It’s interview season again and I have to pack my bags and peddle my ass and ponce off to pastures new, this time to Norway to pimp a new production of Spamalot.  I actually love going to places I have never been before and I treasure visits to Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Trieste, Malmo and Stockholm.  The Producers always treat me well and the casts are fun to meet as the play attracts actors who love Python, and because of the nature of the piece there is always a terrific spirit amongst them.  It  is exciting to visit a new city and to hear the play in a new language, and though my Norwegian is a little rusty, I am looking forward to Oslo, though I am concerned that “Ni” actually means “Nine” in Norwegian and there is a danger of The Knights of Ni meaning something.   I vaguely wonder whether I should bother Michael Palin with this.

The only problem with showing up for an opening is that the Producers lean on my good nature (your what Eric?) and I have to become a walking billboard, ready talk to anyone they can cram into a hotel room for a day.  Malmo was a record eighteen and I could barely speak by the end of it.  It’s hard to maintain one’s human kindness under such a relentless barrage of questioning, and I have been known to grow testy, far from the saintly character both of you who read this blog know me to be,  but I recognize that it is part of the job.  We want the audience to come along and enjoy themselves and if this means I have to answer another hundred more Python questions then so be it.

I don’t mind radio interviews as I’m embarrassingly good at the glib sound bite, and telly doesn’t worry me at all, since I have no idea what I am going to say and so it’s really a form of improv.  Morning TV can be especially fun as the hosts are dodging between breaking news and weather and there is always something to laugh at.   The late night shows can also be amusing and I usually get off one or two good lines, though the worst thing about them is the pre-interview.  To make sure the host doesn’t look like a twat, a minion calls a day or so beforehand, and interviews you so they can write up some intelligent questions for their employer to ask on TV.   My problem, which I always point out, is that if I say something funny in the pre-interview I will never say it on air.  Not deliberately, I just won’t remember what I said, so I try to be very unfunny in the pre-interview, because if they stick to a script on the show it feels like being in the middle of a badly rehearsed play where you are unsure of your lines, and the host keeps looking at you expectantly to say that funny thing you said four days ago to their minion, which by now you have completely forgotten.

The very best interviewers, John Stewart or Craig Ferguson, invariably throw away the prepared line of questioning and go right off on a tangent.  They thrive on this and both are brilliant at it and I love it.  It’s a kind of intellectual ping pong, and they are always the most hilarious interviews, since neither of us has a clue what we are going to say.

“What are you going to do next?” John Stewart asked me once.

“I’m going to become a rap artist”  I said (What? Where did that come from?)

“What will you call yourself?” he said, taking a swig of water.

“Muff Daddy” I said and watched him spit his drink out.

Jimmy Fallon is also another good comic who loves to go off book.

Print interviews are far more worrying.  To begin with, most print journalists seem to come in with the story already in their heads, and your job is just to supply the quotes.  So for instance you do a story with the Daily Quail (name changed to avoid embarrassment) which is supposed to be about Spamalot and the story comes out about how you are at war with John Cleese.

The hardest interviewers are the secret Python geeks.  They come in with the hope that one day the Pythons will reunite and like the Arthurian legend rise up and return.   Sometimes they seem to feel that I have managed to break up the group, because of the success of Spamalot, and even when I point out to them that Python has done nothing for thirty years, despite several attempts on my part to seduce them back into a film and a tour, they are still vaguely resentful of me.   So I don’t like doing newspaper interviews and I avoid them altogether in the UK.  I’d rather be on telly or radio where if I say something funny or ironic it can be seen as such.  Abroad though is a different country, and I do do print, with the added tedium of having to wait for the question to be translated into English, and my reply translated back into Flemish or Catalan or whatever.    I am looking forward to the Paris opening of Spamalot in January, for my French has become a lot more fluent this summer, and I aim to bewilder French interviewers with my weird version of a Provencal accent.

