Cleese: laughing all the way to the bank

Press, 26 October 1989, Page 13

Cleese: laughing all the way to the bank

NZPA-AP London Video Arts, the business and management training film company with John Cleese as a director, is being sold, leaving the 49-year-old actor laughing all the way to the bank. The millionaire comedian’s training films company is being sold for about £5O million (SNZI3B million), it was announced recently. While cinemagoers and TV viewers have given thwemselves stitches watching “Clockwork,” “A Fish Called Wanda” and "Fawlty Towers,” Video Arts has blossomed into a world-famous company and a formidable profitmaking machine.

It has also rewritten the rule book on businesstraining films. Funny man Cleese has led a secret life for 18 years as Britain’s unlikeliest business whizz-kid. Before the sale of the company, its profits, along with his share of the take from “Wanda,” had already put Cleese in the highest bracket of topearning entertainers. Now he is almost certainly in a bracket of his own, above even Britain’s four gold-plated Hollywood superstars — Michael Caine, Dudley Moore, Sean Connery and

Roger Moore. The success of Video Arts is the marriage between the skills of the comic and the sharp wits of the modern marketing department. The company was set up on the initiative of Sir Antony Jay in 1971, the year that saw the first Monty Python film, “Now For Something Completely Different.” Sir Antony, knighted in 1988, is best known as cowriter with Jonathan Lynn of “Yes Minister” and “Yes Prime Minister.” He also wrote, with David Frost, one of the funniest books about Britain in the sixties, “To England With Love.”

Training films, once as motivating as a cold cup of cocoa, have never been the same since.

Out has gone the deadpan “make notes, we’ll be testing you later” style, in has come the idea that humour can be the most effective way to get across serious business messages.

During the last 18 years, Video Arts films starring Cleese have been sold to Brazil (for Volkswagen sales managers), Russia, (which ordered his video, “The Unorganised Manager”), Saudi Arabia (whose government bought “Understanding Business”), Denmark, Zambia and the United States (one of the biggest markets). Topics covered by the 90-odd films include door-to-door sales, positive attitudes to mistakes and assertiveness in the boardroom.

Turnover has reached more than £lO million (SNZ27 million), and Cleese’s contribution to the balance of payments was recognised eight years ago, when Video Arts won a Queen’s Award to Industry for its exports. In the 10 years between the last series of “Fawlty Towers” in 1978 and “A Fish Called Wanda” last

year, a quiet period in his artistic life, his Midas touch has extended beyond Video Arts.

A series of TV advertisements for Sony in the early 1980 s not only coined a nation-wide catchphrase (“those awfully nice people”) but reputedly earned Cleese the largest single fee for a TV commercial.

In 1983, he turned his experience as a patient of psychiatric counselling in the mid-70s into a successful book, “Families and How to Survive Them,” co-authored with his former therapist Robin Skynner. Pausing only to rewrite the rules on party political broadcasts — his videos for the S.D.P., in which he appeared free of charge, were the first not to feature a political heavyweight — he immersed himself in the “Wanda” project.

The film’s success confirmed the Cleese money magic. In the United States, the film took £22 million (SNZ6I million) during the first seven weeks of release.

Cleese, whose participation was reputed to have earned him about £7 million (SNZ2O million) was reported to be “taken aback.”