"I think he'd been looking for Paul": Eric Idle gives horrifying account of George Harrison stabbing

The connections between the late George Harrison and Monty Python comedian Eric Idle ran deep. Notably, Harrison appeared in Idles' satirical movie All You Need Is Cash – a film tracing the career of the suspiciously Beatles-like 60s group The Rutles – and re-mortgaged his home so that Monty Python's controversial 1979 film Life of Brian could be financed after the original backers got cold feet.

On the latest episode of The Adam Buxton Podcast, Idle looks back at their friendship. During the conversation, Buxton asks the comedian if Harrison's Hare Krishna faith was any comfort to him after the terrifying incident in 1999 when an intruder broke into the former Beatle's Friar Park estate in Henley-On-Thames and stabbed him multiple times.

"He [Harrison] was very disturbed," says Idle. "I have never, ever seen him more disturbed. It was really shocking, because they fought for 20 minutes.

"He'd been stabbed about 40 times," says Buxton.

"With a butcher's knife," continues Idle. "And bleeding to death."

"And this was just sort of a crazed intruder," adds Buxton.

"Crazed guy, off his meds," says Idle. "And I think he'd been looking for Paul [McCartney]. He couldn't find Paul, so it's easier to find Henley. And he came over the wall, smashed in the window, and George, I think, came out because George was the bold one, who told the Hell's Angels to fuck off. He was always the one who came and said, 'No, you've got to fuck off' out of Abbey Road.

"I think he did the same thing. He went at the top of the stairs and told him to fuck off, you know. And then he yelled 'Hare Krishna!' and the guy came at him up the stairs with a knife. It would have been wiser, perhaps, to lock the door and call the police.

"So I think Liv [Harrison's wife, Olivia] called the police, but it took them about 20 minutes to get there, and this all-out attack took place, and I think Liv, in the end, bashed him over the head with a Tiffany lamp, and they were all passed out when the police arrived and blood everywhere. It was like a scene from a horror film."

"I know he was very shaken. They had a puja [a Hindu ceremony during which prayer is offered to one or more deities]. We went round and went through the attack, bit by bit, up the stairs and still blood on walls and things. It was like really awful and shocking and kind of therapeutic."

The attacker, a 34-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity and sentenced to indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital. He was discharged in 2002, just eight months after Harrison succumbed to cancer.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Idle talks about his friendship with David Bowie and fellow comic Peter Cook, looks back on the swiftly-changing world of the 1960s, and reflects on Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life's long life beyond the final scene of The Life Of Brian.