BBCComedy star Eric Idle says Sir Paul McCartney was initially “a bit weird” about his spoof band The Rutles until he found out the actor had spent his childhood in Merseyside.
Idle played McCartney-inspired Dirk McQuickly in the 1978 mockumentary All You Need Is Cash.
Idle told BBC Radio Merseyside: “I met Paul in the park actually and he was a bit, you know, he’s a bit weird [about it] but [McCartney’s then-wife] Linda loved it.
“Then he found out I’d been at school in Wallasey and he said, ‘Oh, he’s Scouse, he’s one of us. That’s great, he’s one of us’.”
Idle added: “So you know I was alright. I got the Scouse pass.”
McCartney’s fellow Beatle George Harrison had a cameo appearance in the film as a reporter interviewing Rutles’ press officer Eric Manchester, who was based on Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor.
Now living in Los Angeles, Idle is touring the UK and is due to perform at the Liverpool Empire theatre on 14 September.
He plans to include some of The Rutles’ back catalogue, which included more than a dozen Beatles-inspired songs, All You Need Is Cash and the follow-up Can’t Buy Me Lunch.
“It was probably one of the most favourite things I ever did in my life was filming [All You Need Is Cash].
“It was a great fun to do. We did a lot in Liverpool 8… and then we went to Southport to try and pretend we were in the West Indies.
“We had cardboard cut-outs of coconut trees to film Ouch! which was our version of Help!”
Getty ImagesBorn in South Shields, Idle later spent some of his childhood in Merseyside with his widowed mother before he was sent to boarding school in Wolverhampton.
“On my fifth birthday, I went across the Mersey on a ferry and the Liverpool overhead railway which existed in those days and went along the docks,” he said.