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BREXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

After George introduced me to her in 1975, I got to see Joni Mitchell occasionally over the years; we spent New Year’s Eve 2016 side by side in wheelchairs, and recently she came to my seventy-fifth birthday when my son was there: “Come on, Carey, get out your cane.” One day I said to her, “You have to think of our generation as the survivors on the Raft of the Medusa. One by one we slide off the raft into the jaws of the waiting sharks.”

The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819 oil painting by the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault.

I was trying to cheer her up!

What I meant was, the end is inevitable, you have to embrace your fellow time travelers even as they slip away. Ours was an extraordinary generation, born into a devastated world, exhausted from six years of total war. Sixty million died. Nowadays the young think times are tough if they can’t get an Internet connection. They’re right; times are tough, but there was a time before it all began to go to shit, when it all really was shit. Our generation was born into that time. It was called World War II. We heard the sirens in the night and put on our foul-smelling Mickey Mouse gas masks and went down into the Anderson shelters. It was very loud and very terrifying. Then it stopped. For a bit. That was the gap in time our generation lived in. We thought we were hard done by, but we were wrong: we were lucky. We wouldn’t have to march off to war. The peacetime conscription of the National Service stopped just before I was due to be enlisted. Senior boys at my boarding school would turn pale at breakfast as their call-up papers arrived, but it mercifully ended a few years before my turn. Phew! Not so good for the Yanks, of course. They were even more fucked over by Vietnam, and poor Gilliam had to serve his time in the New York Armory, where he would eventually film Robin Williams in The Fisher King. But from the bomb sites and the rationing, we skinny-shanked, undernourished, badly toothed British boys got to remake a shattered world. You’re welcome…

So, what were we Pythons, we who were once so young and who are now so not? Were we friends, comrades, coworkers, teammates, gang members, rivals, siblings, brothers, brothers-in-law, or brothers-in-arms? I noticed we had become legends quite a while ago. We used to be icons, and before that stars, and before that celebrities, and before that merely TV comedians, but the Reaper keeps on Reaping and you go up a notch each time until you finally end up as myths, which is when you know you’re dead. When I first noticed we had become legends I decided to keep a diary, in which I wrestled with the intimate problems of being a legend.

The Diary of a Legend.

Monday.

Got up. Was a legend. Had breakfast. Went back to bed.

Tuesday.

Got up. Still a legend. Fed dog. Went back to bed.

Wednesday.

Exhausted from being a legend. Stayed in bed.

Thursday.

Wife said you’re not a legend, you’re just a lazy old bastard.

Friday.

Decided to look for new wife.

Saturday.

Remembered John Cleese. Changed mind about looking for new wife. Cheaper to stay with the old one.

Sunday.

Tired of being a legend. It’s exhausting. I looked in the bathroom mirror and it appears fame has gone to my ass.

Monday.

Somebody in the pub said you’re not a legend, you’re not even funny anymore, so piss off back to America.

Tuesday.

Pissed off back to America. They sent me back.

Wednesday.

Have decided to stop writing a diary about being a legend, as I’m becoming the sort of person I would normally try and avoid. I have decided instead to become a National Treasure.

Thursday.

They said: Fuck off, we have far too many National Treasures. In fact, the U.K. is now National Treasure Island.

So, I’m not sure what we are. Perhaps we’re collectibles. Survivors of the Sixties? British cultural icons? I don’t know. We’ve even become a stamp.

I pay taxes in three countries and I can vote in none of them. I wasn’t even allowed to vote against Brexit. The Russians had more say than I did. And of course, I can’t vote in the States, though they coined the phrase “No taxation without representation.” I was once coming home through LAX when a steely-eyed immigration officer peered suspiciously at me.

“How long have you been a green card holder?”

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

“Then why aren’t you an American?”

“Erm. Er…Well…”

I hesitated. What should I say? What was the correct thing to say?

“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, from a college founded in 1347. A man who watched England win the World Cup at Wembley in 1966 and Manchester United lift the European trophy in 1968. An Englishman, a proud Elizabethan, heir to the traditions of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wilde, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Dickens, a cricket-loving survivor of the Sixties and a member of one of the most admired comedy groups in the world. Is it not enough I live in your fair country and pay my taxes? Now you wish me to put my hand on my heart and pledge allegiance to a self-righteous, lying, tax-avoiding moron, and his racist, gay-bashing, environmentally dangerous, greedy-bastard, science-denying cronies, who reject evolution and the rights of women, and plunder the planet for profit to please their powerful funders, stealing the very air and clean water of their children, while tweeting insanely and lying through their teeth on propaganda TV channels that would have shamed Joseph Goebbels? No, sir! 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 and retire into the countryside suffering from Ibsen and ennui. The Australians don’t force me into baggy swim pants to stand on planks in orange sunscreen hurtling across their shark-infested waters singing ‘Advance Australia Fair.’ No, sir. Enough, sir. I am a taxpayer, 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 all authority.

“Good question,” I replied.

But in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations

He remains an Englishman!

