in public interest, although not yet proven as a cometary event.  I knew the earth passed regularly through cometary debris fields, which caused the amazing and spectacular shooting star showers that I observed with such joy in the clear summer skies of Provence, and I wondered if the sun itself might pass through similar galactic debris fields.  Might this not cause mass extinctions on our planet?   I was seeking some kind of regular pattern and was wondering vaguely if there might not be seasons of the sun: spring when life emerged, summer, fall and then winter when extinctions occurred. In order to see if that might be remotely possible I wanted to know how many times the sun had been round the galaxy and nowhere could I find such a figure.  So I made a very simple calculation.  I divided the time of our solar circumnavigation of the Milky Way Galaxy, “We go round every two hundred million years,” by the estimated age of our sun.  In those days 4.5 billion years was the accepted figure.  I was shocked by the result.  In a universe where extremely large numbers (millions of billions) were common the result of my simple maths was staggering.  The number of times the sun has been round the Galaxy is only twenty-two and a half!   That’s it.  That’s all!  I couldn’t believe it.  I checked and rechecked my figures.   4,500,000,000 divided by 200,000,000 is approximately 22.5.

A little later I was reading Timescale by the science writer Nigel Calder and on the 3rd March 1984 with much trepidation I wrote to him:

Dear Nigel Calder ,

I am enjoying Timescale very much and I know I shall continue to enjoy it for many years. On the strength of this unsolicited compliment I wonder if you can help me with a hopeless layman’s question which has been bothering me for years? If the Solar System is four and a half thousand million years old, and the period of our galactic orbit is two hundred million years, then we have only orbited the galaxy twenty two and a half times.  It seems such a ridiculously low number is it right?

He replied almost immediately on the 8^th March 1984

Dear Eric Idle

Right: it’s not many times around the galactic maypole, since the Earth began. The figure for the period of the Sun’s orbit still seems to be about 200 million years, so Mother Earth is indeed a flighty 22 galactic years old. And by my reckoning the universe itself is about 67 galactic years old, scarcely old enough to run a Coal Board. Perhaps I should have made something of this in Timescale.

I ‘m glad you like the book and it was very nice of you to write. To return the compliment: you must know that Python’s ECT has cured many a case of terminal earnestness in people like me. Seeing that science is a game played with crazy ideas, I sometimes wonder how much of the current breakneck rate of discovery is due to your cerebral anarchism….

He then went on to propose we collaborate on a musical about Halley, whose comet was due to return a year later.  He concluded:

I’d love to meet for a chat – about Halley if you like, or real science if you prefer.

I replied on May 13^th 1984

Dear Nigel Calder,

Thank you for your very kind  letter. I felt very proud that you were able to affirm my  tentative cosmological questionings.  I shall now proceed to bigger and better things – calculating the age of Fred Hoyle,  and the number of years it takes to circumnavigate  Patrick Moore.

I must also thank you for your book on Halley, which I very much enjoyed.  Your musical sounds interesting, though I personally have taken time off from delving into the past and am now optimistically researching the future.

(an obscure reference to The Road to Mars.)

I’m  sorry it has taken me  so long to reply.  Like the  comets I wander about a lot, except that  I can rarely  predict where I will turn up – clearly pre-Copernican  journeyings…. I do hope we can meet when I return…

So I was right!   And it’s possible that I was the very first to observe this.

I shared this correspondence recently with Professor Brian Cox and said on the basis of this I thoroughly expected to get my invitation to join the Royal Society.  He replied:

I will ensure that membership forms are dispatched.

So on the strength of that early discovery I think it’s time to update the figures.

We now believe the Sun is 5.7 billion years old. So to calculate the number of times our star has been round the galaxy take the age of the sun: 5,700,000,000 years and divide it by the time it takes to complete one circuit of the Milky Way: 200,000,000.

Result:   28 and a half circuits.

You get it all here folks….

The brain is a weird thing isn’t it?  I’ve learned to respect mine.  Oh sure I’ve battered it about with massive quantities of social and recreational stimulants.  It can handle a fair amount of abuse and still recover, but for long synapse life, careful treatment is recommended. Quite a few Sixties celebrants are now suffering early onset of the dreaded mist.

What’s weird for me is the transition from sleep.  Frequently I wake up with an idea.  That is to say while I am still “asleep” I have an idea and then I wake up and write it down or start writing.   Very often it’s a line.   A thought.  Occasionally it’s a joke.  Very infrequently it’s a song.  Today it was  a song.

