Last month I was in Mexico City to celebrate what the Producer accidentally called “the one hundred thousandth performance of Spamalot, er sorry the one hundredth performance.” I was there to attend a gala performance to unveil a plaque celebrating this not quite so momentous achievement and to expose myself to the Mexican media where, I was assured, I was a bigger draw than Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The Producers met me in style, in a huge Cadillac SUV, with cream leather reclining massage seats, with a driver, a bodyguard and a translator, and as we drove into town I felt like the Kardashians. Fortunately they were nowhere to be seen.

They checked me into the Hotel Camino Real, a magenta colored hotel, with long wide corridors, virtually identical to the one we stayed in in Ixtapa while filming Yellowbeard in October 1982, almost thirty years ago. I was immediately filled with memories of that extraordinarily talented comedy cast, so many of whom have passed away since then: Graham Chapman, Spike Milligan, Kenneth Mars, Peter Bull, Susannah York, Harry Nilsson, the mighty Peter Cook, the hilarious Peter Boyle, the very funny Madeleine Kahn, Sir Michael Hordern, dubbed by Cook Hordern Monster for his superb display of shouting at the Front Desk, a performance, Peter said, that was even better than his Lear. Then there was the fabulous actor James Mason, and of course the much lamented Marty Feldman who died right here in Mexico City from a heart attack, which became fatal only because it was rush hour and the ambulance could not reach him in time. The traffic was crazy then, and now, thirty years later, it is totally insane. I am offered various estimates on how long it will take to get to the theater tonight, from twenty minutes to two hours, depending on the traffic. The Mexicans themselves use this as the perfect excuse to be late. Indeed the curtain is delayed twenty minutes as only half the audience have taken their seats. People are still walking in five minutes before the Intermission. Now that’s late on an Elizabeth Taylor level.

I’ve always found bad films more fun to be on than good films and god knows Yellowbeard is not something you should try watching by yourself, but The Making of Yellowbeard documentary is rather interesting, as the movie looks like it is going to be very funny.

“Everyone is laughing a lot,” says one of the writers on camera.

“That’s the kiss of death” says Spike Milligan presciently.

And indeed it did die a swift death, but it is worth watching the backstage stuff if only for the great Cook, who was on superb form until he finally succumbed to the Camino Royal mini bar and returned to his first love, alcohol.

Graham, however, was strong and fit and in full alcohol recovery mode, and he remained on splendid form, except for one mad night at a party when he crazily tried to leap in to the back of an open vehicle which David Bowie was driving away at great speed, injuring his leg quite badly, and almost shutting down production. Not a good move on your own movie. Fortunately he was a Doctor. David, who had had a few, showed up next day totally mortified.

Peter, though, was on superb form, bobbing up and down in the hotel pool asking strangely pertinent philosophical cosmic questions :

“We all know the speed of light, but what is the speed of darkness? “

“We know where the light comes from but where does the darkness come from?”

Questions we are still struggling with today.

At this point in his life he had given up drinking and one evening he suggested we needed to find some grass. I agreed to accompany him on this expedition, but where to begin?

“We shall find the nearest bordello” said Peter.

My wife gave me an old fashioned look, but, with his incredible charm, Peter reassured her I should come to no harm. Somewhat skeptically Tania agreed, so off we drove to the local whorehouse. It wasn’t far. A small door in a white-walled street led into a cantina, a square open to the sky with a band and a bar and lovely girls who were happy to dance, or there was a low cabana with discreet rooms if you wished to dance horizontally. There were tables for drinking and strings of coloured lights and when we entered it had the air of a private party where the guests had yet to arrive.

Peter was an instant hit. He ran in shouting loudly in cod Spanish, shook the hand of the barman, seized a beautiful tall girl wearing only a bright red bathing suit and began the most unimaginable shaking jitterbug boogie. The girls went nuts. They danced around him and he boogied with them all, flinging his arms around, his hair wild, occasionally sinking to his knees or exaggeratedly twisting low. One minute it was a slow night in a naughty night club and the next it was a one-man fiesta.

