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Day two of the audio book and some minor bad news from yesterday. There had been an incident with the hard drive yesterday, which we thought we’d got away with, but it turned out that we had, in fact, lost one of the recorded chapters. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it meant the first half hour was taken up with reading it out again. Thank God it wasn’t everything though. That would have been dispiriting. I probably did a better job the second time, but see if you can spot which chapter it is when you listen through!
We did 130+ pages yesterday , though 10 of them didn’t record. And did around 110 today (plus the 10 from yesterday) so I think that works out as about the same work rate (especially given that we finished about an hour earlier). There’s 50 pages and some other bits and pieces for sort out tomorrow, so we might be done by lunchtime. But let’s not make any predictions.
On the journey in and back home (finally back in my fully tyred electric car) I listened to Eric Idle’s biography Always Look On The Bright Side of Life. Not for any particular reason. I have not yet asked him to be a guest on RHLSTP (he is in America most of the time anyway) and I am pausing the book club in August and don’t need any new guests for that just yet, but I’ve had this audiobook for a while (I think it was on sale or maybe I just had lots of credits and so bought it) and thought that with all the driving this week I might get through it.
I was such a fan of Python as a kid, so these guys mean so much to me, but once I became a comedian myself it was maybe not so cool to be quite such a fanatic so my ardour cooled. I wasn’t sure about seeing them at the O2 (but was glad I relented in the end as it was amazing to behold) and it’s nice, now, to be at a point where I can remember how important they were to me and to enjoy being a fan boy. This biography is interesting because Idle is very happy to openly express his love of money and talk about his celebrity friends (ironically he sees being a celebrity himself as a bit of a bind, but doesn’t seem to notice that he is as big a fan of others as the people who might annoy him by being a fan of his). It’s actually quite refreshing to see someone not try and pretend that they’re above this kind of stuff. The book is fun for a fan, although I’d like to have seen more about his childhood (he lost his dad, who was killed hitchhiking home after the war and then endured a miserable time in a horrible boarding school) and less about his celebrity life style. It can feel in places like he had dashed some of this off (there’s a little bit of repetition). But when he’s talking about the friends he loved and especially the ones he’s lost, he’s a lot more invested and he certainly lived an amazing rock star life of sex and drugs in the seventies. Maybe not too many revelations, but I was pleased to hear about the creation of Mr Cheeky - maybe my favourite Python character - as well as to hear him honestly talk about some of the bad films he’d been in and how he got trapped writing scripts in Hollywood that never got made.
Obviously I’d love to get him on the podcast and maybe his mate Mike might put in a good word for me.