I used to think those words of W. S. Gilbert pretty much described me, but of course, the more I return to the U.K. the less I recognize it. In my lifetime, it has changed beyond all recognition, particularly now it has become Brexit Through the Gift Shop. I feel like an old John le Carré character returning to a circus that has changed irrevocably. I think, after all, I’m happiest being a foreigner. Perhaps there should be a Homo sapiens passport? I feel less and less connected to individual states, and more and more connected to human beings. Coming out of a Grammy MusiCares tribute to Paul McCartney, an evening I had found extremely moving and uplifting, I bumped into Smokey Robinson.

“That was so great,” I said. “It made me proud to be white.”

“Me too,” he said.

Last year they tried to put Python in a museum. We were approached by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, who wanted to mount a big, six-month retrospective exhibition to celebrate fifty years of Monty Python. I warned the guys.

“Turn it down,” I said. “Look at the others. Bowie: dead. Balenciaga: dead. Alexander McQueen: dead. Pink Floyd: almost dead. Is that not telling you anything? Run away now.”

But they wouldn’t listen to me.

“It’s an honor,” they said, which in England means “no money.”

We should have been warned. The V&A immediately turned down our proposed title, Monty Python: The Same Old Bollocks. That title was very Python. In-your-face aggressive modesty. But they wouldn’t accept it. We were polite and suggested another: Monty Python Exposed. But no, they weren’t having that either. What’s this? Fifty years later and we’re still being cut by the establishment? Instead, they told us, they were going to call it From Dali to Dead Parrots, and it became clear they were doing an exhibition on Surrealism, and the so-called roots of our work. Pretentious nonsense. We’re nothing to do with Dali or Duchamp. For me, Python has always been about comedy. That is the art. The Footlights motto is Ars est celare artem. “The art lies in concealing the art.” A fine observation about performing. If you take us seriously you miss the joke, even though we were always deadly serious about being funny.

More important, the museum insisted they would have control and final say, so I was never prouder of Python than when we all said no. The museum couldn’t believe it. Happily, we stuck to our guns. We are still a very gnarly gang. Un-clubbable. I like that. So, no museum for us in the future but certainly a mausoleum. Even if we don’t all join Terry J. in an Old Jokes Home before then. Dear sweet Jonesy. He came to a Python meeting in October 2017 and sat quietly as we discussed business. At one point he yelled, “No. No. No!” and we all turned to look at his anxious face, but it was clear it was about the water he was being offered.

“Actually, when he says no, he means yes,” said Michael seriously.

We dissolved into laughter. The meeting had turned into a Python sketch. Terry joined us for lunch, where he sat happily drinking red wine amidst the banter.

Laughter is still the best revenge. One day the sun will die, one day the galaxy will die, one day the entire Universe will die. I’m not feeling too good myself. So, what have I learned over my long and weird life? Well, firstly, that there are two kinds of people, and I don’t much care for either of them. Secondly, when faced with a difficult choice, either way is often best. Thirdly, always leave a party when people begin to play the bongos.

Now I just wait for the inevitable question: “Didn’t you used to be Eric Idle?” That and the delicious irony that I get to sing my own song at my own funeral. I have prepared some last words. Well, you can’t be too careful, can you? In the Eighties when I was still comparatively young, a man sitting next to me in the Groucho Club said, “Oh, that’s funny seeing you here, I’m just writing your obituary.”

What?

I checked for vital signs, my wallet was still there, my dick was still there, my wife was still there.

“So far as I can tell,” I said, “I’m not dead yet.”

The young man explained that he was working for the Daily Telegraph and his job was to write obituaries of celebrities so that they would be ready to print at the drop of a hat.

“In that case,” I said, “perhaps you’d like to know my last words?”

Indeed, he would.

“Say no more,” I said.

He liked that. It’s best to be prepared, and that does take care of the final words problem. Suppose you’re having an off day and you can’t think of anything funny, and you say something fatuous like “Pass the Kleenex.” That would be embarrassing.

And my song goes on. I sang it at a Pembroke College fund-raiser in Cambridge in 2017 and they very kindly rewarded me with an honorary fellowship, which touched and moved me more than I can say. I sang it to the survivors of the England football team who won the World Cup fifty years before, back in 1966, when I had stood on the terraces at Wembley Stadium with Bill Oddie. I sang it at my daughter’s graduation, where I was commencement speaker and Whitman College generously gave me an honorary degree. I have let Exit International use it, and, to the dismay of my wife and manager, I have turned down several large sums of money from advertisers to license it, so you will know I am either finally dead or destitute when you hear it on a car commercial. Not that I want to go, of course. I’ll be like the rest of you, clinging on desperately and screaming for more morphine. Though I did want it to say on my tombstone: I’D LIKE A SECOND OPINION…

My funeral song will go on…and on…though obviously we don’t. Dust to dust is about right. We dissipate into the carbon atoms we came from; technically, reincarnation is sort of correct, we get reassembled into other things. I’d like to be reassembled into a Tesla so my wife can still drive me.

I was born in the same place as my mother and I wonder if I will die in the same place as her, which would mean our home in LA. To be precise, in our guest room, but that’s now become my wife’s shoe closet. I think I wouldn’t mind dying in there amongst the Jimmy Choos. I worship the ground she walks on anyway, so that would be appropriate. She, who sadly knows me best, thinks my last words will probably be “Fuck off,” but that doesn’t look good on a tombstone, so instead I would like on my grave:

Eric Idle

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