I was dreaming that Mick Jagger was downstairs in a dream version of our French home.  It was not at all like it but  I recognized it as our French house.  (He has never been there by the way.)   We had had dinner and I went upstairs to fetch a couple of guitars.  It wasn’t easy as a large autobus was just leaving my bedroom, trying to get through the narrow exit.   I ran around collecting the things you need, two guitars, capos, picks, tuners, and a notepad and pencil.  My wife was there.   She was making going to bed noises.  I said honey I am going to play.  If I write a song with Mick you’ll certainly be happy I did.  She concurred.   I might have been tuning the guitar but a very simple riff came into my head.   It was very catchy.  I woke up.   I should write that down I thought.   I fetched my little digital recorder, picked up a Taylor guitar and figured out the riff.  Oddly it was in B flat.  That was the key in my dream.  (I never write in B flat.)    It started with F, went to E flat and ended in the dominant key B flat.   I got that down.  Then I realized that was the hook, the chorus, and my brain supplied the obvious opening starting verse in E flat to B flat.   Four of those and then bring in the hook.  I recorded that.  So I played that for a while and recorded a verse chorus verse chorus chorus.  Then I wondered about words.  Playing it back I jotted down a few things.  It’s very African.

Still and all    One and all.    For You.

But I wasn’t happy with the “For You” bit because it didn’t fit the insistent rhythm of the pattern that was inside my head.  Just then another part of my brain warned me to write down what I was intending to do this morning before I forgot,  since I was now side-tracked into writing a song.  So I wrote a little post-it note for myself:  “try importing facsimile into your blog.”  Then my brain went Ding! “facsimile” that’s the perfect rhythm of the word pattern that the riff ends with.  The perfect verbal match for the sound pattern.

Still and all.   Reasonable.  Facsimile.

Also it fits as an African chant underneath the verse – facsimile, facsimile, facsimile, facsimile.

So there we are.  I have a dummy lyric.  The words fit the rhythm.  I have the hook recorded.  I have no idea what the song is about.  I can leave this for now.  The inspirational part of the brain now awaits the Protestant work ethic part of the brain to come along and fit words to the pattern.   That might be a day’s work.  Composers always take just a few minutes while the poor lyricist slogs away all day.  That’s the nature of the beast.   There are far more words than notes.   So far more possibilities to consider.  I’m thinking that the left side of the brain supplied the dream part and the right side will now come along and tidy it up.  Or perhaps it’s vice versa.  I’m not sure.  But I’ll keep you posted if it becomes anything.

March 4, 2013 6.30

                                                                           Foreword

“The vagina,” writes Carlton, “both looks and acts like a purse.”

It’s an odd opening for an academic treatise, isn’t it?   I’m not even sure that it’s true.  Does the vagina act like a purse?  I suppose it could be argued that “the love muscle,” as he calls it, is so sought after by men that they do seem happy to throw money at it, yet it is a strange way to open a scholarly study of human love;  but then this author is always unusual and it will come as no surprise to his many fans to find that the writer is not a human at all but a thinking machine, a 4.5 Bowie.  I never use the term robot,  for the word implies something mechanical or pre-controlled, which in the case of Carlton would be very misleading because he is, despite his non-humanity, a highly original thinker.  We are fortunate indeed to have him here on Campus as Regius Professor of Humorology.  Humorology, the study of the causes and nature of comedy, is today a well- established science but when Carlton joined our University over a hundred years ago, it was a brand new discipline, a tiny backwater in the Department of Metachemistry.  It’s hard for us humans to remember that when he came along Metachemistry itself was less than a hundred and fifty years old; this now venerable science which began with The Uncertainty Theory, where you can’t say where anything is, and ended with The Anxiety Theory, where you can’t say where you left it.

Incidentally, I use the masculine personal pronoun with Carlton purely for convenience.  “It” seems so cold, and the modern “heshe” is ugly, but it is important to remember that Carlton is essentially genderless.   A perfect viewpoint you might say, for undertaking a study of human sexuality, which is what this fine book is, yet Carlton was ridiculed for tackling the subject of sex at all.  “Professor Joins Cliterati” was the headline of one particularly nasty review in a Tablot, and there has been no shortage of critics denying the right of non-humans to examine human behavior, particularly sexuality.  But even this doesn’t quite explain the furor which has greeted the announcement of the forthcoming publication of Venus Envy.

Perhaps Carlton should be accustomed to abuse, for he has never been far from controversy.  Indeed, since his earliest days he has courted conflict, as you may see from his autobiographical memoir, I Carlton, if you are ever lucky enough to get hold of a copy.   I need hardly expound his manifold academic achievements.  He was the first thinking machine to submit a thesis for a Nobel Prize, De Rerum Comoedia, (Concerning Comedy) on the nature of irony in humans, although, ironically, he was disqualified for not being human.    He was compensated for this disappointment when his startlingly original thesis recognizing the force of Levity in the Universe earned him tenure here at The University of South Titan.

