Eric Idle on death, life in Provence and “zero chance” of more Monty Python: 'They hate my guts – I don’t know why, I only ever made them money’

"I’d like to be buried here,” sighs Eric Idle, surveying the bucolic little corner of Provence he calls home for half the year. “But only after I’m dead.”

The perfect comic timing shouldn’t come as a surprise: the former Python was voted the 21st funniest man of all time by his fellow comedians in 2005. But the intimations of mortality might be unexpected from the performer most of us picture with a mischievous perma-twinkle in his eye and a nudge-nudge never far from his elbow.

That young iconoclast is 83 now, though, and narrowly survived a pancreatic cancer that should have killed him. (He laughed aloud when his doctor gave him the diagnosis, because a year or two earlier he’d asked the same medic what would be the quickest and surest disease with which he could kill off a character in the musical he was writing, and was told “pancreatic cancer”.)

So what does the man who wrote the most-requested music at British funerals – Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – think of, when he thinks of death?

“I think having the number-one funeral song is pretty damn good. I love that, and I reckon it’s really healthy.” Beyond that, he says, he refuses to believe in “extra-celestials”, and argued over afterlives with George Harrison at the Beatle’s deathbed in 2001: “He thought he’d escape rebirth. I said, ‘I’d give anything to be reborn.’” As…? “I didn’t put my name down for anything in particular. But maybe an England Test cricketer. In the days when they could still get pissed in the evenings.”

He’s modest about his most famous legacy. (“Will Python be funny for ever? No. It’s extraordinary it’s gone on for however many generations it’s gone on for.”) But there’s no mistaking his pride in his adopted French home – especially since he’s now written a book about it. Idle in Provence starts in 1971 (“when the Radio Times was still about radio,” he jokes), with Idle buying a ruined Provençal farm building that had “no water, no road, no electricity, no floors”. But, bit by bit, he turned it “from shack to shackeau”.

This is no dull old DIY-memoir, though – it’s too witty and too wide-ranging for that. (See its subtitle, A Brief History of Thyme.) And because the farmhouse has been central to almost all Idle’s adult life, and because he’s irrepressibly candid, we learn about everything from his “year of loving dangerously” after his divorce to having his daughter sectioned while he was taking to the stage in London’s O2 for the Python reunion in 2014.

But why buy such a moneypit in the first place? “To escape! To escape the long shadow of boarding school, and how people are in England, and Python, and fame, which is a silly illusion that doesn’t help you much.” Indeed, one of the reasons he loves the area around Cotignac, where his “shackeau” sits, is that no one knows him as a Python. “No man is a legend to his trousers,” he says, deliberately mangling 17th-century writer Madame Cornuel’s quote about no man being a hero to his valet.

It was a charm not lost on any of Idle’s starry chums, either. Python always had famous fans, from Orson Welles to Elvis Presley (“He called everyone ‘Squire’ after my Nudge Nudge sketch”), but many become close friends over trips to the farmhouse to stay with Idle and his second wife. Harrison Ford, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Carrie Fisher, Robin Williams and assorted members of the Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd and the Who adored the anonymity of life in Cotignac and the shoulder-shrugging indifference of its citizens to their presence.

The Pythons came too, of course, their visits remembered fondly (the book has an excellent anecdote concerning John Cleese and ping-pong). But there is “absolutely zero” chance of Cleese or Michael Palin returning, says Idle. “They hate my guts. Don’t ask me why. I only ever made them money.”

Money, Idle explains, is not as plentiful as one might imagine. “Do you think I get a pension? I’m still working, at 83, to pay for my healthcare in America [he lives in California when not in Cotignac]. People think you’re loaded because you did a show 40 years ago – but the billionaires are billionaires because they don’t pay royalties: they put you on Spotify and YouTube for free. It’s theft!”

There are, at least, still the simple pleasures of Provençal life to be enjoyed: the vines, olive trees, pine, broom, rosemary and fennel; the badgers, hares, quails, nightingales and cuckoos; and that prized peace and quiet. “I’m part of the woodwork now. I’m there in the boulangerie in the morning, I’m in the supermarket. That other [celebrity] thing people think of me as can be discarded, so everything is comfortable and easy. I really don’t want to spend all day being mistaken for a comedian.”

And he’s not worried that writing a book about his little idyll could lead readers to track him down and ruin it? “Oh, it’s hard to find. And if necessary we’ll get shotguns.”

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