‘Comedy is much more important than I thought’: John Cleese on the press, his new talk show and the power of Fawlty Towers

John Cleese enjoys tough questions. He’s currently touring America with An Evening with the Late John Cleese, and a substantial part of the show is thrown open to the audience. He tells me that when someone asks a particularly rude question – such as ‘Why can’t you stay married?’ – it simply adds to the fun. Another one of his favourites is ‘What’s the worst film you ever made?’

I ask him the same question. ‘Well, there are a lot of contenders,’ John says. Apparently his ‘sabre-toothed daughter’ Camilla might have the answer, because she often introduces him to the stage as ‘the star of The Pink Panther 2’. When I tell John that I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it, he offers me some succinct advice: ‘Don’t.’

For the past eight months, I’ve been working with John as executive producer on a new discussion show for GB News called The Dinosaur Hour. ‘They gave me the best offer that anyone has ever been given in the history of television. They said to me, “Would you like to make ten one-hour programmes, and do whatever you like?” And they haven’t interfered at all.’

He explains that the process has reminded him of working on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. ‘The BBC just let us get on with it, because it was so cheap and it went out so late. Except when they were putting out the Horse of the Year Show instead, which they did quite a lot at the start. They didn’t bother to watch it, so there was no supervision. And it wasn’t because they were enlightened – it’s because we were not important.’

The Dinosaur Hour was filmed in a 12th-century Norman keep, and we populated the space with nuns, businessmen, a Hungarian Hussar and a clowder of roaming cats.