There were many at the time who remonstrated against accepting an android into academia, but he soon rose above this early prejudice. Indeed in the last few decades, I am happy to say, mechanistic racism has been almost entirely removed from our Universities.  Teaching machines are now totally accepted on Campus.  We have much to gain from non-human thought, not least a little humility when considering ourselves.   Professor Carlton has been in the vanguard of helping us comprehend the way we are.   His new book is invaluable to an understanding of the way we mate.  More than a bed-time companion, it challenges our way of thinking about ourselves.

When I first joined the Metachemistry Department,  Gratuitism was all the rage.  Gratuitism, or Free Won’t  to give it its proper academic title, is essentially a rag-tag philosophy which argues that chaos reigns in the Universe, that everything is happenstance, that life is a mistake and that accident is God.  Gertrude Stein was the unwitting Godmother of this philosophy with her observation “there’s no there there,”  but she was referring disparagingly to Oakland and not denying the causal reality of all things and she would be distinctly surprised to learn she had become the basis of a philosophy, just as Mozart would be shocked to learn he had starred in a movie.  That’s the thing about the future: it’s all utterly startling.

When I was a young undergraduate Carlton demolished Gratuitism in a brilliant series of lectures called Byte Me in which he charted the evolution of the electron.  He invented the concept of “ironic” numbers, figures that could be understood to have different values to different observers, and was able to prove mathematically that the future is both inevitable and unpredictable.  Nothing could be known for sure and yet this very unpredictability was a certainty.  So how to resolve this paradox?   In the Electron Age, he argued, existence is indistinguishable from information.  Indeed the information and the evidence that it exists are the same thing. Existence is essence.  He had rediscovered a form of Electronic Existentialism.   This led to his great work on Bionic Evolution in which he charted the evolution of the electron.

What he labeled The Wood Age, our Biological Era in which information traveled at the speed of life, and was largely carbon based (tree, paper, ink, coal, steam and oil) had been replaced by the Bionic Era, The Age of the Electron.

Unnatural History, as this subject was then called, is now better known as The Inhumanities, but Carlton was the first to study the history and development of the information-bearing electron in his groundbreaking book The Ascent of Magnet.  Even then he attracted detractors.   His book was ridiculed, parodied as Fission Chips, and he was dismissed as MacDarwin, but I am happy to say that this great work has remained a best seller, as well as one of my personal favorites (along with Metal Fatigue, his slender book of poems which earned him a Pulitzer and a Tony Award.)

During his later years, when asked what he was working on he would reply that “he was working on nothing.”  He meant it literally of course.  The concept of nothing had always obsessed him.  The idea of the absence of thingness intrigued him.  Since nothing cannot come from something, then nothing cannot possibly exist, since something is the nature of the Universe.  Conceptually even a vacuum is filled with itself.  To examine these ideas he invented his famous Negative Dice.  He created a pair of dice numbered in the usual way except each digit was given a negative value: minus one through minus six.  When the sum of the two dice is obtained by multiplication and not by simple addition, it is impossible to roll a negative number.    With normal dice, it is impossible to roll a zero, but if you mix Negative and Positive Dice it is now possible to roll zero. (Actually six times:  six plus minus six, through one plus minus one.)

For this he was banned from all Casinos.

Carlton has been unjustly accused of creating controversy merely for the sake of it and there are even some who refer to him as Charlatan and call his teaching The I Thing.   He has, they say, invented The Nouvelle Vague with his famous Butterfly Mind Theorem,  a theorem which becomes so easily distracted it is unable to prove itself.   But this is nonsense.  He is an utterly sympathetic entity.  He was the first to argue for the extension of animal legal rights to intelligent aquatic life, and his paper Habeas Porpoise denounced man’s inhumanity to manatee and led directly to legislation which permitted dolphins for the first time to have lawyers.  Although his Complete History of the Future, is still sadly incomplete, his Venus Envy, stands as a shining example of popular academic writing.  I am sure it will find many fans.  I know that his current lectures, Enquiries into the Nature of Human Religion, have caused anger, but I find his controversial Paradox of the Atheist God,  in which he posits a God who does not believe in himself, a tremendously stimulating idea and I can only deplore the decision of the University to withdraw the course and ban him from all further religious enquiry.  His enemies wanted to burn him.  Or at least melt him down.  In this age!  It is monstrous how much influence powerful religious bodies still wield over the academic world through their funding programs, and we would do well to remember that religions, while posing as harmless philosophies, are outside the realms of normal logic, behave contrary to the rules of science and are the primary cause of human warfare.  As well as leading to strange costumes and bad sex.

