Transcribed from Radio Times, 20-26 May 1995, pp 18-20.

FROM THE RADIO TIMES:

THE JOHN CLEESE OF PYTHON DAYS is no more. He has ceased to be. But while his new satirical series on the constitution confirms his reputation for "seriousness", he remains a rebel at heart.

Here is a health warning: do not accept what he says just because he says it. Right? I'm glad we cleared that up, because these actor chappies can be a pompous pain when they sermonise about not smoking, or meddle in politics. "I couldn't agree more," he says. "Our views should be treated with complete scepticism. Just because we're good at acting or writing, there is no reason why readers should give any more weight to what we say than their tobacconist or bank manager. My biggest skill is going to experts for information and then putting it across in a reasonably humorous way."

He has applied this to Look at the State We're In, a series of six ten-minute comedies which examine various aspects of contemporary Britain - the Royal Perogative, secrecy, law, local councils, VAT and political power - acted by a cast including Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Antony Sher, Prunella Scales and himself. "Let me tell you one thing about satire: That Was the Week That Was was wonderfully liberating and terribly funny at first, but the standard went off rapidly because the guys writing the jokes didn't know as much about the subjects as they should. It struck me you need to get teams of people, half of whom are well-informed, the other half who are comedy writers, which is what we've done. If anyone challenges us, we can trot out constitutional experts. We exaggerate sometimes for comedic effect. But everyone exaggerates in politics." He believes Britain has become too centralised, authoritarian ("We're 'subjects', not citizens") and secretive. Try telling that, I say, to one of the many public figures whose murky dealings have been exposed so luridly.

"But they've only been resigning in droves over sexual scandals, which are the least important. The reason we have so many in this country is because people who are not getting enough love read about those who are. I say, without the slightest doubt, that readers of the News of the World are sex-starved, to a man and to a woman. Anyone reading that stuff on a Sunday morning instead of doing it has their priorities all wrong. The whole system of newspapers stinks. I feel sorry for journalists who are under terrible pressure from editors. I know through contacts that there was an editorial decision at the Sunday Times only to do 'spiky' interviews. What kind of reflection of reality is that?"

It could be newspapers have become less admiring of self-adoring 'artistes'. What's wrong with pointing out that some of them are untalented nonentities? "That's all right. But there's a difference between being critical and writing in a snide, ad hominem manner. I've never been hurt by anyone saying my performance was no good, or the script didn't work. What I find unacceptable is the highly personalised style of attacking people, which is all to do with a journalist getting his or her rocks off. There's a lot of envy. Journalists have to deal with it more than others. I would have thought that if you're interested in films or books you'd rather be producing them than commenting."

In spite of his comic genius, he has been mocked both for his well publicised reliance on psychiatry and the killjoy puritanism of his anti-smoking advertisements. "That's silly," he says. "The whole point of any halfway decent democracy is for people to exchange views. The Health Education Authority [currently re-evaluating its anti- smoking campaign] is a government body, not a right-wing maverick radio station in America putting forward odd views, and I've never come across a doctor who thinks smoking is good for you. Advertising is an amusing way to explain the downside to smoking, and that is part of the democratic process. Most people think the advertisements are funny but you learn in this business that not everyone has the same sense of humour. There are only about three sketches out of 40 Monty Python shows which everyone thinks are funny - the dead parrot, the Spanish Inquisition, the Ministry of Silly Walks."

He was brought up "lower middle class" in Weston-super-Mare, where his father was an insurance salesman. After Clifton College he went to Cambridge and became a schoolmaster for two years, before starting a television career. For all hi affability you still sense he is reining in the demons supposedly exorcised by group therapy under Dr Robin Skinner, a psychoanalyst he consulted first in 1974 and with whom he has co-authored two best-selling books, Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It. His own life and three marriages to blonde Americans [Connie Booth and Barbara Trentham, by each of whom he has a daughter, and Freudian-Kleinian psychoanalyst Alyce Faye Eichelberger] have been recycled ad nauseam. "I spoke about psychiatry because it had relieved me of some of the heaviness that used to attend my life and I felt it was absurd not to talk openly. I think I went on for 12 months too long. People have heard enough about Cleese and therapy." So much so that he offered £10,000 to anyone who would write about his work rather than his private life. He had replies from the Daily Sport and the Spectator. "I'm always attacked in the Spectator but they're a very unbalanced crowd. Talk about News of the World readers being short of sex. You should look at the people sitting round a Spectator lunch table, poor old things."

