Common sense is the real generation gap – just ask John Cleese

As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend not to know what ‘John Cleese’ means. If anything saves him from cancellation, it will be the hope that he can snuggle down and hide in that gap until it’s all over. The cancellers won’t try too hard because they didn’t know who he was in the first place; others will register the row, furrow their brows, and then be distracted by chortling merrily at the thought of Basil Fawlty going to work on his 1967 Austin Countryman with a large tree-branch.

What has he done? He has Said Something On Twitter. ‘Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more,’ he wrote.