If you still want your Spamalot in English then you may be pleased to hear that the wonderful Christopher Luscombe production of Spamalot which ran so successfully at The Harold Pinter Theater this summer and garnished me great reviews for his hard work is coming back again at The Playhouse from November 12^th through April.  If you intend to go at Christmas time do book early as Spamalot is now firmly established as an alternative Panto in the UK, having smashed Box Office records last year at Brighton, and doing really well the year before in Birmingham.

And for regular readers of this blog you may be pleased to know that every now and again if I write something I think funny I send it to The New Yorker, and this month I submitted another piece that they’ve accepted.  It will be in Shouts and Murmurs, on September 17^th and is called In Me Own Words, The Rock and Roll Memoirs of Eff “Stiffie” Steffham.

Coming home through LAX late last year a steely eyed guardian of your gates peered suspiciously at my Green Card and, as is now sadly customary for we poor semi-citizens of your great and growing empire,  finger printed me and photographed my eyeballs.

“How long have you been a Green Card Holder?” he asked suspiciously, though his screen could surely have told him that and much much more.

“Oh  I have had it for ages” I said “More than twenty years.”

“Then why aren’t you an American?”  

“Erm.  Er…Well…”

I was flustered.   I was bothered.  Was this a proper line of questioning?   Of course you must never complain to a Customs Officer, or they’ll have you bent over in a back room snapping on their rubber gloves ready to poke around in your rectum.  Why is it arseholes always choose the arse for punishment?   I sometimes wonder if  those alien abductions when sophisticated beings from another planet descend in glistening saucers to perpetrate anal penetrations on poor witless rednecks is not actually some Alien Customs program.  Or maybe an extra-terrestrial pro gay marriage program.  Do the rednecks say as they feel the alien probe on their little redneck buttocks “Why aren’t you an American?”  

What should I say?  What is the right thing to say?  My thoughts were racing but somewhere deep inside me outrage was simmering.   Enough was enough.

“Because sir I am an Englishman.  Born and raised in England under the bombs of Hitler.  A member of one of its most prestigious Universities dating back to 1498. A man who watched England win the World Cup at Wembley in 1966 and Man U lift the European trophy in 1968.  An Englishman, a proud Elizabethan, heir to the traditions of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wilde, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Dickens, a graduate of Cambridge University, a pre-baby bubble boomer, a survivor of the Sixties and a member of one of the most famous comedy groups in the world.

“Is it not enough I live in your fair country and pay taxes to your bankrupt system, ruined by the systemic avoidance of tax by your greedy corporations, who claim rights hitherto reserved for citizens and earn exemptions for themselves thereby bankrupting California, because you must not shackle business, oh no, better to shackle your schools and social systems than threaten one bonus payment to another billionaire.  Now you wish me to put my hand on my heart and pledge allegiance to a series of greedy, gay bashing, racist, Republican retards who deny evolution, and the rights of women and would return America to the dark ages of Puritan New England?

“The French do not shrug at me sardonically and ask me why I am not French. The Norwegians do not stop me on their shores and insist I wear thick knitwear and a large red anorak.  The Swedes don’t demand I marry a pale blonde and retire into the countryside suffering from Ibsen and ennui. The Australians don’t force me into baggy pants to stand on planks with orange sunscreen hurtling across their shark-infested waters singing Advance Australia Fair.

“No, sir, enough, sir, I am a tax payer, a member of your Academy, a Grammy winner, a Tony winner, a father of an American, a lover of America, married to an American wife with an American child but not, sir, an American!”

Did I say any of that?

Are you kidding me?  I fear the alien anal probe.

“Good question” I replied.

“Eric is in the country finishing a novel.

 He’s not a writer, he’s just a very slow reader.”          

                                                                        Ancient Barry Cryer joke.

Why do I keep my Reader’s Diary so assiduously when I eschew all other tasks?

Good question.   But who’s asking?    I am.  Aha!   Who are you?  I am me.

Who are we talking to when we talk to ourselves?

