Search for
Search for
Search forJohn Cleese on life and laughs
Thursday, July 24, 2008, 08:30
Expectation was rising in a way that's normally reserved for groupies at rock concerts.
But wide-eyed Cleese aficionados were filling the place, ranging from youngsters who knew Clifton College's funniest old boy as “Q” in the James Bond movies, to those who could recall giggling at his lanky antics on The Frost Report, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers.
Cleese is giving the performances to raise cash for the zoo, which recently announced plans for a multi-million pound new conservation centre on the outskirts of the city.
Last night's show was the first of three sold-out “audience with” style performances, also running tonight and tomorrow.
The over-arching feel of the event is an atmosphere of relaxed banter. There's no pretence at glitz or glamour from the master of silly walks, who has lived in California for the past 15 years.
He simply perches like a geography teacher at the front of the class - a profession he enjoyed for two years in his home town of Weston-super-Mare, before heading to Cambridge, where he first made his name as a performer.
“I can't tell you my dears how nice it is to be back,” the 68-year-old funnyman said, affecting his strongest west country accent, to the delight of the audience.
“No I love the Bristol accent,” he added, with a grin. “It's a fabulous way to speak.
“I remember once being at a football match at Ashton Gate, and I heard one fan actually shouting 'kick it out of the penalty aerial'. You couldn't make that stuff up.”
But Cleese doesn't have entirely fond memories of his west country childhood.
In an interview with the Evening Post's Seven magazine last week, he described the Weston-super-Mare of his childhood as “a very middle class, protestant, repressed little town”.
And it wasn't just the seaside town that made the young John unhappy.
During last night's performance he opened up to the audience, with his trademark honesty, about his difficult relationship with his mother, who continued to live in the town until her death in 2000, at the age of 101.
“I did have a dreadful mother,” he said. “Isn't that a terrible thing to say? But it's true.
“She was classically self-centred. Always thought entirely of herself.
“And she lived to 101 - I thought I'd never get rid of her,” he laughed.
“But actually, having that extra time allowed us eventually to work things through.
“I used to phone her up each week, and she'd ask me how I was - but only because she knew I'd naturally say, 'I'm fine, how are you?'
“Then she could tell me that she was 'a little bit down this week.' She had been 'a little bit down this week' for 50 years.
“But there was one time when I decided to actually tell her how I was feeling. I said I'd been a bit depressed.
“Then a few days later she phoned me back to see how I was - she'd been worried about my depression.
“I felt a great warmth come up through me at the thought that my mother had been concerned for me. So I said, 'thank you so much mother for worrying'.
“Her response was, 'of course I'm concerned, you're the only person I've got to rely on'.
“And I'm afraid that's just how she was.”
Cleese - who has long been an advocate of psychoanalysis - said he believed much of his creativity developed as a result of the “maternal deprivation” he felt he suffered.
“There is a commonly held belief in psychoanalysis that maternal deprivation can be an extraordinary cause for creativity,” he explained.
“If only she'd been worse,” he added with a chuckle. “I could have been huge.”
Cleese is currently in the process of a costly divorce from his third wife, the American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger.
“Guess how much I'm paying her at the moment?” he challenged the audience, in a Fawlty-esque aside; his anger clearly bubbling to the surface.
“I'm paying her £900,000 a year. And we had no children. It really is astonishing.”
Cleese's best friend Michael Winner (“Winner doesn't have any others,” according to the comedian), recently described Eichelberger as having “a voice that could tear the testicles from a rabbit”.
But John shows little bitterness towards his ex directly - he keeps his strongest vehemence for her lawyer.
“She hired a lawyer called Jacqueline Misho who is notorious for taking you for everything she can get.
“When I told my friends she'd hired Misho they just put their head in their hands.
“I've suggested it would be much easier and more fair if we went to mediation. But I guess Alyce is just feeling very insecure and wants to get everything she can.
“My two other divorces were very peaceful affairs. We went to mediation, and it was very civilised. But this is quite different.
“I even spoke to Alyce and suggested that I chose her lawyer and she chose mine - that way it would be fair, and neither of us would have one of these terribly aggressive ones. But she wasn't interested.”
Cleese also talked briefly about his previous marriages to his Fawlty Towers co-star Connie Booth and Barbara Trentham - saying the latter's name in a mock wail of agony.
The comedian was also happy to talk openly about his current relationship - with a 33-year-old brand executive from Chicago.
“The tabloid newspapers go on about her being half my age, but I'm not sure that matters,” he said.
“We met in New York and she asked if I'd like to go for a coffee.
“She's absolutely gorgeous, and incredibly intelligent. To be the brand manager for a company like Nice 'n' Easy haircare at the age of 33 is quite something.
“All my friends were incredibly jealous when they saw her.”
Throughout the evening the audience was treated to clips spanning Cleese's career - everything from A Fish Called Wanda, to Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and Cleese's 1989 documentary, Operation Lemur.
Cleese's preoccupation with lemurs was born at Bristol Zoo in the 1950s, when as a pupil at the neighbouring Clifton College, he fell in love with one of these endearing animals.
He was briefly joined on stage by Colin, one of the zoo's current lemurs.
“He's a beauty,” Cleese said, as he offered him a grape in an affectionate mouth-to-mouth move.
“See how gentle they are?” he added. “A monkey would just grab it off you, but these are lovely creatures.”
Cleese also recalled his life as a schoolboy at Clifton College - breaking from the discussion at one point to sing a rendition of the school's song with fellow old Cliftonian Chris Searle, who was leading the informal interview for the evening.
In the second half of the show the audience members were invited to question Cleese themselves.
They covered everything from the process of writing Fawlty Towers to his political persuasion - Lib Dem in the UK, democrat in the States.
His left-leaning politics led him recently to offer his services to presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
“I believe in democracy,” he told the zoo crowd. “As far as the UK is concerned, I've always been a strong advocate of proportional representation.
“When it eventually became clear that we'd never get that, I did lose interest slightly in British politics.”
But he said he was pleased when he realised recently that the darkest politics of the last century had finally disappeared.
“I was in the airport at Hamburg,” he said, “and from across the other side of the terminal a big fat German businessman shouted over, 'hey John, don't mention ze war'.
“Everyone in the place erupted into laughter and I thought - yes! We've finally moved on from the politics of the 1940s.
“It's always great in life to feel that things are moving on for the better.”
Comment on this story