By Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
So, Anyway
John Cleese (Random House)
****
John Cleese is in a genial mood, so laid back on the line from London that I imagine he is stretched all the way out with his hands behind his head and his feet on a coffee table. The bitten down fury that we associate with Basil Fawlty is nowhere in evidence, nor the acid sarcasm of so many of his characters. But there are some sly observations. Remembering his hapless father, he says, “He was such a patently decent man, I can’t ever remember him raising his voice. I think if he’d been able to raise his voice it might have been helpful to him. He was always trying to keep my mother on an even keel – anything could set her off. If he’d been more forceful maybe he’d have had a better time.”
Muriel Cleese was a depressed, anxious woman given to throwing tantrums – or “tantra” as Cleese calls them. “Her rage filled her skin until there was no room left for the rest of her personality, which had to move over till things calmed down a bit.” She swore that he never cried as a baby. “I probably thought that if I did she might appear,” he deadpans.
He draws a direct line between his mother and the years he has spent in therapy dealing with his troubled relationships with women. “My ingrained habit of walking on eggshells with her dominated my romantic liaisons for many years… a cocktail of over-politeness, unending solicitude and the fear of stirring controversy rendered me utterly unsexy.”
So, Anyway is a droll, revealing Portrait of the Comic as a Young Man, cantering through his peripatetic childhood, through school – “I was irritatingly tall and pathetic and wet” – to his years at Cambridge and his sudden swerve away from law and into show business. It’s also a handbook on the art of comedy. Cleese is generous with his advice to new comers. “I tell them to steal!” he laughs. “Steal other people’s ideas and rewrite them. It’s too difficult to do it all from scratch.” He describes how he and writing partner Graham Chapman would flip through Roget’s Thesaurus calling out random words that would spark deranged scenaria like plummeting sheep, and he studs the chronicle with delicious anecdotes, such as how Peter Sellers copied the voice of a mad fan to create Bluebottle in The Goon Show, and how a headmaster (“not the brightest lighthouse on the coastline”) was the model for the classic sex lesson in The Meaning of Life.
But reader, beware. If you are hoping for tales of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers you will be disappointed. The book stops when Cleese is 30, just as he and Chapman are forming the Pythons. The BBC was demanding a title for this new comedy series. “We worked our way through A Horse, A Spoon and a Bucket, The Toad-Elevating Moment and You Can’t Call a Show ‘Betty’,” he writes. Eventually they hit on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
I asked him whether he misses Chapman, who died in 1989.
“I do. But he was a strange man. He could be delightful, funny, creative. I was genuinely fond of him but there were times when I looked at him and thought ‘I don’t, dear Graham, know what’s going on in your mind.’ He was very complex.”
Having just celebrated his 75th birthday, Cleese is getting busy on the next instalment of his autobiography. “I enjoyed writing this – I made myself laugh and I made sense of bits of my life that seemed very confused. I thought how much I like to do this and not get up on stage every night and say what I said the previous night. And as I get old and crusty and curmudgeonly,” he chuckles, “I will write about the extraordinary world we now live in, and why I’m not so sure it’s making too many people happy.”
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Book details
- So, Anyway… by John Cleese
EAN: 9781847946973
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