This sharp lesson in the limitations of freedom of speech left Carlton with only one major field for study:  the subject of Sex.  Venus Envy is the fruit of this labor.  Ever since man first ejaculated in space – see Confessions of an Astronaut or Hand Jobs in Tight Places (Oxford Scientific Books 2001) sex in space has been the subject of thousands of books, from the helpful best-seller The Joy of Zero Gravity Sex to the erotic classic 2069.   So this book of Carlton’s is not exactly virgin territory, if I may be forgiven a pun.  (Carlton loves puns almost as much as paradoxes, indeed one of his early books is called Paradox Lost and features a blind poet who cannot find his manuscript.)  This is the first book by a non-human to attempt to understand human sexuality and for that reason alone it is worthy of attention.  His understanding of human comedy is unique in my experience amongst academic androids and it has permitted him to observe that the mating process in humans is essentially hilarious.    This makes Venus Envy a classic of its kind.

I thoroughly recommend this book.

Carl Sartre

The University of Southern Saturn

The author of this foreword, Professor Carl Sartre, was found dead shortly after writing this introduction.  At 11 a.m. on the morning of February 45^th 2238 (Universal Relative Time) he was found by his Housebot, lying on his back, bleeding heavily on to a  Persian rug behind the desk in his study at the University of South Titan.   He had been bludgeoned to death by a heavy object.   The murder weapon was found beside the body.  It attracted considerable attention due to its unusual nature.   It was a large heavy metal dildo.

 This silver metal dildo, an antique from the 21^st century, on loan from The Hustler Museum, was until recently in the possession of Professor Carlton, a humanoid co-faculty worker, and the subject of the deceased’s last known writing.  When questioned, the android claimed the dildo was a research tool for his new book Venus Envy, a study of human sexuality.  He had no idea how it had left his possession or how it had come to be found at the murder scene.   He described himself as a colleague in the Department of Inhumanities, a chess partner of the deceased and the author of several notable academic books.

 The shocking nature of the crime, and the nature of the murder weapon created a stir amongst the Tellytabs.   Who would want to kill such a harmless old academic? Why the dildo?  Was it a sex crime?   Speculation was rife.  The Tablots were full of stories.   There were no apparent witnesses, all doors were locked, the usual scanning devices were in place.  There was no forcible entry.  No alarms.  No warnings.  Only one person had access to the Professor’s quarters.: the humanoid Carlton.  It seems he was entrusted with the entry codes and was in the habit of visiting the Professor in the evenings, to enjoy a quiet game of three-dimensional chess or watch a ball game.    Suspicion naturally fell on him. He had the means, and the opportunity but there was a total lack of motive.   On the whole authors do not go around bludgeoning the writers of their forewords; certainly not at their desks and certainly not while they are writing such flattering recommendations.  It seemed unthinkable that the perpetrator could be Carlton.  Why should this venerable thinking machine resort to violence?  And yet who else could it be?

From The Tablots Report, the evening of the 46^th of February (URT time).

Carlton, an Assistant Professor at the University of South Titan has been detained and is assisting Police in their enquiries.

Footlights!       A Hundred Years Of Cambridge Comedy       By Robert Hewison

Foreword by Eric Idle

Comedy is a very odd activity.  To stand on a stage in front of hundreds of other people and make them laugh is a very strange thing to do.  For some bizarre anthropological reason, since earliest time a few people have found it necessary to be amusing.  Why should this be so?  Clearly when someone goes to such lengths to attract the admiration of strangers we can observe that they must feel desperately unloved, but this does not explain why we, the audience, should tolerate and actively encourage them in their weird behavior.  Nor why comedy should prove to be so popular or so universal.

It seems no coincidence that England, a land rich in absurdities, should be so rich in comedians.  Writing about comedy is difficult, but it is not half so difficult as writing comedy.  For example, I am writing in this room to which I have come every morning for the past few weeks, but today is different.  Today I have only to write about comedy, I don’t actually have to write the bloody stuff itself.  If I’m wrong when I’m writing about comedy then some minor critic in Penge will abuse me over his saltimbocca, but if I’m wrong when I’m writing comedy then – horror of horrors – nobody laughs: there is nothing but the sound of one hand clapping.  It is this potential result that gives comedy its edge.  It is a bit like tightrope walking.  You really have to do it to know it, and indeed that is also the only way to learn how to do it.

