davidclensy.com

In a rare interview, John Cleese tells David Clensy about his plans to return to Clifton College; reveals he’s writing a new comedy reminiscent of Fawlty Towers; and predicts that ‘Barack Obama will transform the world’

When you’re due to interview John Cleese over the telephone, it’s difficult not to imagine him on the other end of the line standing behind the reception desk at Fawlty Towers.Beyond all reasonable logic, I half expect him to answer in Basil’s trademark stressed-out state, while Sybil, Manuel and the Major get up to some slapstick capers in the background.

In fact, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. When he comes on the line, the godfather of silly walks; the nemesis of Norwegian Blue parrots; the leader of the People’s Front Of Judea, sounds surprisingly reserved – thoughtful and intelligent.

You know immediately when somebody’s brain is working on a much higher intellect than your own – you can almost hear the whirring. He answers questions without pausing for thought, skipping gleefully between subjects. If you don’t get your next question in quickly, he’ll come up with one for you, after bridging the pause with a relaxed: “Now, let’s see, what else can I tell you?”

With a career that’s spanned the story of modern comedy, from working with The Two Ronnies on The Frost Report, through the Monty Python years, to the immaculately written Fawlty Towers, John has come a long way since his school days at Clifton College.

But the Weston-super-Mare-born star is returning to his alma mater later this month, giving a series of intimate “evening with” style performances at the school’s Redgrave Theatre to raise money for the neighbouring Bristol Zoo.

“When I was a schoolboy at Clifton College, we were so close to the zoo that I could hear the animals all day,” he says. “It was the gibbons mostly, they were whooping all the time,” – he breaks to give me an impromptu impersonation of a gibbon. But I could also hear the lions and the tigers roaring. I loved it. I would often go and wander around the zoo. My favourite animal was a lemur, who was in a cage near the main entrance. I just took to him – he was such a playful little thing. And I’ve loved lemurs ever since. That’s why I’ve done work for Save The Lemurs over the years, and made TV documentaries about them. In fact, when I’m on stage in Clifton, I’ll be joined by Colin the Lemur, whom I met last year when I last visited the zoo. Nice little chap.”

There are plenty of stories in circulation about Cleese’s time at Clifton – most famously that he marked-out footsteps in the snow making it appear that Field Marshall Earl Haig had left his stoney steed in the night for a visit to the little boys’ room.

“I’ve heard that story, too, but sadly it wasn’t me,” he says, dashing the school’s foremost urban legend. In fact, that story was doing the rounds when I was at Clifton College. Although in those days it was supposed to be some other Old Boy who’d done it. These stories just keep going round and round, and they’re always attributed to the last famous person that was there,” he laughs. “I’ve heard another one about me putting an old Morris Oxford on the roof of one of the school buildings. Again, not a shred of truth in it, sadly.”

He may not have wreaked the sort of havoc you would have wished for from a future Python, but John has fond memories of his time at the school.

“I had a very happy time there,” he says. “It was a friendly school. My only criticism is that the teaching then wasn’t stimulating enough for me. I used to get the most enjoyment from the particular teachers who had a habit of going off on a limb and talking about life in general rather than their specific subject. I learned a lot from them, but not much from the normal lessons. But then, I also found that at Cambridge. I think I do need a lot of intellectual stimulation to be happy.”

This is a trait that has reflected in his career. Never one to rest on his laurels, he’s always moved on from successful projects before they had chance to wane. He left Python before the fourth TV series, and called it a day on Fawlty Towers after just 12 episodes.

“True,” he says. “I was the first to leave the Python team, after the third series, because I was ready to try something new. And when people found out I was writing a sitcom with my first wife Connie Booth about a hotel in Torquay, they thought I was mad – ‘why’s he writing with his wife?’ they’d say. But we did OK with Fawlty Towers, I think.”

John, who has divorced recently from his third wife, the American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger, is currently trying his hand at writing with a close relative again – this time it’s his daughter Camilla. “I’m writing a film script with Camilla,” he reveals. “It is a comedy set in an old folks’ home. No doubt people will say there’s a hint of Fawlty Towers in it. But to be honest, no matter what I wrote, people would say there’s a hint of Fawlty Towers in there somewhere. I could play Mary Queen of Scots and somebody would say there’s a touch of Basil Fawlty there.”

Apart from the lemurs documentary, John has steered clear of television since Fawlty Towers. But for the past four years, he has also been pioneering a new form of entertainment – performing at his ranch in California in podcasts for his website, with viewers charged $1 per downloaded episode.

Fed up with television executives and studios, John set up the website in 2004 as a vehicle for his humour and personal philosophy. “It’s like having a tiny TV station,” he says.

It’s the kind of technophile behaviour of which another of his most famous incarnations would be proud. John briefly took on the role of Q in the Bond movies during the Pierce Brosnan years, following the death of Desmond Llewellyn. “Desmond was a fascinating man,” he says. “I’d worked alongside him, playing his deputy in The World Is Not Enough. He’d been a prisoner of war, but he had great respect for the Germans. I used to love listening to his stories.”

By 2002, when it came to filming Die Another Day, the Bond world had lost the veteran actor, and John was happy to step into the iconic MI6 quartermaster role. “I enjoyed being in the Bond movies, though of course, I only did two of them,” he says. “Unfortunately, when they moved over to Daniel Craig, the producers decided to take the element of humour out of Bond, so Q went. That was a real shame, I think, but they’ve done it because the films make most of their money in the Far East now, and our Asian friends just don’t really get the humour. They just want to see the action sequences. In my view, they go on for far too long now.”

But over the past 30 years, John has shown he feels quite at home among the Hollywood glitterati, producing hit movies like A Fish Called Wanda. He’s lived in Santa Barbara for almost a decade.

“I love California,” he says. “I’ve lived out there since 1999. I grew up in Weston-super-Mare, which was a very middle class, protestant, repressed little town in those days. Going to America helped me to shake off that repression. Though people used to tell me I was more like an American anyway – given my interest in psychoanalysis, and having married three American women. But the weather is fantastic, I’m able to be close to my two daughters, and, of course, I’m not as well known out there – which is very liberating for me.

“Although people are lovely to me in the UK, I’m so well known here it can get a bit oppressive having everybody looking at you as you walk down the street.”

And John is optimistic about the future of his adopted country. He recently revealed his plans to pen speeches for presidential hopeful Barack Obama exclusively in the Evening Post’s sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

“I think Obama is the brightest beacon of hope I’ve seen in world politics in the last 30 years,” he tells me. “He’ll win a landslide. I think McCain will win three states at the most. Barack Obama will transform the world. Bush has done nothing but harm to America, and it’s not just me sounding off – people all over the world are saying this. I think Obama will be able to clear the slate for America.

“I’ve not met Obama yet in person,” he adds. “His people have asked me to meet him, but I think he’s far too busy to meet me at the moment – he’d only be able to offer me 90 seconds. What’s the point of that? But I have made it known that I am more than happy to work for him. That might be speechwriting, or simple fundraising. In fact, I am organising a fund-raising event for the Obama campaign in September, so that’s one relatively straightforward way I can help him. I’m excited about a future in which Obama is president.”