A career retrospective fondly remembering a previous career retrospective: who said pop will eat itself? I enjoyed Eric Idle’s touring “one-man musical” very much: he seems like a thoroughly good egg, he’s led a remarkable entertainment life, and who’d begrudge him, now 82, the chance to bask in it – and his audience’s palpable affection – at least one more time? But even I found it a bit much when, reaching the end of this greatest hits compendium, Idle includes Monty Python’s 2014 O2 gigs in his pantheon of past glories. A show for nostalgists warmly recalling an earlier show for nostalgists? Welcome to entertainment in the age of the never-ending showbiz afterlife.
In fairness to Idle, this show (called – what else? – Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live!) is not about Python, it’s about him, from South Shields childhood via boarding school in the Midlands, all the way to the Hollywood Bowl. It follows the now familiar format, with our host narrating his life and works in story, lots of clips on an upstage screen – and in song. A certain self-centredness is unavoidable with such shows, but Idle offsets that better than most, dedicating a substantial slice of the evening – and two sentimental songs – to sorely missed friends George Harrison and Robin Williams.
Rarefied name-dropping of the type indulged in tonight (a King Charles here, a Mick Jagger there) can sometimes pall. But it’d be hard for Idle to tell his tale otherwise, as we follow him from university revue with Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, to domestic comedy stardom with Python and “mock’n’roll” icon status in the US. We see him hosting Saturday Night Live next to John Belushi. We hear how Elvis Presley’s girlfriend told our starry-eyed host how Presley performed Idle’s sketches in bed.
Happily, Idle retains a personality that seems immune to pomposity. Call him the anti-Cleese: his erstwhile bandmate receives a good-natured ribbing tonight. We get a handful of Python sketches onscreen (Nudge Nudge; the Queen Victoria Handicap), and a clip of the interview when the team “accidentally” spilled Graham Chapman’s ashes on live TV. We also get a long medley of his Beatles spoof the Rutles, an extract from his supposed Diary of a Legend, mocking his national treasure status, and a performance (in virtual duet with American clown Puddles) of his cosmos-sounding Galaxy Song from the Python’s 1983 film The Meaning of Life.
No profound meaning of life is ventured by this octogenarian tonight, in what Idle jokes might be the last time we hear from him – not only because he might die soon, but because his audience might, too. But, in a show with an unmistakably elegiac undertone, Idle does conclude that his job has always been simply to cheer people up – cue a rendition of the signature song that’s helped us all digest life’s gristle for 46 years now and counting. If at times it’s not just nostalgia but nostalgia-squared tonight, at least Idle has a lot worth being nostalgic about.
At Pavilion theatre, Bournemouth, on 24 September and Royal Albert Hall, London, on 27 September
