Life held some happy coincidences for Eric Idle. One of them was that the young man from a humble background (his mother was a nurse, his father died young) attended an amateur theatre group at Cambridge University, which also included John Cleese and Graham Chapman. The three young men shared a comedic talent and a penchant for developing a new kind of British humour from high culture with anarchy. In 1969 they appeared together with three other comrades-in-arms as "Monty Python's Flying Circus" for the first time on BBC television.

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Idle mostly took on the role of a beautiful but nasty actor in the sketches and contributed characters with penetrating language quirks, which were at the same time sharp social satire. Already in the third episode of the "Flying Circus" he showed this talent in a joke about a pub goer who annoys his neighbor with suggestive ambiguities ("wink wink, nudge nudge"), only to turn out to be an uptight pennant in the end.

Idle's greatest talent, however, lay in singing. It is not without reason that the group's most famous song comes from his pen: In the Bible comedy "The Life of Brian", the crucified hero looks at a hundred other convicts at the end and discovers Eric Idle to his right, who asks him from his cross not to hang his head and instead whistle along as he sings the catchy song "Always look at the bright side of life".

The song became a worldwide hit, is now one of the most played songs at British funerals and gave Idle a relaxed life after the end of the comedy troupe in the early eighties. He starred in several feature films, including "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", which his former Python colleague Terry Gilliam brought to the cinema in 1988. He developed a musical from the Python Arthurian parody "The Knights of the Coconut", which earned him a Tony Award in 2005. He wrote thrillers and plays.

In his 2018 autobiography, he looks back on a life as hedonistic-anarchic as his Python characters: yacht trips with David Bowie, cricket visits to the West Indies with Mick Jagger and party nights with Harrison Ford. Chance had brought him to the right place at the right time and he had seized the opportunity to make something out of it, which the boy, born in 1943 in South Shields, England, dared to imagine only in his dreams. Today Eric Idle is eighty years old.