Being funny ‘hard work’ for Cleese

Press, 13 June 1977, Page 15

Being funny ‘hard work’ for Cleese

By

MARGARET PRIDE

When you are a funny man — funny in as much as you make people laugh when you appear on television — people expect you always to be cracking jokes, providing a laugh a minute. Not so with John Cleese, star of “Fawlty Towers.” He does not laugh at jokes, does not make them, and sees life seriously in spite of the fact that he is one of television’s funniest men.

He is beginning to wish, for instance, that he had not done the famous Silly Walk in the first place. What started in the “Monty Python” series has become an act people expect from him. “Every day I walk along ithe road and people yell at I me, ‘come on. Let’s see vour I Silly Walk*. “I am not a funny man. Every series I have done — “Monty Python," “Fawlty Towers” — has come about through sheer, agonising hard work. "I suppose there are times when I am like Basil Fawlty. I shout and wave my legs and arms about. I think most people have a touch of Basil about them. It’s just that when it happens to you, you don’t think it is particularly funny.”

There are stories circulating in Britain that “Fawlty Towers” is killing off the tourist industry because overseas visitors think all hotels are like that. On the other hand, plenty of visitors have asked to stay at Fawlty Towers, just to see if life there is as bad — albeit hilarious — as it is on television.

Cleese says the idea came from truth. “My wife Connie, and I stayed at a hotel in Torquay where the owner was incredibly rude. He had a theory that his guests prevented him from running his hotel properly, because they got in the way.” When the series was first shown in Britain, it ended quietly, and with complete indifference from the public, says Cleese. That he thought, was the end of it.; He went into a gloom. But the 8.8. C. put on a re-

peat series, and suddenly it became the programme to watch. As a result Cleese and his wife are writing another series. Cleese is a middle-class man | (his boyhood ambition was! to play cricket for Somerset! County) who went to prep. I school, college, and Cam-< bridge University. He in-' tended to be a lawyer, but! Cambridge changed that. |

He joined the Footlights, the famous university drama group, and wrote sketches for them. When he left Cambridge, the Footlights show transferred to a theatre in London’s West End, and eventually went on tour in 1964 to New Zealand and Nev; York. It was then called “Cambridge Circus.” At 38, Cleese hates talking about himself, because he l does not know how to describe himself. “Am I clever? Well, sometimes I am, sometimes not. I like to think I am. The trouble is, when you are a public performer people expect you to be clever all the time.

“I am a worrier, and I fidget. I hate physical violence, so I don’t like ball games like football and rugger. Cricket is different.” In spite of the fact that he dislikes interviews, Cleese is intensely polite and courteous. but odoes tend to be uncommunicative. He is a mass of contradictions. He is quiet, but can also go into a Fawlty rage. He likes to. be anonymous, but drives around in a chocolate Rolls Royce — a very distinctive thing to do in London. He loves his wife, Connie Booth, and adores their six-year-old daughter, Cynthia. But he does not live with them.

Sadly, their joint success has not stopped their marriage breaking up. Connie plays the receptionist and waitress. Polly, in “Fawlty Towers,” and is also the coauthor.

But although they live I apart —Connie has Cynthia with her •— they see each other frequently. They still work together, and go to an analyst together to try to

[find the reasons for their problems. “For various reasons, we held each other back. We depressed each other. We go our separate ways, and we’re much better friends now we don’t live together.

I “I don’t know about the jfuture. Who does? I’d like to [take time off to sort things 'out. To get some order out lof the chaos I seem to be |in.” With that, he said his goodbyes and folded his 6ft sin frame into his inconspicuous chocolate Rolls Royce.