‘This is about money.
I want enough not to have to fly commercial’
John Cleese tells Dominic Maxwell why he’s reviving Fawlty Towers, how he still disagrees with Monty Python co-star Eric Idle and why woke has a good and a bad side.
In a theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, the most famous hotel lobby in British sitcom history is preparing to take guests for the first time in 45 years. Whatever audiences end up thinking of the stage version of Fawlty Towers, which started its West End run on Saturday night, there are sure to be pleasured gasps from the faithful as they file into the auditorium: it is an uncanny recreation of Torquay’s crummiest hotel. And to judge by the recording of a run-through, the same will go for the performances by a skilled cast. A radical reinvention this is not.
Upstairs in the Grand Bar, John Cleese nurses an oat-milk latte. His play condenses three episodes written in 1975 and 1979 with his first wife and co-star Connie Booth for the original series. I adore Fawlty Towers, I tell him, as many do. It topped a Radio Times poll for Britain’s best sitcom as recently as 2019. And yet, a stage version? You can’t help but wonder ...“What’s the point?” he chimes in, smiling. Um, yes.
Cleese, 84, felt that way himself for decades. He said no to new Fawlty on television, to a Fawlty musical. Then in 2015 he accepted the offer. The previous year he’d reunited with Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam for Monty Python shows at the O2 in London, and had loved the sense of celebration in a crowd that knew every line. And so he thought, “Why not?”
“I mean, there are so many of these shows being recycled now,” he says. His director, Caroline Jay Ranger, did the Only Fools And Horses musical. “And this is a good one. It’s not something I’m excited about like I would be if it were a new script. But I think it’s a good deal. And it’s lovely to sit in an audience with people rocking with laughter. It lifts you. So there’s sort of not much against it. Even if there’s not much for it.” Can any of it improve on what he did in the Seventies? He thinks three separate endings all coming together on stage “will be bigger and better than the original”. Yet he didn’t consider writing something entirely new for Basil. “No, I’m doing that with my daughter Camilla for television.”
First announced last year, the new television show will be set in the Caribbean, where Basil’s illegitimate daughter, who has worked in hotels all her life, has been given a tough new job. “And so she thinks she needs her father’s help, because she’s bought his version of things, which is that he is a wonderful hotelier.” Cleese chortles at the prospect.
He loves writing with Camilla, his child by his second wife, Barbara Trentham. (He also has an older daughter, Cynthia, by Booth.) “She comes up with bigger ideas,” he says, “but I know how to get us there.” They are only an episode and a half into writing it, though. First: the stage show. He is also working on a musical of his 1988 film comedy A Fish Called Wanda (in which he starred with Palin, Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline), a nonmusical stage version of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and a film comedy about cannibalism. Meanwhile, he and Camilla have found backing for another film, Lookalikes, in which Hollywood stars will play their own lookalikes.
Booth isn’t involved in either Fawlty Towers project, although Cleese has said she will “sneak in” to see the stage show: “I let her know what’s going on.” Which is not what Booth said last year when news broke of the new sitcom. “I’d have appreciated learning about the project from John rather than reading about it in the papers,” she said.
Cleese demurs, although by the sounds of it, he didn't pick up the phone himself. “Well, she knew about it actually,” he says.
“She talked to my agent, or her agent had talked to my agent about it. So she felt she had been left out but actually she hadn’t.” She co-owns all things Fawlty, though? “Yes, she gets a chunk of everything. She doesn’t do anything on this because she doesn’t want to, but she gets a reasonable amount of money.”
Cleese is often in the news for chiding woke oversensitivity. In 2020 he was publicly furious that the Fawlty episode The Germans was temporarily taken down from UKTV, because of “racial slurs”. That episode is one of the three he has used for the stage show, but the slurs (including the N-word), spoken by the silly old major, are gone. The joke was always against the major, says Cleese. “But we’ve got rid of the lines, because once you’ve heard those words in the theatre nobody would think of anything else for the next hour.”
He hates censorship, but has no problem with warnings before television shows. And he is optimistic that the culture wars are starting to abate, just a bit. “Because I meet so few people who take the extreme view. And there is a good end of woke and a bad end. The good end of woke is ‘let’s be kind, let’s be considerate’. If someone is in a wheelchair, let’s make sure they’ve got the facilities to live a good life. Who’s going to argue with that?