I think all writers talk to themselves.  That is why they write.  That is why I write anyway: to find out what I think.  To discover that hidden voice inside yourself is the great joy of writing.  Oh look what I think!  Writing is a search for the undiscovered self.  But writers also write because they read.  Would it be possible to find a writer who did not?  Someone who hadn’t come to writing first through the joy of reading?  I doubt it.  They wouldn’t be much of a writer. Reading opens up the realm of the mind, reading connects you intimately with the voices of hundreds of great thinkers, and reading keeps you honest.

I love books and I love reading and a long time ago on my first computer I began to list the books in my London library for a game we were working on.  So I have an incomplete list of books from before 1992,  and then from 1993 I listed books as I read them.  Even in those days I was getting to the age when I would be half way through an Elmore Leonard and have a sudden feeling that I knew what was about to happen.  Keeping a list was a simple and efficient aide memoir, made possible by the computer age.  I began to add brief comments for myself, so I could recall what I thought about a particular book and often I included notes on where I was when I was reading something.  (Hence this summer’s sub heading:  Reading Jane Austen in Venice.)   Occasionally I would rant at some poor author, or the title would be followed by a cryptic “Chucked it!”  I am an intolerant reader, forgiving in public but ruthless in the study.

Barchester Towers.                               Anthony Trollope                                           March 1993

So memorable I have forgotten the title. (Irony marks needed)  Something to do with becoming Dean of somewhere.  I find him effete and I’m afraid dull.   John Major’s favourite.   Figures.   I left the book in Mustique….

May Week Was In June.                       Clive James                                                           April 1993

Clive and I!   The ego has landed.   More tales of the man who took Cambridge by storm.    It was love at first sight.   Clive James fell in love with himself at first sight.  Curiously touching, funny and pretentious at the same time.  Just like Clive.

Discreet references to friends would creep in.   Mike Nichols invariably introduced me to some new writer I would enjoy, and since the list was only for myself there was no reason not to mention this.   So, bit by bit, it became a kind of intellectual journal, a map of where my mind had been and what it had been thinking while reading.

Why did I begin to share my reading list online?

That is harder to explain.   Did I want to say “Look at clever me, look at all these books I’ve read?”   Partly I suppose.  Ego is extremely hard to deny.

I first published my reading list after I moved to California in the Nineties, when I was still running PythOnline, a quotidian task which eventually became promethean.  My ambition had been to create an amusing web site to which the Pythons could contribute and where I could vent my occasional spleen and unfold my propensity for satire.  But as the Python contributions soon dried up and I was left to deal with it solo,  the task became increasingly frustrating.   Each day there would be an ever growing mountain of Python questions to answer, and when I did attempt to answer them:

“You’re not Eric Idle” they would say.

“Yes I am” I would reply.

“No you’re not” they would insist.

“Then fuck off” I would add.

“Oh.  You are him.”

So I shared my reading list initially out of desperation to keep it real, and to provide fresh material, for soon I found I had a highly unpaid job, a monster that daily demanded new food.

There were a couple of unexpected bonuses from publishing.  First there was a small but grateful feedback from lonely readers round the world who were happy I had shared with them.  This was an encouraging step forward from fielding endless Python questions, (“Which one were you?”) and secondly, the splendid Dave Eggers, whom I had got to know when he wrote a very amusing profile for The New Yorker about the chair I wrote Spamalot on (which, yes, I have carefully preserved in plastic wrap for The Rainy Day Sale) emailed me to ask if Michael Chabon could be in touch.   What a lovely gift that was.  And yes Dave, I will always do your Reading Benefits despite being rather tired of performing.   We must encourage reading.   It is the great escape for the young.  It opens doors into the mind of ourselves and others.  It permits the solitary to communicate, even when they feel most isolated.  What possible use is it?   Every single possible use.   It defines us.  It creates us.  It involves us.

So I have been assiduously keeping my summer reading list,  it’s been a good one with new books by Martin Amis, William Boyd, Jake Arnott, and (my tip for The Booker) John Banville.

I’ll publish it shortly.   Meanwhile if you check out Reading  you’ll see where I got to so far this year before I set off on my travels…

Sunday night in the Olympic stadium was one of those extraordinary experiences, a unique moment in my life, and one that I shall never forget.

