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A review by siria
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography by Eric Idle
3.0
A bio-by-numbers. The fun of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life comes from Eric Idle's cheery, showbizzy name-dropping. As he says at one point, you pick up this kind of celebrity memoir to read about people you have heard of, not their non-famous family and friends. Fair enough. And there are more than enough names dropped here to keep anyone with an interest in the pop culture of the '60s through to the early '90s very happy indeed. Hardcore fans of Python probably won't find much new here, but I liked getting a glimpse behind the scenes of how the TV show and the movies were put together.
But this is a relentlessly surface book. Idle hints at addiction, loss, the failure of his first marriage, but it's all quite hollow. There's little by way of self-reflection or analysis. His much vaunted iconoclasm and commitment to thumbing his nose at the establishment (refusing to let the V&A do a Python retrospective, for instance, because it seemed like it would be overly pious) sits jarringly alongside frequent warm mentions of the Prince of Wales and Prince Andrew. (Ugh.) Only when he talks about his friendship with George Harrison, and to a lesser extent with Robin Williams, do you really get a sense of Idle as someone who's capable of having relationships that are based on more than nudge-nudge-wink-wink and truly stupendous amounts of cocaine.
But this is a relentlessly surface book. Idle hints at addiction, loss, the failure of his first marriage, but it's all quite hollow. There's little by way of self-reflection or analysis. His much vaunted iconoclasm and commitment to thumbing his nose at the establishment (refusing to let the V&A do a Python retrospective, for instance, because it seemed like it would be overly pious) sits jarringly alongside frequent warm mentions of the Prince of Wales and Prince Andrew. (Ugh.) Only when he talks about his friendship with George Harrison, and to a lesser extent with Robin Williams, do you really get a sense of Idle as someone who's capable of having relationships that are based on more than nudge-nudge-wink-wink and truly stupendous amounts of cocaine.