The whole place loved Peter: the band became animated, the barman smilingly shook his cocktails, people flocked in to watch, and every girl in the place was mad to dance with this crazy Englishman, who beamed goodwill and, yes dammit, innocence. It went on for hours with the band going nuts and the girls lining up to fandango with this wild spirit, but we were filming next day and as midnight approached I made my excuses and left. My beautiful young wife was waiting for me at the hotel, hard enough to persuade her we only went to score some grass without staying all night. My last sight was Peter leading a line of ecstatic ladies in a conga line. He waved cheerily, tapped his nose and yelled “No problem, Eric, we’re in…”

In the morning we learned what had happened. Peter had taken the tall girl in the bright red bathing suit back to her room. Once inside Peter asked casually if she had any grass.

“Of course” she said, and reached under the bed and brought out a huge load wrapped in newspaper. Peter asked her how much for it. She cited a derisory amount and the deal was made.

“I have to go now” said Peter.

“What?”

She broke in to floods of tears. How could he possibly leave? Didn’t he think she was beautiful?

“I only wanted some grass” Peter explained as gently as he could, but she was inconsolable. It wasn’t a matter of money. It was honour. It was Mexico. It was her reputation. Poor Peter tried hard to convince her that honestly she really was beautiful, and normally he would have been torn up with desire for her but actually he had only come for a dance and some grass. He had, he said, to spend a long time reassuring her.

“Been easier to shag her” said Marty, getting to the nub.

Some thirteen years earlier the irrepressible Marty Feldman was on my honeymoon. I know that sounds weird but he and my then wife Lynn and his wife Lauretta were great friends and insisted we fly to Antibes, to lie on matelas (which I thought were French sailors) and order citron pressés (which I thought were French cars.) It was my first visit to the South of France, and incidentally the first week of Python filming, which I was permitted to miss. First things first.

Marty was always very supportive of Monty Python. And an hilarious chap. I once found him and Cleese in a street laughing their heads off. They had found two very attractive young ladies on their knees bent over searching the pavement.

“What are you doing?” they asked.

“We’re looking for a screw” said the lady.

Collapse of hysterical comedians.

So there are many ghosts with me on stage that night, as I unveil a plaque celebrating “one hundred performances” of Monty Python’s Spamalot. And let’s hope I’ll be back after another ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine…

I’m on my way to Mars.

Well alright my name is.

It successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Sunday on a 354 million mile journey to the red planet and in eight and a half months’ time, in August 2012, it will touch down on the surface of Mars.

And ok, it’s not just my name. It is also my wife’s name, and my daughter’s name and the name of Tasha Goldthwait my Dogchild (I’m her atheist Godfather.) In Tasha’s case she is deeply sorry that she gave the Pasadena campus her real name and not Tashole Goldtwat. Only a comedians daughter would have anxiety about landing a joke on Mars.

And alright, as you may have guessed, it’s not just our names but several hundred people who happened to visit the Mars lander during the many months it was under construction at JPL in Pasadena, and who, like us, put their names on a list. Still it is a giant step for my name even if it is a miniscule step for mankind, and I confidently lay claim to being the first ex-Python on Mars. It’s certainly a lot further than Michael Palin has been. In name anyway. Although there are asteroids named after all the Python’s, so I guess technically they are farther out, but they are named from here, my name will be there.

Curiously it’s on a space vehicle called Curiosity, which as we all know killed the cat, so let’s hope this lander arrives safely. Curiosity is a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered machine meant for the exploration of Mars in hopes of finding evidence of microscopic life. NASA’s MSL took off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, November 26, on an Atlas V rocket. It’s the largest probe we’ve ever sent there, about the size of a mini cooper. It is about four times as heavy as the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. It has a large robot arm, a weather station, a laser that can vaporize rocks at seven meters, a percussive drill, and 4.8kg of plutonium-238. And my name. Did I mention that?

