Interview: John Cleese

IT seems to be rather a burden to John Cleese that people always expect him to be funny – especially as he clearly thinks he has something to be grumpy about. We’ll get to the grumpy bit in a moment.

He also finds it both a little flattering and a bit of a bore that even his doctor may greet him with a silly walk. And yes, he still has to run the gauntlet of “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...” “It is an ex-parrot...” “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” or memorised recitations from the Cheese Shop sketch in the most unlikely of places.

Some zealous Monty Python’s Flying Circus fans may have found life a little colourless since those immortal lines were broadcast during the four cult series of the surreal sketch show between 1969 and 1974. To them, comedy has been on the slide ever since.

They’re still living in the land of petty bureaucrats, overbearing toffs, timid vicars, mad housewives and Terry Gilliam’s genius animations including the giant foot, created with camera, airbrush and scissors for use instead of punchlines, so that one sketch could melt into the next, stream-of-consciousness-style.

For the many who feel there has been no better anywhere since the 45 Python shows and the movies the series spawned – including Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life – an evening spent in the company of John Cleese will be to dine at the top table with one of the five men who, it’s been said, did for comedy what the Beatles did for music.

Those who aren’t quite so stuck solely in the Python groove may expect him to be something akin to his crazed, irascible hotelier creation Basil Fawlty, who believed all would be well in the world and in his nondescript seaside gaff if it were not for “the bloody guests”.

Modelled on a real hotelier the Pythons met in Torquay, Basil was all hysterically flailing arms, shrieking delivery and high blood pressure. Even though Cleese himself seems gentle, affable, measured and slightly self-conscious, he strongly suspects that when he dies the headlines will read: “Basil Fawlty Has A Heart Attack.”

For a brainy, charismatic man – he could easily have become one of the country’s top barristers after reading Law at Cambridge – who has done a lot more than Python and Fawlty, it must be a double-edged sword to be beloved, but mostly for extraordinary work created so long ago. That said, many comedians would die happy if they thought they’d be remembered at all.

Forty years on, Cleese has the opportunity to bring us right up to date with his life on stage, page and screen. He’s treading the boards for 31 nights across the UK, earning cash to help to pay his most recent ex-wife (there are two others), American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger, the $21m alimony he has agreed to give her over seven years.

“I have to earn $1m a year before I get to keep a penny myself,” he grumbles, his tone resigned rather than ranting. “I think the show will be fun, and I’ve spent ages writing and polishing it, but I do resent the fact that the need to pay alimony forced me to pack my bags and travel, rather than stay at home writing.”

His two previous exes are also American blondes – Connie Booth, who played Polly the maid in Fawlty Towers, and actress Barbara Trentham – and each had a daughter with Cleese. He says he reached an amicable agreement to pay them a lump sum on divorce. With Eichelberger the parting has, been “contentious.” He has sold a ranch and a couple of other properties, two of which reportedly went to Alyce Faye.

But he still owns a house in California, where he spends much of the year (“my bones love the weather there, and there’s also the tax thing”), and according to recent reports, a newer property in Bath which he shares with the new blonde in his life. John Cleese is concerned about alimony, but he’s not pleading penury or giving up on love just yet.

Now that he has honed the show into two hours of anecdotes including tales of hip and knee replacements, hair transplants, divorce, clips of brilliant comedy moments from his career and sundry stories of the fabulous creative alchemy between himself and Python pals (the late) Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, he’s really looking forward to it.

The man who has been voted the second funniest British comedian ever (the top spot earned by his friend, the late Peter Cook) has recently been seen jumping around in a sleeping bag in a series of TV ads for the AA. But he draws the line at reality TV. “I was approached to do a series – I think it was the jungle one – and although I wasn’t going to do it, I asked out of curiosity how much they were paying. It was £200,000.”

“It would be like the collapse of Western civilisation. If I’m going to do embarrassing things for the money, then it would have to be a lot more money and they’d have to be things people are not going to see.”

The stage show will be enjoyable, he says, as “people will buy tickets because they already like me. It’s not like you’re a young comedian and see the audience as potentially the enemy. Comedy is a brutal business in the early stages; you get the instant ‘yes/no’ of laugh or no laugh. That’s why comics talk about ‘dying out there’ or say ‘I killed them’.”

Cleese was born 71 years ago in Weston-super-Mare. His mum Muriel was an acrobat, and his father. Reginald, who had changed his surname from “Cheese” in 1915, was in insurance sales. As a 6ft, 13-year-old, John is said to have painted footsteps to suggest that the school’s statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth to go to the loo.

Cleese met Chapman at Cambridge, where they were stars of the Footlights. A revue took them from the Edinburgh Fringe to Broadway. While in the US, Cleese met Gilliam and Connie Booth.

Back in Britain, he was hired to write for The Dick Emery Show, then he and Chapman joined the team of The Frost Report, which already had among its talent Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones. From there, they moved to At Last the 1948 Show. The five future Pythons then coalesced on Do Not Adjust Your Set.

We know the rest, except that an unsung hero in the success of Monty Python was Michael Mills, then head of BBC Light Entertainment, who followed his gut instinct to commission the first series of 13 shows, for which Cleese says he was paid £4,000 to write and perform.

“Critics didn’t know what to make of it, and it was really due to the repeats that we gathered a decent following,” he says. Looking back at the long days spent dreaming up and writing the material, he remembers “...lots of energy and squabbling, but always about the material and whether it was good.

“The two stroppiest were Jonesy and I – he was excitable and Welsh, and I was cool and Cambridge and overbearing. We kind of cancelled each other out.”

By the end of the third series, Cleese had had enough. He opted out of the final run, but joined in again for the spin-off films. Away from the Pythons, Cleese’s film projects have included Clockwise and the role of Archie Leach, Jamie Lee Curtis’s unlikely object of desire in A Fish Called Wanda and its sequel, Fierce Creatures. He’s even appeared in two Bond movies.

He has, with his former therapist, Robin Skynner, written self-help books about family life, made lucrative comedic training videos, and fronted factual TV series The Human Face, but finds himself unimpressed with the world of film and TV television today. “I don’t actually like acting much, unless a script is so marvellous... but if I get offered a film role in England the money is usually tiny. In the US, most comedy is aimed at 17-year-old boys who know nothing.

“There’s not much intelligent humour. I find that very few people know what they’re talking about, anywhere.”

He’d love to write and present a TV series about religion and spirituality. “I went to see the head of ITV about my suggestion for something that would examine the difference between religion and spirituality, but using humour.

“After five seconds, he glazed over. He obviously thought it was inappropriate for me, yet it’s an area in which I’ve had a lifelong interest.” He finds this kind of pigeonholing tiresome and frustrating.

Cleese says he is “gently getting around to thinking about my autobiography.” There’s a lot to look back on, but when he occasionally sees a clip of Monty Python at a fundraising do, “I sometimes can not recall either writing or performing in a sketch, yet I did both.”

In his personal life, Cleese is clearly a man who likes the closeness of bright, glamorous women. His new love is Jennifer Wade, a UK jewellery designer 30 years his junior. Friends may urge caution, but word on the street is that she could soon by Mrs Cleese IV. Haven’t three divorces, and a recent financial scorching clipped the wings of this hopeless romantic? He laughs a real belly laugh. “No, I’m still a romantic. I still believe in it all... But for some reason the question reminds me of my favourite joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.”

John Cleese – The Alimony Tour will be at York Grand Opera House on May 28 and 29 and at The Grand Theatre, Leeds, on June 2, 3, and 4.