“But the idea that biological sex isn’t an extraordinarily powerful determinant of sex... If anyone wants to live that way, that’s fine, but don’t let them compete against women who have always been women if they’ve had the advantage of a man’s body. That sort of thing. And the huge oversensitivity with this idea of ‘microaggressions’.” He roars with laughter. “I mean, mispronouncing someone’s name as a microaggression. I’ve been going to America since 1964 and they always call me ‘Cleece’. You shouldn’t
They have made so many bad decisions. There was a time when I thought they might be an interesting centre-right organisation, but then they gave a programme to Boris Johnson. He’s a pathological liar. You can’t do that.”
John Cleese on working with GB News
make fun of pain. But you can make fun of phoney pain.”
He is proud of the programme he made about wokeness as part of his discussion series, The Dinosaur Hour, last year for GB News – but he was glad they didn’t want him to make any more. “So I’m free of that. They have made so many bad decisions. There was a time when I thought they might be an interesting centre-right organisation, but then they gave a programme to Boris Johnson. He’s a pathological liar. You can’t do that.”
If Cleese were richer, he would spend more of his time making factual programmes. He’d love to explore his interest in psychic phenomena, and the afterlife. Yet he wants to earn good money while he can.
Famously, in 2011 he named his standup show The Alimony Tour, after a California court forced him to pay US$20 million to his third wife, the American psychologist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. He has now paid that in full, he says.
“But this is about getting myself a nest egg, so I can get a place in the sun. Because I have a problem with British weather. And if there’s a crisis, you can throw money at it. That’s the best thing about money. The next stage is to have enough not to have to fly commercial. I’m 6ft 4in and I find flying absolutely awful.”
On top of that, he says that 12 years of marriage to Jennifer Wade, 32 years his junior at 52, has “reawakened something” in him. “When you have someone who really loves you it changes you. It’s made me feel more positive. I haven’t had that experience before. And I’ve never really been a very confident person, you know?” Which is hard to fathom if you know Cleese only from his public persona. “Yes, that’s public schoolboys being taught how to look convincing when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Gets you to the top of companies.”
One final reason for putting new spins on old comedies is that ... well, people want them. It’s not that he hasn’t been writing new screenplays. He has several sitting in a drawer. It’s just that, until Lookalikes, producers didn’t want to finance them. “The things that get backing are the things based on properties that are already out there.”
Hence the Wanda musical, which he is still tweaking, in which comedy will be paramount, songs will be short, and there will be “no dancing”. He expects the Life of Brian play to be in the West End next year. Idle has already written Spamalot, the stage musical of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Cleese says neither he nor any other Python wanted to join him in staging Brian when he mooted the idea. “So I went away without having to please anyone else.”
But Idle is already displeased, having complained that Cleese is taking out the famous finale, his song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Cleese says he’s “deciding how much of it to keep”, but that he has radical plans it doesn’t fit in with.
He wants to get rid of the whole crucifixion ending, because it keeps Brian stuck on a cross for the last 20 minutes: “You almost forget he is there.” Palin told Cleese the audience would expect the song. “But I said, ‘Michael, when did Python ever give the audience what they expected?’ So I’ve changed quite a lot.”
In February Idle complained on Twitter that Python no longer brings in an income. “It’s true,” says Cleese. “Python brings in very little money.” He disagrees, however, with Idle’s assertion that their manager, Terry Gilliam’s daughter Holly, is to blame. “He was absolutely out of order on that one.
He has been criticising Holly for a long time. And neither Michael nor her dad nor I think it is any way justified. We can’t figure how that particular bee got in his bonnet. We made money for a few years in Python, but it’s a long time ago now.”
Cleese’s mind is as sharp as ever, but his voice is a bit croaky today, and he has had health problems – two hip replacements, a knee replacement, a pacemaker and type 2 diabetes (hence the oat milk).
He still loves what he does. “But I don't want to have to work all the time, which I’ve been doing lately.”
His face is relatively unlined – the impact, in part, of the stem cells he pays a Swiss clinic to insert in him every 12 to 18 months for £17,000 a time (NZ$25,528), for the past 20 years. He thinks looking younger may help him keep getting acting work.
“But the purpose was not to change my face. It’s not about my appearance – that’s just a side effect – it’s to prolong my life. There are still a lot of things I want to do. But your energy drops.
“You still find energy for the things that you really like. But for the ones you don’t, it’s harder to fake it.”