The Beatles almost beat the Pythons into space. When the Voyager space probes left earth in 1977 they included a Golden Disc on which were inscribed a sampling of the many sounds of earth, its languages, its music, its rhythms, its speech. Both Voyagers have now left the Solar System. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system, and maybe millions of years before anyone gets round to playing the Golden Disc. Prominent amongst the ninety minutes of music was the Beatle recording Here Comes The Sun, but, alas for human folly, it had to be removed because the British publisher Lew Grade would not let them have the rights!

So I like to think that someday our names will be inscribed on the walls of a Martian Museum. Who was this Tasha Goldthwait they may say, as they revere us on Martian Independence Day. Or perhaps our names will be read out at the Mars Parade to be remembered on Martian Thanksgiving as they carve the Space Spam.

And if all else fails I am at least the author of The Road To Mars which for a very brief moment landed on the LA Times Best Seller List.

While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is not so well known that Ben Jonson’s own plays were written by a teenage girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared leaving no trace of her very existence, a clear indication that she wrote them. The plays of Marlowe were actually written by a chambermaid called Marlene, who faked her own orgasm, and then her own death in a Deptford tavern brawl. Queen Elizabeth, who was obviously a man, conspired to have Shakespeare named as the author of his plays, because how could a man who only had a Grammar school education, spoke Latin and a little Greek, possibly have written something as bad as All’s Well That Ends Well? It makes no sense. It was obviously an upper class twit, who wished to disguise his identity so that Vanessa Redgrave could get a job in her old age.

Many people hold the belief that Richard the Third was not only a good man who would never hurt a fly but actually wrote She Stoops To Conquer and that the so-called author Oliver Goldsmith found it under a tree when visiting the battlefield at Bosworth field in 1773, now a multi-story car park, (clearly an attempt to cover up all the evidence for this.) Oscar Wilde’s plays were written by a stable boy called Simon, though Wilde gave them both a good polish. Chaucer was written by a Frenchman on holiday, whilst Simone de Beavoir wrote all of Balzac and a good deal of Les Miserables, despite the fact of not being born yet. Beau Brummel wrote nearly all of Jane Austen and two men and a cat wrote most of Charles Dickens, with the exception of A Tale of Two Cities, which was written by Napoleon while on holiday in Saint Helena. Incidentally Napoleon was not Napoleon but a man called Trevor Francis, who later turned up playing for Birmingham City.

The Bronte Sisters’ novels were actually written by a vicar called Norman, except for Charlotte’s, whose Aunty Betty wrote most of her things. Thomas Jefferson used a ghost writer to write the American Constitution, a woman of color called Betty Mae, who was a non-voluntary worker, (doncha hate that slave word?) while Moby Dick was written not by Herman Melville but by Herman Melbrooks who wrote most of it in Hebrew on the boat over from Coney Island, but Melville, who spoke only Yiddish, had it translated by his dentist.

The Scarlet Letter was originally The Pink Letter before Nathaniel Hawthorne stole it and published it under his own name, originally as The Scarlet Pimpernel. Swift did not write Gulliver’s Travels, but found it in the toilet of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, took it home and copied it out in his own hand writing. The Shorter Pepys, an Oxford paperback, was actually written by the taller Pepys, a man named Doris Pepys, who was no relation, but worked as a candle cleaner in Wapping (home of the Liar.)

Henry James did write all of his own works, because nobody else could be that boring, and more significantly no one else has ever bothered claiming them. Edith Wharton was clearly Henry James in drag, and he wrote her novels in Rye at the weekends, while hosting gay parties for a few friends in from town.

Mere lack of all evidence of course is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at Intelligent Design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people claiming to believe in it. Darwinism itself is only supported by tons of evidence, which is a clear indication that Darwin didn’t write it himself. It was most likely written by Jack The Ripper, who was probably King Edward V11th, since all evidence of this has been destroyed.

