Eric Idle..words fail me. No more Monty Python for me. Spamalot can fuck off too.

It has been made clear over the years, by the other Pythons especially, that Eric Idle is a piece of work. As the report on the Rutles dispute states, “in Britain most fans were aware that the Rutles was truly an equal collaboration between two very talented people. It was a product of Neil’s brilliant music and equally a product of Eric’s skillful script and his professional turns as the narrator and Dirk McQuickly.” No argument there; but taken as a whole, the 'All You Need is Cash' programme would have been little but a bunch of weak sketches and cameos without the inspired Beatles pastiches written by Innes.
If the details laid out in this report are true, then Idle really is a nasty piece of work.

I wish I was in the UK or US so that I could buy a ticket to see Neil Innes perform, not only because he's talented but because I'd think of every penny as being one that WASN'T going to Eric Idle! Three UK shows, 19/3, 20/3 and 28/3, before he's off to the US:
http://www.neilinnes.org/live.htm

I know we all "feel" for Pete Best but as History also shows,Ringo WAS the drummer for The Beatles,it's just that he didn't enter the film until a bit later on...

...in the spirit of Proust and Python, if anyone can summarise this for me in less than a minute I'd really appreciate it. Sorry, I just can't be bothered to read it all.

I appreciate it.

At some point I will. I guess there's no excuse for laziness.

as the most recent bits are more than a decade old. wasn't there an Innes interview in Word recently?

Neil did not lose his house and is not living in poverty. Like a great many of us he works for a living and you will find him at gigs in the UK this month and in the US next month, as mentioned above.

To quote Neil when he was told this topic was going ‘That story was wrong then and it’s wrong now’

There certainly was an article recently in Word at which he was visited at his home, and he's also been pictured in it as a 'talking head' in many a TV programme recently.

In addition to having done bugger all of much note for decades other than resting on the mustiest, most notoriously withered laurels in show business, and despite having had absolutely zero input in the writing or recording of the Rutles songs, guess who insisted on a whopping 50% of the U.S. royalties and residuals from all the Rutles songs, on pain of M'Lud?

Yep. Those Beatles really are a nasty pieces of work, aren't they.

Oh.

Actually, to be absolutely accurate, it was ATV Music, and the surviving Fabs themselves probably had no inkling that that "their people" were being so, er, zealous on their behalf, but if Neil Innes was chizzed out of his just deserts on the Rutles project, it was hardly Eric Idle's doing.

Neil Innes is, by all accounts, almost certainly a top bloke and Eric Idle is, by all accounts, almost certainly, er, a bloke, but in the absence of the Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life hitmaker's version of events, I think all we can reasonably conclude is that two former creative partners who went way back had a big falling-out (oh, the irony), more or less got it sorted it out a few years later, and are now both rather embarrassed about the whole affair.

the unbelievably poor Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch that simply rehashed the original footage with a few out takes and new interviews with musicians that were sometime amusing although the best didn't even make the final cut

The rest were poor links by Idle and allegedly he even approached Innes to write some new songs for it. Innes refused unsurprisingly but Idle used some of the songs from the Archeology LP he was so keen to stop. The ruddy nerve!

Luckily this went straight to bargain bin.

When you think of what a second Rutles film could have been

- Barry's drinking and Thomas The Tram voiceovers
- Stig's continued allegience to Arthur Sultan and his film company set up to finance the controversial Dick Emery 'Oooh You Are Awful' movie
- Dirk's seal clubbing scandal and the 2nd marriage to Nasty's ex Chastity
- Nasty's 'Lost Weekend' in which he watched all six seasons of the popular series in a Brandy Alexander fuelled binge

but no, Idle pissed over his own work as readily as his pal Dan Akroyd did with 'Blues Brothers 2000'