It’s October 1978 and I’m being crucified. I’m thirty feet up on a cross in Tunisia singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Beneath me in a troglodyte courtyard, dug out another forty feet below ground level, an Arab woman sweeps her front yard. She never looks up. We’ve been here for three days. It’s the final scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the song I wrote echoes across the desert to the distant hills. John Cleese has the u. e rest of the Pythons seem fairly cheery. ere are twenty-three of us on crosses and only three ladders, so between takes if you need a pee there is a desperate wait. I suppose if that’s the only moan you have about being crucified, you are on the whole lucky . . .

There’s something a little chilling about turning up for work and finding a cross with your name on it. Oh sure, they weren’t using nails, and we had bicycle seats to perch on, but it makes you think, hanging up there for three days in your underpants, gazing out at the desert. Perhaps everyone should be crucified for a few days, because it does give you a good perspective on life. Especially if you are singing a song that references your own passing:

Just remember that the last laugh is on you . . .

And don’t think the irony escaped me. I have always known this last little giggle at my expense lies somewhere in the future. I only hope there’s a good turnout.

The song was supposed to be ironic, but it ended up being iconic. I mean, you can’t have much less of a future to be bright about than while being crucified. But people began to sing it in real wars and in real danger. It struck a chord somehow and now people sing it everywhere. Including football matches, and funerals. Especially funerals. As of this writing, it’s the number one song requested at British funerals.

So here I am, up on a cross in Tunisia singing it for the first time to Graham Chapman. How the hell did I get here?

A Scar Is Born

By an odd coincidence, I was born on my birthday. In the same place as my mother, Harton Hospital, South Shields, County Durham, though luckily not at the same time. I was born plain Eric Idle. We couldn’t a afford a second name. There was a war on. At the time of my birth, Hitler was trying to kill me, but fortunately he missed. The closest he got is one of my earliest memories: a shot-up U.S. Wellington bomber, limping home from Germany, crashing in flames in the field beside my nursery school.

“Nothing to worry about,” said the nurses, as they hustled us inside.

Surely the scariest words you can ever hear. en I learned the truth from my mum: “ e American pilot was looking for an emergency landing in the eld. He saw the kids playing and deliberately turned away, taking the plane down.”

I’ve always liked Americans. They’re brave buggers.

So, close, Adolf, but no cigar.

If one of the best ways to appreciate life is to have an unhappy childhood, I was very fortunate. Things began badly and got worse. Try this for irony: my father was killed hitchhiking home from World War II. He’d been in the RAF since 1941 in the most dangerous seat of a Wellington bomber, that of the rear gunner/wireless operator, from which he emerged unscathed, and yet seven months after the war in Europe was over, he was killed in a road accident hitching home for Christmas. All over England, servicemen were waiting to be demobbed, and as the trains were full for the holidays they were told to thumb for rides, since everyone stopped for the boys in uniform. My dad got...