If it were nothing more than gilded youths dressing up as women then you could hardly be blamed for thinking of the Cambridge Footlights as an effete collection of privileged wankers.  It has from time to time been just that, but collectively it is far more than that, for it has proved to be a durable training ground for people who have gone on to become excellent in their own right.  This is Footlights’ triumph and its justification.  It is also preeminently a self-inventing form.  No University Official stepped forward and said ‘Let there be Footlights.’  In fact they have flourished so healthily without direct encouragement that this might be seen as yet another triumph for Cambridge subversion.

Comedy is a shared experience.  Without an audience it is nothing.  Far more so than tragedy, comedy is intimately connected with the audience’s response.  We weep alone, but we all laugh together.  It is this shared communality that makes it so powerful and so popular.  It is constantly reminding us of our own absurdity in this vast universe.  It is frequently to do with scale, cutting us down to size, laughing at our human weaknesses.  For a few moments it removes us from the prison of our own personalities, the trap of our own self-created selves, and unites us in a warm shared response by making us laugh at the trivia in which we continually enmesh ourselves.  It is an uplifting experience.  We are taken out of ourselves, and made to laugh at ourselves.  This is both slightly painful (laughing does hurt) and healthy (because it is done communally).  It is instant group therapy.

It achieves this effect by demonstration rather than persuasion.  We do not decide to laugh, we find ourselves laughing.  In the dark amidst hundreds of strangers we suddenly find ourselves united in a tribal explosion of noise, which begins in a shout of recognition and ends in the sound of a gurgling drain or a goose being strangled.  For a few seconds we are all barking mad together.

To be on the other side of a laugh, causing it, triggering it and feeling the great wave of human noise come back at you, is one of the most powerful and addictive sensations that there is.  It is a great welcoming sound that wraps round the performer, enmeshing him in approval.  He can learn to play with it, to toy with the audience’s expectations, to tickle the laugh, to surf along it, hold it back and then finally release it, but he can learn this only by doing it.  To be sure, such ability is partly instinctive – some people are just funny – but it can also be learned, or at least honed and improved by experience.  This is why a structure like the Footlights is so useful.  It is both a training ground, and a safety net, which prevents hundreds of people who are drawn to it but are otherwise unsuitable, from pursuing it too far.

This is the history of a comedy club.  A loose association of extraordinary people with almost nothing in common except that they all belonged to it.  Nothing dates faster than comedy.  Today’s topical witticism is tomorrow’s puzzled yawn.  From the many extracts in this book it is easy to chuckle at the sketches near our own time, but at the distant end of the century the humour is elusive and we can only stare blankly at the lines and wonder ‘Did they really laugh at this?’ I think the reason for this is quite simple.  Comedy consists of two elements:  the content and the manner.  The content is the contemporary trivia of day-to-day shared experience from which the comedian draws his material.  The manner is the secret that belongs to the performer.  An odd mixture of ‘timing’ and a strange persuasive power which reassures the audience and lulls them into a state of confidence in which they can accept that that virtually anything he says is funny.  Looking at old scripts we are left only with what they said, not how they said it, and that is to miss perhaps sixty percent of the comedy.  A good comedian can make you laugh at almost anything.

The value of Footlights for me was that, while learning about content, how to write, rewrite and cut sketch material, I still had to  go out and learn performing in front of quite difficult audiences.  In my short time there I experienced almost every kind of audience.  We performed cabaret professionally at least twice a week.  We played in theatres, we played at Edinburgh Festivals, before factory audiences, before dinner-jacketed hoorays and ball-gowned debs, in Butlin’s holiday camps, before drunks, before dinner, before Round Table businessmen, and ultimately in radio and television studios.  Had one sat down to plan a crash course in show business one could hardly have bettered this as a learning experience.  A University which permits such activity is clearly doing its job, by doing absolutely nothing.

Despite repeated complaints about the Footlights – that it is somehow too professional (but then who wants amateur comedy?); that it is elitist (though nobody laughs because they are impressed by the social rank of those on stage); that it is privileged (nobody laughs out of kindness either); and that it is undergraduate (they are after all, undergraduates) – it has nevertheless self-created its own tradition.  A tradition which seeks after excellence, and then seeks to hide that excellence.  (Ars est celare artem.)  The measure of the Footlights is that it is continually reinventing itself.  It is impressive that with no encouragement from the University, no financial support, no grants nor University premises, and with hardly any real continuity except for a few dedicated officers (take a bow Harry Porter), it should survive for a hundred years.

We should be grateful to Robert Hewison, a man who has suffered the advantages of an Oxford education, for so excellently researching and writing the history of Cambridge humour.

Eric Idle

Sydney 1982

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576767.Footlights_