He doesn't agree with Michael Palin that Monty Python was a form of therapy. "There was a tremendous sense of exhilaration at the beginning. I don't know if I'd have been worse had I not done Python, but whenever I've met artists who claim their art is therapeutic they never strike me as people who have grown up very much. I guess I'm not grown up either. I'm probably now operating from the base of about a 14-year-old, rather than eight, which I used to be. I've onlymet two completely grown-up adults in my life - one was a guy who ran a fundamentalist Christian organisation in the US and the other was the Dalai Lama. One of the alarming things about being in your 50s [he is 55] is that when you were younger you assumed people of this age were grown up and you realise it's complete nonsense."

His wealth - even after divorce settlements - allows him to be generous, although it is not always appreciated. It was fine in 1992 when he took 40 friends on an all-expenses-paid three-week trip down the Nile, but when he lent money to others only about ten per cent paid back and it left a residue of bitterness. "Polonius ['neither a borrower nor a lender be'] was right. I remember my dad telling me that after he took me to see Laurence Olivier's Hamlet when I was ten. I never believed it at the time." His own financial independence was assured when Video Arts, a firm specialising in training films, was sold for £50 million in 1989, earning him an estimated £10 million. "Not many people have spent 20 years on something so fundamentally unpromising as training films. It was a strange thing to do. I really only got into it because I adore Tony Jay [chairman, and author of Yes, Minister] - sorry, Sir Tony. I'll never get an honour. The Establishment doesn't actually dislike me but they know I'm not one of the team. I'm an outsider, fundamentally subversive. I don't see the point of honours anyway. They're slightly humiliating and infantile, like getting the Form 4 reading prize because the headmaster wants parents to know you've made an effort and supported the rugger team at away matches."

He may be subversive, but many fans were disappointed when he appeared to become too "serious", introvert, joined the "health police" and wrote serious books. Where was the humour? "All I can say is I'm sorry, but I find other things interesting as well. People have a go at me [he quotes some on the back of his book - "The secret of self- esteem lies in flattening Cleese's nose all over his stupid face"] but I know the first book is really good. It's sold 400 copies a week for 12 years. The media will be gunning for me with my next film [a sequel to A Fish Called Wanda, provisionally called Death Fish 2, now being filmed], but you can relax because they give everyone a work- over. When they were unpleasant to Palin I predicted they'd have a go at Mother Teresa - and a month later they did."

Last week saw the start of re-runs of Fawlty Towers. "The second series was the toughest thing Connie and I ever did because I knew it had to be better than the first. Wanda caused the same problem. You'd rather succeed than fail, but a medium-sized success would have been a lot easier to follow." His original fee for writing, acting, helping direct and produce Wanda was $300,000 for 18 months' work. "But because we were on percentages we made a lot of money. I'd much rather take a sensible fee up front and gamble it's going to be a success than take these obscene sums. You talk to anyone who has been on a film with Stallone or Schwarzenegger and they'll tell you everyone else gets very small fees. I auditioned a young actor last week who had scenes with Stallone in a film and he never spoke to him, except on camera. I don't know why people behave like that. It's infantile. Even the nice stars go mad. People I like very much have quite clearly gone balmy."

He and Alyce divide their time between homes in Holland Park, west London, and Montecito, California, where they spend the winter. "The mornings are lovely and lift you. We returned to England in March this year and you can see people have had such a struggle to get through the winter. They look beaten and it takes three or four weeks of sun before the bounce comes back. The other advantage of living partly in America is I don't have a deep personal stake in the country, so when things go wrong with the government I can observe from a distance. Here, I become much more worked up and disappointed. But there are good and bad things everywhere - a boring thing to say, but it's how I feel. San Francisco is the nicest city in America, yet people living there are very parochial. It's a question of trying to get the good bits and avoid the bad bits wherever you are."

There are a lot of "bad bits" in England now, he believes. "There's been a general depression since the early 70's. Governments haven't worked and everyone knows it. People feel they don't have control over their own affairs and there's nothing to be done about it. We need to be more involved, not sitting at home watching videos." That is one reason he and producer Roger Graef devised Look at the State We're In. Over dinner they wondered, as one does, why "constitutional reform" was a turn-off. "We're trying to inveigle them into watching by having well known names. I want people to sense their powerless- ness." And come the revolution? He smiles, "It will be a very gentle one, with lots of coffee breaks."

Interview: John Cleese
From the Fierce Creatures web site