Word: eric
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...Amazing, the staying power of a TV cult. From Oct. 1969 to Dec. 1974, when the four seasons of Monty Python's Flying Circus were running on BBC, you couldn't see the show in the U.S. The Pythons - composed of Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin - had made a film of their best early skits, called And Now for Something Completely Different, but they were barely known in these parts when the Holy Grail film opened here. The movie was essentially a calling card for the show's airing on U.S. public...
...Another thing about the Beatles and the Pythons: both could be called musical comedy acts. Just as the Fab Four made humor a crucial part of their appeal, so the Pythons frequently used songs in Flying Circus ("Eric the Half-a-Bee," "The Lumberjack Song," "Dennis Moore") and their films. Idle's blithely idiotic ditty, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," helped make Life of Brian that rare Crucifixion movie you could hum your way out of. And the Jones-Palin anthem from The Meaning of Life ("Every sperm is sacred / Every sperm is great / If a sperm...
...Idle might have been born to showbiz. His grandfather, Henry Bertrand, had been manager of a circus called Robey's Flying Midgets. "I ended up in a circus too, and a flying one at that." In fact, his childhood was more Dickensian-poignant than Python-comic. In 1945, when Eric was two, his father died when coming home from the Army for Christmas; the car he'd hitched a ride in was hit by a truck. The family had few resources, so for a dozen years, from age seven, Eric was raised at the Royal Orphanage in Wolverhampton, an institution...
...were lower-middle-class oiks," Idle says of himself and most of the other Pythons, noting that only Cleese and Palin had gone to posh public (private) schools. Yet however scraped his circumstances or mean his surroundings, young Eric was not a pouter; he always looked on the bright side of life. And he developed an early facility with language. "I think I was always interested in words because in such a sterile environment you have to create your own entertainment, and explore your own brain.... I was more well read than most teenagers because at boarding school there...
...Idle's charisma and social ease were ever a source of wonder to other Pythons. "I first saw Eric on stage in Edinburgh doing a revue," Jones recalls in the book. "I just remember seeing this very beautiful young man on stage, with very blue eyes." Palin adds that "Eric has always been a very gregarious character as long as I've known him. He was always very popular with loads of friends around him." (It was Idle who hooked up with Harrison, convincing the ex-Beatle to give his implicit blessing to the Rutles parody by appearing briefly...