Paranoia? Of course not. It’s alternative scholarship. What’s wrong with teaching alternative theories in our schools? What are liberals so afraid of? Can’t children make up their own minds about things like killing and owning automatic weapons in the playground ? Surely it is up to parents to decide whether their children should go armed to school? Far better they have something to protect themselves with than go without food. Bush was right: No child left unarmed. What is all this dictatorial approach to learning anyway? What gives teachers the right to say what things are? Who’s to say that flat earthers are wrong? Or that the Church wasn’t right to silence Galileo with his absurd theory (actually written by his Proctologist) that the Earth moves round the Sun. And why shouldn’t something be taught in schools just because a bulk of evidence says it’s erroneous? Surely it’s up to parents to decide what should be taught to their offspring, even if so-called science “proves” it ain’t. I’m with Sarah Palin on this. It’s so snobbish and elitist to cite “evidence.” I think we all know what lawyers can do with evidence. Look at Shakespeare. Poor bloke. Wrote thirty seven plays, none of them his.

c) Eric Idle (most likely Michael Palin really)
10/30/2011

This blog is about me. It’s not interactive. It has no message board. It’s not about Monty Python, or The Rutles. It’s not about you. You cannot contact me, you cannot post replies, there is no interactive Chat Room, and I won’t even know you’ve been here. Call it a message in a bottle, call it selfish, call it narcissistic, call it Fanny Mae if it’s a girl, but it’s still about me. Me, me, me.

You can sing that if you want. It’s the Diva Scale: Do, Re, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me….

It’s not that I don’t care about you, whoever the heck you are, // I do care deeply in a very warm and caring way//

Oh by the way, see those signs? The ones that look like this: // They’re irony signs and I just invented them. Feel free to use them. As much as you like. // I wish to go down in history as the inventor of the irony mark.//

See how useful they can be? I was being ironic about using irony. //Clever eh?// Now you too can be ironic without the unpleasant misunderstandings which occur when people don’t notice you’re being funny.

I have observed that when texting or reading email people have a tendency to take everything at face value. There’s nothing to indicate that you might perhaps be being “tongue in cheek.” I was frequently offending people, particularly in email, when I had no intention of upsetting them. They had just missed the irony. Now you have my irony marks: and //the world will be a better place. // (//©E. Idle.)

Of course they’re going to have to reprint tons of Jane Austen books, but that’s a small price to pay for clarity.

My good friend Mike Nichols () told me he had the same problem.

By the way that sign () indicates name dropping, so that if I am being ironic and name dropping at the same time, it would look like this:

//Sarah Palin would make a great President// is clearly ironic.

Sarah Palin would make a great President: of Wal-Mart. Needs no irony marks.

//() My friend Sarah Palin would make a good President ()// would be both name dropping and irony.

You’re getting it right? It’s a breakthrough in Semiotics. Perhaps we should call it Semidiotics? I shall ask Steve Martin () what he thinks.

While I was working on this brand new concept of irony marks (//©E. Idle) I had a few failures. I soon discarded ++ as you have to use the Num Lock and you tend to forget to turn it off so suddenly you write 352e th5s and have to search for the damn Num Lock again.

For a while the leading contender was <>

I liked the look of this but it unfortunately involves using the shift key which is annoying, whereas // does not.

Also I realised that if one was name dropping and being ironic at the same time you would end up with this: (<>) which I felt looked like a sphincter.

After some thought I decided to use that sign to indicate asshole, as in the sentence:

The other day Dick Cheney (<>) came out with a new book which //sets the record straight on the invasion of Iraq.//

There you see I’m using both the asshole sign and the irony marks and my meaning is much clearer.

Mike Nichols () told me he that had one golden rule when Directing and Producing: “Never tolerate assholes.” This works nicely for me because when I founded PythOnline, back in the mid-nineties, I chose this image for The Spam Club on the fledgling website:

The Latin motto, and //I needn’t tell you how to translate Latin // means: “No Assholes.”

Still a good motto.

Eric Idle ()