Mark Forstater's Blog

A Twat’s Tale

November 11, 2015 at 10:48 am Leave a comment

The 7th Python is sub-titled A Twat’s Tale. The reason is because sore loser Eric Idle, when interviewed by Ben Williams of Time Out about the reason behind the 02 reunion said, ‘We were meeting last August in gloomy circumstances because we had just been sued by this twat.’ Later on the gracious Idle told Alan Yentob on Imagine (BBC1), “We’ve been involved with this idiot who was one of the producers on Holy Grail and he has spent seven years suing us. So what it meant was it cost us a million quid to defend ourselves.” On The Meaning of Live, he also said, “Seven years he’s been pursuing us, seven years; it’s cost us a million quid, with lawyers, just to turn up and say no, that’s not true, to defend yourself.” Eric also called me a loser which is odd since Eric fails to mention that they lost the case and the 7 years defending themselves could have been reduced to no time or cost at all if they had just looked at the evidence and agreed to negotiate. But they didn’t. There were 4 distinct points where a settlement could have been achieved but in each case they (for some reason) decided not to settle. This led John Cleese to say, “And we were kind of laughing about it, you know, nobody was in despair, it’s insane- Why didn’t we settle 5 or 6 years ago?”

Why didn’t they settle 5 or 6 years ago? They had every opportunity. I never wanted to go to court, and I never thought they would want to put themselves on trial. But they did. It’s one of the mysteries of this case, one of the unanswered questions I still have about what was really going on with them. However the book does sweep the curtain aside and show the real Oz.

Entry filed under: Monty Python Trial, The 7th Python.