Happy Birthday Eric Idle

The Father, Dogfather, Reader, Writer, lyricist, composer, guitarist and Monty Python star, Eric Idle, celebrates his 79th birthday today. Idle wrote many of Python’s songs including “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” and won a Tony for the musical “Spamalot” in 2004.

Above: Idle with George Harrison in 1978

Here are 4 Fab things that Eric Idle did...

1) In the 39th episode of Python, Eric does a brilliant impersonation of Sir Dickie Attenborough handing out the award for the most awards award.

2) The Galaxy Song

(From the 1983 film The Meaning of Life)

3) Mr Smoketoomuch's famous rant that took place in a travel agents... "Swimming pools full of draft Red Barrel and fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into the queues. And if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss your bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, the first item in the menu of International Cuisine. Every Thursday night there's a bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny emaciated dego with nine-inch hips and some fat bloated tart with her hair Bryll-creamed down and big arse presenting flamenco for foreigners. And an adenoidal typist from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhea trying to pick up hairy, bandy legged, whop degos called Manuel. And once a week there's an excursion to local Roman remains, where you can buy Cherry Aid and melted ice cream and bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel. And one night they take you to a typical restaurant with local atmosphere and color and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "I love the Costa Brava!" "I love the Costa Brava!" And you get cornered by some drunken green grocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and last Tuesday's 'Daily Express' and he's on and on and on about how it is running the country and how many languages Margaret Powell can speak and she throws up all over the cuba libres. And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton Airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dry British Airways sandwiches. And you can't even get a glass of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England with the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty. And the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ashtrays. They keep telling you won't be another hour, but you know damn well your plane is still in Iceland, because it had to turn back, trying to take a party of Swedes to take a party of Swedes to Yugoslavia. Of course it loads you up there at 3 a.m. in the morning. And then you sit on the tarmac for four hours because of unforeseen difficulties, i.e. the permanent strike of airtraffic control over Paris. When you finally get to Malaga airport, everybody's queueing for the bloody toilet, and queueing for the bloody half-customs officers, and queueing for the bloody bus that isn't there, waiting to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been built. When you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel Limassol, while paying half the holiday money to a license Spaniard in a taxi, there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the bath, there's no water in the tap, there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet, and half the rooms are doublebooked, and you can't sleep anyway, 'cause the permanent are in the jungles in the hotel next door. Meanwhile, the Spanish National Tourist Board promises that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a mild outbreak of the Spanish Conleigh, rather like the previous outbreak in 1616, even the bloody rats are dying from it!"

4) The Rutles. Idle's collaboration with Neil Innes gave us many wonderful songs to learn and sing including, OUCH