John Cleese hits out at the BBC for damaging comedy: “The British people deserve better than this”

It’s 50 years since the first broadcast of Fawlty Towers, which he and Connie Booth wrote and starred in and many regard as the funniest television programme ever made. Its two series consisted of just a dozen frenetic, intricate farces, shown on the BBC half a century ago, but they became so lodged in the public consciousness that the anniversary is being celebrated by something approaching Fawlty mania.

U&Gold is repeating original episodes on weekdays; the Fawlty Towers stage show, running to packed houses in the West End, can be seen on TV on Friday; and there’s a book on the way (Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All). Basil, Sybil, Polly and Manuel are everywhere.

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 be absolutely frank…”

Frank doesn’t begin to describe his account of his last meeting “a couple of months ago” with BBC executives to discuss possible projects.

“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.

“We had some good, comedic ideas, but they weren’t interested. Not what they wanted. They were looking for Basil Fawlty on a ship or something. It was a hopeless idea but they seemed keen on it. I wanted to say to him: ‘You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.’

“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.

“They’re not nurturing talent. Young writers go and see this clown and assume, as he is the one who commissions the programmes, he knows what he’s doing. The people in charge now have no idea at all. The writers deserve better than this. The British people deserve better than this.”

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.

He was clever enough to get a scholarship to Clifton College, arguably the poshest school in the West Country. And then on to Cambridge and the Footlights at the height of its fame. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe led to the BBC, sketches on The Frost Report and a central role in writing and appearing in Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

“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.’”

The secret to its success is laid out in the new book Cleese has written about Fawlty Towers. It’s about taking huge amounts of time and infinite pains. It’s not just a collection of gags. It’s establishing and developing characters, intricate plotting, building up the pressure in that hotel lobby, constantly refining and editing – “boring, practical things”.

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 “Comedy Script Editor, Light Entertainment, Television” was unsparing in his scorn and put it down on paper in a memo to his boss. “I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title. A collection of clichés and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.”

Cleese and co only heard about this much later. Their lowest point came recording the second episode in front of the usual invited audience. Nobody laughed. It was only afterwards they found out the BBC had handed out the tickets to a big group of visitors from the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation, who couldn’t speak English.

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 breakthrough came when the initial series of six was shown on BBC One. It was an almost instant hit, with 12 million viewers and a permanent place in the nation’s affections. It took four years to produce the second series, at least in part because John and Connie’s marriage broke down.

“Some thought it surprising we could do any more programmes, but it didn’t seem too much of a problem because we didn’t stop liking each other,” he says now.

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.

“If you want to make money in British TV, do a lot of OK programmes; don’t attempt to do anything special. Get rid of the writers and real acting skill. What they are looking for now, more than anything, is something cheap. Find a format with a studio audience like Have I Got News for You. I suspect Ian Hislop has made a lot more money out of TV than I have.”

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.

But they’re certainly being exploited now, and the legions of fans all over the world seem to love it. I discovered this when I went to see the stage adaptation at London’s Apollo Theatre a day before our interview. The show is effectively three TV episodes bolted together, with actors who channel the original cast faithfully, even brilliantly.

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…”

The stage play is off on a national tour soon, Cleese is planning a second play featuring another three of the episodes, and he’s shortly embarking on yet another tour of his own show. He’s done hundreds of them. Perhaps because he seems almost to have given up on television.

“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.”

He thinks comedy today is hamstrung by political correctness. “The BBC, in particular, is cowardly about offence. We are a long way from the days when a BBC director-general would say, ‘There are some people one would wish to offend.’

“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.”

I wonder out loud if he’s worried the BBC might be upset by the trenchant way he seems to bite the hand that fed him with comments like this. Not at all. “If it makes people cross then I shall be happy.”

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’s nostalgic for politicians like Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins – “impressive men. Now they come from think tanks and PR, I just don’t see who’s going to turn things round. I am very disturbed by what’s happening in Britain. I don’t think the people in charge are any good.”

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.

He’s 85 now, nearly 86. I ask him what keeps him going and make the mistake of suggesting he doesn’t need the money. “Of course I need the money. Haven’t you heard about the divorce?”

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.

“It’s been a terrible struggle to get back. It’s only now, this year, when I can start to do things because I’m interested in them, rather than because I need the money.”

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 thinking of moving back to the West Country – “except it’s always raining there”. He adds, “I’d be delighted to think I had somewhere of my own where I could be buried.”

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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