The timeless appeal of Monty Python's Flying Circus is something Eric Idle cannot explain.
Five decades on, on the eve of his latest Australian tour, its popularity still surprises him.
"I've never actually been a Python fan. When I think about Python I think about filming it or writing it, I don't know what it's like to experience it coming out of your television screen," the English actor, comedian, songwriter, musician, screenwriter and playwright says.
"I do know that we liked to try to shock people, and surprise them, and to play games with them, like the three-sided record we released that we didn't warn them about.
"People appreciate being tickled like that."
Idle is looking forward to bringing his nostalgic one-man musical, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Live!, to Australia in November.
"I have a lot of friends there. I've been coming to Australia since about 1976. I just love it, it's one of the most wonderful places on earth," he says.
Idle - with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin - formed a comedy troupe in 1969 and called it Monty Python. The rest, as they say, is history.
Monty Python's Flying Circus was a comedy sketch series that aired from 1969 to 1974 on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) network. The Pythons went on to make the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), and The Meaning of Life (1983) which have achieved an almost cult-like following.
Their work evolved into live shows, films, albums, books and musicals and, in 1988, Monty Python received the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. A decade later they were awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute.
Idle was the musically-inclined Python, making his Broadway debut with Spamalot in 2005 which won the Tony Award for Best Musical that year as well as a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album.
Music remains important to him today. It was, in fact, his first love.
"I had been playing guitar since the age of 13, and then Elvis came along and changed our lives ... It's something that's been with me my whole life. It's one of the things that makes me happy, just jamming and singing along with people," he says.
"I love having a guitar and I now find myself, shamefully, with 30 [laughs]. I know, I know, I'm old and I've been collecting them a long time and I do love them, they're fantastic."
Idle was close friends with former Beatle, the late George Harrison, among other music icons. He reckons it was a sign of the times.
"What was interesting to me was that we were all part of the rock 'n' roll generation who came out of the '50s and '60s, but we'd gone on to college and television and doing comedy, and they'd been on the road playing music since they were 16 or 17," he says.
"I think comedians and the bands were always very close because the comedians thought they could play music and the bands thought they were funny. There was a natural draw there."
Idle wrote the quintessentially British stiff-upper-lip ditty (and funeral favourite) Always Look on the Bright Side of Life for The Life of Brian, singing it while his character in the film hung from the cross. He admits it popped into his head from time to time while he was undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer five years ago.
"I didn't dwell on it though. I was in the hands of other people, medical people, and I was more concerned about my kids and my wife - all the people around me, really," he says.
"I'm glad I got a reprieve. I'm five years clear and they say I'm good for another five at least. I'm looking on the bright side, as someone once said."
Monty Python fans are all around us, and when I put a call out on social media for some suggested questions for Idle, my particular circle didn't disappoint. The following questions in particular piqued his interest.
Is Galaxy Song the greatest Python song or is it Every Sperm is Sacred?
"The Galaxy Song is quite interesting. I think it pertains to our position in the planet - we are tiny little people on this very small planet in the middle of an extraordinary exploding universe," Idle says.
"Our pathetic smallness makes us ridiculous, how we have to deal with politicians and kings and queens and all that sort of thing.
"I do think that has a bit of a lasting appeal, and Professor Brian Cox is fond of it, and I got to film it with Stephen Hawking which was great fun. I find science very interesting."
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow?
Idle laughs heartily at this one.
"I think you can ask Siri that, you know, they answer these things, but it is an interesting question," he says.
"But what's really interesting, I think, is how many of the little slogans people fall back on in daily life from all that time ago, in those sketches. And also that's in Spamalot so I quite like that."
Was he inspired by people like Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer?
"I was very, very inspired by Tom Lehrer. I loved his songs - he's still with us actually - and a little bit of Stan Freberg but not quite so much," Idle says.
"It sort of depended what records we got in the '50s and '60s, you know, I was quite fond of Nichols and May."
Were there any Flying Circus sketches that the BBC vetoed but Python went ahead and did anyway?
"There was one I made called the Wee Wee Sketch and I made John Cleese, who helped cut it, do it on tour and it got big laughs, I'm happy to say, so he ended up being quite wrong about it," he says.
"But on the whole we were very fortunate because the executive weren't monitoring us until the second or third season, when they would find the most extraordinary things to complain about - as people do, when they start looking for things to complain about.
"I think we were also fortunate that because the writers - us - had been to Cambridge and Oxford, we would actually terrify them."
The specificity of the questions directed to Idle, almost encyclopedic in their nature, surprises him and, again, he finds himself ruminating on Monty Python's enduring appeal.
"It completely surprises me, I mean, comedy doesn't tend to last anywhere remotely up to 50 years and I often wonder why it manages to still make people laugh," he says.
"I think it's because it's not particularly topical, and while it's satirical, it's satirical about genres, types of people rather than specific people, so it lasts longer than, say, an old Saturday Night Live sketch about Gerald Ford falling over.
"And sometimes the sketches were purely about themselves; a nice absurd idea.
"We also wrote it all ourselves and performed it all ourselves, which I think makes it slightly unique in the comedy world which usually has writers."
Idle remembers the precise moment he fell in love with the idea of making people laugh. He was "16 or 17" and attended a show in London called Beyond the Fringe starring Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett.
"They were so funny. They took a lot of things, like religion and the monarchy and the army and the war, and they made us all laugh and laugh and laugh, and I thought 'Good heavens, you can actually say these things and people laugh'," he says.
"I got the album, I learned it, and from then I just wanted to be funny, I wanted to be a comedian. It changed my life."
Idle's new book, The Spamalot Diaries, hits the shelves on October 5. It's based on the diary entries he wrote when attempting to bring Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Broadway as the unlikely theatrical hit Spamalot, and he's excited for people to read it.
"We were moving house about a year ago and I came across this thing that I had written and completely forgotten about," he says.
"I kept a diary during the rehearsing and making of Spamalot where I confided all my thoughts and anxieties.
"The people around me at the time - Mike Nichols and Hank Azaria and Tim Curry - all feature in it and perhaps the best director ever, Mike Nichols, who I was a big fan of from when he was in Nichols and May. We'd been friends for 15 years so it was a wonderful experience, one of the best of my working life.
"And I didn't censor myself ... I kept in some of the rows we had and all my anxieties ... it's not like I knew it was going to win a Tony back then!"