If ageing is finding newer and better ways to scare the shit out of yourself, then this was perfect:  live in front of millions of people in a highly technical show with even the Dress Rehearsal cancelled and only everything to go wrong, I had occasion to question my sanity in agreeing to doing something quite so silly quite so publicly.

About a year ago the rather brilliant director Kim Gavin and The Head of Pretty Much Everything Else took me out to lunch and asked me to do Always Look On The Bright Side of Life at the Closing Ceremony.  They took me round the completed stadium and the work site that would so brilliantly come together as a pleasure zone and asked me to keep quiet about it, as they wanted it to be a surprise.  I was happy to agree but now I can say I was very proud to have been selected for the British Show Biz Team at The Olympic Games, I am a Comedy Olympian and I was also hoping to win a Brass Medal.

Waiting to go on was surreal, I was following The Spice Girls, and with the sound track in my ears and having to sing live and people also yelling in my ear I could only go forward and hope.   I could hear nothing else.   Not the crowd, not anyone, so when immediately I finished someone asked me “Are you happy?”  I could only say “I’m happy it’s over.” But with hundreds of emails from all round the world I now know it worked and the reviews were magnificent and it was all worth it, and yes reading the comments of my friends made me very happy indeed.

The magnificent Timothy Spall confessed that with seconds to go, crouched in a chair at the top of Big Ben with a homburg hat ready to be Churchill he was absolutely terrified.  Posh said she was scared stiff, they hadn’t performed in a while, but the Spice Ladies all looked exquisite and I got hugs from almost all of them.  I got to watch David Beckham playing with his kid, very sweet, I got to hang with my new pal Russell Brand (who stars in Dick), I got nice hugs from Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry, to whom I said “Now we know who we are:  we are the sort of people who will turn out for nothing!”  I had a nice hello from Ray Davies in a golf cart, a big squeeze from the adorable Annie Lennox, bristling with bonhomie and normality, greetings from Brian May and the Queen boys, and Nick Mason whom I have known since 1979, who said he was moved by the whole thing (me too) and a lovely hug from the adorable and extremely beautiful Naomi Campbell.  We did a crap movie together in the nineties and I found her delightful, then and now.

So though we did not get the dress rehearsal we had been promised – it was amazing they erected the stage in time anyway – by show time there was only one thing to do, fingers crossed and go for it.  After all it’s not every day you get to follow The Spice Girls.   Hiding under the stage awaiting my cue with eight of the most exquisite scantily dressed models, all wearing angel wings, I asked a stage hand who was staring at them open mouthed, “Is this Heaven?”

“Oh yes” he said.

“Funny they don’t look like virgins to me”  I said.

Odd how a gag can calm you down before you face the storm and suddenly I could hear my pal Jeff singing Mr. Blue Sky, which was my cue to crouch down in the hole waiting to emerge.

And in a blur it was over.

In fact the only downer of the whole experience was the usual attempt by The Daily Mail to create a war between us Pythons, and in particular between me and John Cleese.  One thing you can say about The Daily Mail is they never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.  This morning I was amazed to read the hoary old lie about Pythons at war with each other trotted out yet again, with a series of old “quotes” this time “written” (perhaps “made up” is a better word) by a an old ex-girlfriend of Terry Gilliam’s called Glenys Roberts, a woman who might easily have been made up by Private Eye.  They tried this on last December announcing a war between myself and John Cleese and I wrote at once to John, assuring him I love him, and have always been grateful for the many laughs he has given me throughout my life.  He replied warmly and we have been on very good terms ever since.   Now on the occasion of his marriage they try again.   So I have written to him again, congratulating him on his marriage and wishing him great happiness.  Lest there be any mistake.  I like John Cleese.  He is very, very funny.   He has been working incredibly hard over the last few years, and I wish him well for the rest of his life.   I like the rest of the Pythons.   We get on very well.  I do not like The Daily Mail.   I can only urge you to laugh at them.   Best yet, ignore them.   And of course “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.”