Just mention the BBC, and John Cleese turns into Basil Fawlty in front of your eyes.
You would expect their creator to be enjoying all this, wallowing in the nostalgia and back- slapping with the BBC about the comedy triumph that seems to live for ever. But he’s not. He’s seething. The golden age of comedy, when British shows were the best in the world, is gone, he says. And it’s the BBC that’s killed it.
“When was the last thing, the last, really good thing they ran. The Office? How long ago was that? You used to be able to switch the TV on and there’d be Penelope Keith or Nigel Havers or someone doing something amusing and you’d watch it for half an hour and go to bed with a smile on your face. It was a major contribution to society. Now? Let me tell you. Let me beabsolutely frank…”
“There were two people from BBC Comedy. One had to leave early – he obviously had much more important things to talk about. The other, very senior in terms of commissioning comedy programmes, was really one of the most stupid men I have ever met.
“This is the problem. It’s the BBC executives, the commissioners, who want to be the people with the ideas – so people can say, ‘He commissioned that programme.’ Not he wrote it, or he performed it – he commissioned it… what a Renaissance Man! To be looked upon with awe.
It was all so different 50 years ago. Cleese was already established by then. He’d grown up in Weston-super-Mare in a resolutely ordinary family. Muriel, his mother who lived to 101, made him complicated – “she was depressed and angry all the time; she’s the reason I’ve spent a large part of my life in therapy”. Reg, his father, was “lovely and nice and the reason I’m not completely mad”. The family name was actually Cheese, but his dad changed it to avoid embarrassment, little realising his son would make a career out of it.
“The head of BBC Comedy, Jimmy Gilbert, took me to lunch and asked me if there was anything I’d like to do. I talked to Connie [Booth, his first wife] and we remembered the hotel in Torquay we’d stayed at when we were filming Monty Python and its breathtakingly rude owner. I didn’t really need to explain the idea. Jimmy simply said: ‘OK, I’ll commission it.’”
He and Connie took six weeks to write each episode. Impossible now, he says. “The financing of British comedy would never allow people to do what we did.” They were pleased with it. Not everyone at the BBC was.
The series ran first on BBC Two. The reaction was muted; the critics divided. The Daily Mirror said it was, “Long John [he’s 6ft 4in], Short on Jokes”. They didn’t know, or at least weren’t told, how many watched.
The second series was an even bigger hit than the first. But they never made any more. “Connie and I both felt that if we did another series, it wouldn’t be quite as good. We’d simply set the bar too high. We’d put so much into it and not got that much out of it.
By contrast, Fawlty Towers is excellence in aspic. Other writers, other stars, other broadcasters maybe, would have flogged a success like that to death. But Fawlty Towers remains just 12 pieces of comedy perfection whose reputation has grown, perhaps, because they weren’t ruthlessly exploited.
The fans were there in strength, along with the usual tourists just wanting to catch a show in the West End. I was sitting between two Americans who’d never heard of Fawlty Towers. They seemed to enjoy it but were bewildered by the way the audience erupted with laughter even before the punchlines. “All the guy said was, ‘The Germans are coming’ and the house came down…”
“How long has it been since the BBC last showed Monty Python – 20 years, more?” he says. “I think it’s because it’s so much funnier than anything they produce today; they don’t want to be shown up.”
“Now, they’re too influenced by the passion and nastiness of the extremely woke. A huge slice of comedy is put straight into the fridge because executives don’t want to get phone calls at dinner. They don’t seem to realise you tease people, you’re rude to people, that you’re fond of.”
More generally, he looks out at an England that’s barely recognisable from his childhood. A time when programmes on television “were at a much higher intellectual level than they are now”. When The Times and The Telegraph “would have been ashamed to put a pretty girl on the front page – we are now an almost entirely tabloid society”.
He may sound gloomy in these quotes, but in person he’s actually surprisingly cheerful, full of plans and schemes, lumbering a bit these days but as straight-backed and (mostly) benign as ever.
Everybody’s heard about the divorce. After all, one of his series of performances was called “The Alimony Tour”, another “How to Finance Your Divorce”. He’s been married four times, but it was the third wife, the American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger, who, as he would say, took him to the cleaners. “You know how much I had to pay? Just under £20 million. Have you ever given anyone £20 million? I had five properties; three had to be sold and she got the other two.
He’s not poor, he says. “But I gave my wife my London flat, I don’t have a car. I don’t have much money… but I don’t want it anyway. Wanting it is an illness.”
He’s even cheery about dying. Perhaps because he can be assured of several kinds of immortality. There’s a lemur that’s named after him (he’s obsessed by them, apparently), and somewhere in space there’s an asteroid called Cleese. Plus, there’s a municipal rubbish heap in Palmerston North named “Mount Cleese”. He called the place “the suicide capital of New Zealand” when he was there on tour and that was their revenge.
But beyond his name, it’s those 12 comedy classics in Fawlty Towers that he’ll be remembered for. As long as people laugh, he’ll live on.
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