Monty Python wit Eric Idle brings his wildly successful musical comedy Spamalot to Birmingham.
For comedian and writer Eric Idle, the show Spamalot is the realisation of a dream. Eric began writing the musical in 2001, it premiered in Chicago in 2004 and was a runaway hit on Broadway for four years. In 2006 it opened in the West End, running for more than two years.
As a member of Monty Python along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, it was perhaps inevitable that Eric would plunder his former experiences for the show.
Loosely based on the Monty Python film The Holy Grail, Spamalot blends some well-known scenes with new characters and songs – even pinching a bit from other Monty Python works.
Now with the musical on tour across the UK, 67-year-old Eric, who lives in California, paid a visit to Manchester to see its latest guise ahead of it coming to Birmingham later this year.
“We started about ten years ago doing Spamalot,” he says.
“I had been in The Mikado with Jonathan Miller playing Ko-Ko at the English National Opera. And there is a song there called I’ve Got a Little List and every night I would re-write it and the audience would laugh and the orchestra would laugh and the chorus would laugh and I thought ‘this is fun, we should write a musical’.
“I went to my writing partner John Du Prez and we wrote something for the radio and that went pretty well so we thought we had to write something bigger and so it was a quest, a quest to find what that might be.
“And I suddenly had this idea that The Holy Grail was the perfect piece of work that hadn’t yet been musicalised. It is composed of little sketches and they each seem like they are coming to a song. And so when we started to adapt it we realised it really would work. Most Gilbert and Sullivan stuff is mock heroic, taking the mickey out of something heroic, and the Grail and Arthur has that grandeur which is capable of mockery. Especially through the eyes of the Holy Grail.
“The Arthurian legend has so much going for it – none of us know what the heck looking for the Grail means and why didn’t they ever find it?
“So we then wrote about four or five songs, recorded them and sent them to the Pythons and said ‘well what do you think of this?’
“One of the songs was called The Song That Goes Like This and they all laughed themselves silly and said ‘go off and write it.’
They didn’t insist on getting involved, they said ‘just run with it’ and it evolved from there.
“It also occurred to me that one of the aspects that Python hadn’t explored was the Lady of the Lake and bringing women into it. If you are making a musical then that is the very basis of it. That is when it turned from being purely a Monty Python theme to being a much more open musical about romance and about people having feelings and emotions.
“There have been many different responses from the Pythons. But the fact is it is not the way they would have done it – it is the way I would have done it. That is something different. With truth and emotion.
“If there is any emotion showing in Monty Python, Gilliam will come along and cut its head off or something will drop on it. It is a complete boys’ thing because it denies feelings. Of course, as you get older, even boys have feelings.”
Eric believes the show has much wider appeal than Monty Python, attracting die-hard fans and also people new to the comedy phenomenon.
“I think some people who come to Spamalot really know Python,” he says. “You hear them cheer when the killer rabbit comes on or the black knight comes on and clearly some people know what is going on. But it isn’t important to know anything. You can come never having seen Python. You could come actually hating Python and still have a very good time I think.”
But despite the musical being such a long-held dream, Eric admits he was still surprised at how popular it has become. A hit on both Broadway and the West End, its tour takes it across the UK, coming to Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre for Christmas with a cast including Matthew Kelly who is replacing Marcus Brigstocke as King Arthur, Todd Carty as Patsy and Jodie Prenger as the Lady of the Lake.
“Its success was totally surprising,” he says. “I knew we had a market. Before we opened in Chicago we were sold out for the run. But then when it hit the audience, they just went crazy and laughed and laughed and laughed.”
Eric has made some changes to the show for the UK tour and admits that he is constantly tempted to tweak a bit here and there to keep it current.
“It never seems to finish. I have got a whole new song – You Won’t Succeed in Birmingham if You Haven’t Any Stars. It is the new truth – so do you have a little bit of Susan Boyle, a little bit of Ozzy Osbourne? There are always little refinements for each area. We were very lucky to come in at the rehearsal stage and alter it a bit.”
Eric was born near Newcastle-upon-Tyne but after his father was killed in an accident, he was sent to the Wolverhampton Royal School at the age of seven as a boarder. He was thoroughly miserable at the school but also has many happy memories of living in the West Midlands.
“Birmingham is my youth,” he says. “It was always between where I lived which was in Studley, Mappleborough Green, and where I went to this awful boarding school in Wolverhampton. In those days I took Harry Potter type trains, steam trains, to Wolverhampton.
“Birmingham was always the place to do shopping and go to the theatre, the pantos.”
And he admits to a cheeky joke staged in the city when he returned as a member of the Monty Python gang.
“My mum was on stage once when we toured there with the Pythons in about 1974. She came on stage on Michael Palin’s birthday and we pretended she was Mary Whitehouse. She made Michael a cake and Michael put his face in the cake.
“It was actually in the Birmingham Mail that Mary Whitehouse did appear on stage. Which made us very happy. Not everything should be true – some things should just be funny.”
After school, Eric studied English at Cambridge, where he joined the drama club Footlights. Here he was to meet many of the comedians he would work with over the following decade.
“It was fun to be part of it,” he recalls. “When we were at Cambridge, there was a satire movement and there were all these shows growing and becoming and we were very fortunate that when we left Footlights we were trained in writing and performing comedy.
“And so we went straight into comedy. I was writing for I’m Sorry, I Will Read That Again and The Frost Report and we had our own TV show by about 1967 Do Not Adjust Your Set. We were very fortunate and very privileged – but also we were very good. And then we were well rewarded.
“When we got our own show it was so bizarre because it wasn’t anything that was necessary or inevitable.
The BBC had given The Two Ronnies a show and they wanted to give John Cleese a show but Cleese wouldn’t do his own show, he insisted on bringing on Chapman and then he insisted on bringing along Palin and then we all came together because we were this gang and suddenly the BBC was faced with this unruly mob of people who would not tell them anything about it because they didn’t know what they were going to do.
“And because we had been writers for all these different shows we thought we wanted to do something different. ‘Let’s not do what we know we can do, let’s just mess it around a bit, let’s muck with it.’
“And I think that was the secret. By trying not to be successful, to be a bit different, it gave it a sort of mad edge. When you look at those early shows you think ‘what are they doing?’ and ‘what is going on here?’
“I mean Vikings are there, sheep drop on people’s heads. It is completely absurd, you know. And it is all taken extremely seriously. That gives it a sort of honesty.
‘‘We weren’t trying to be stars. No one ever knew our names. The only person with a name was John Cleese because he was in The Frost Report. It was absolutely anti-showbusiness. It was the antithesis of showbusiness and we were very lucky that the BBC allowed it on late on a Sunday night.”
When Spamalot comes to Birmingham at Christmas it will be vying for audiences with a number of family shows – including the Hippodrome’s pantomime, this year featuring Joan Collins in the cast. But Eric is unfazed by the competition.
“I like sitting down for panto time, we have always wanted that, John and I,” he says.
“If only poor Joanie Collins could have been in it. But we will ask Jackie. Maybe she will make an appearance. Or Phil, the little known brother of Joanie.”
* Spamalot is on at the Alexandra Theatre from December 7 to January 1. For tickets call 0844 847 2388 or go to www.alexandratheatre.org.uk
