Comedians can be a punchy bunch and there are few more plain-spoken practitioners than the great John Cleese. This week one of the nation’s greatest funnymen gave an interview in which he vowed never to work with the BBC again, citing a recent lunch he had (I don’t think we can say “enjoyed”) with “two BBC people”.
“One worked for the comedy department, and he had to leave early,” Cleese said. “He obviously thought he couldn’t learn anything from someone who’d appeared on The Frost Report and worked on Monty Python. And the other one was a complete idiot.”
The 85-year-old’s bad blood with his former colleagues seems to go back to a press event in 2018 when the head of comedy at the time, Shane Allen, said that the BBC wouldn’t commission a comedy show made by “six Oxbridge white blokes”, which many took to be a dig about Monty Python, one of the glories of our comedy world (which was conceived, written by and starred five Oxbridge white blokes and Terry Gilliam).
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Cleese’s annoyance was also evident when I spoke to him earlier this year, when he happily sounded off against the “joyless f***ers” that he believes continue to police comedy. His main concern was what he called the “woke element”, which he said was creeping into an art form he cares about with a profound passion. “There’s no question that people having a creative meeting will sound more ‘are we allowed to say that?’, and the moment that kind of extrinsic factor comes in, it kills it,” he told me. “And the trouble is, a lot of the people who are objecting to humour are people with almost no sense of humour.”
On that score, he probably has a point. In our more sensitive age, comedy producers and broadcasters can be excessively alive to offence, as the trigger warnings (or what the BBC prefers to call “guidance”) that appear on many of the BBC’s archive shows on iPlayer demonstrate. Episode one of series two of Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash’s gentle comedy The Royle Family comes with an iPlayer warning about “discriminatory language which some viewers may find offensive”. It is not the only such notice. But it is the way of the world.
However, I don’t think Cleese’s reasonable gripes and his feelings about BBC management mean we are facing a full-blown crisis in TV comedy, nor that everyone at the BBC is a complete idiot. Allen is not an idiot. I was at the press event in 2018 when he made his remark and it was slightly throwaway and not (as I saw it) intended as a dig against Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones et al. Around this time the BBC was showing Hold the Sunset, the amiable comedy in which Cleese plays the boyfriend of Alison Steadman’s Edith, so clearly the broadcaster admired his work — as well it should.
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In fact, few backers of comedy (and admirers of Python) can be more passionate than Allen, now an independent producer and architect of many great recent shows on the BBC, including Daisy May Cooper’s fabulously dark and funny Am I being Unreasonable? as well as The Power of Parker, an excellent Nineties-set caper starring Conleth Hill. If six Oxbridge white blokes came to Allen now with a comedy as brilliant as Monty Python, I suspect he would bite their hand off.
Daisy May Cooper and Jessie Dave in Am I Being Unreasonable
BOFFOLA PICTURES/ALISTAIR HEAP
And there are other excellent British comedies to be found in the BBC schedules. The second series of the Bafta-winning Such Brave Girls has just aired (a third series is under way); Kat Sadler’s examination of her own very real struggles with self-harm and mental illness is breathtakingly daring and funny. If people think Gen Z cannot laugh at their neuroses they should skip past Auntie’s warnings about the show’s “strong language, adult humour and some sexual content” and watch this.
As one producer says: “Cleese often lights this touchpaper by saying comedy has been lacklustre for the past 25 years, but it’s an insult to all those amazing writers and performers who created Fleabag, Detectorists, Peter Kay’s Car Share, Derry Girls, Friday Night Dinner, This Country, Inside Number 9, Mum and so on.”
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Everybody said sketch shows were dead and too expensive, but David Mitchell and Robert Webb have proved in their pretty good new Channel 4 show Mitchell and Webb are not Helping that they aren’t. I hear it’s not the last sketch show in the pipeline either.
In private, comedy producers will tell you that they are slightly hamstrung by changing times and sensitivities but say that one major problem is technological: viewing has become fragmented, people stream in their own time and the watercooler moments that many of us enjoyed in the 1980s the morning after an episode of The Young Ones or Blackadder will not be repeated. But that’s not to say there aren’t good shows out there.
Kay Sadler and Lizzie Davidson in Such Brave Girls
BBC/VARIOUS ARTISTS LIMITED/VISHAL SHAMA
This autumn Alan Partridge will make a welcome return to the BBC, after four years away from the small screen, with a new six-part series called How Are You? In it, Steve Coogan’s character tries to integrate back into British society after spending a year living and working in Saudi Arabia. This time, the man from Norwich is doing his best to understand the nation’s mental health. Obviously he gets it painfully wrong but, as always, the joke is on Alan, who claims that comedy doesn’t examine these issues. It really does.
I love Cleese and would love to see him back in a BBC comedy because he remains as lively, passionate and funny as ever. When we spoke he said that he and his daughter Camilla — who he told me was his “third great writing partner” after Connie Booth and Graham Chapman — have written an episode-and-a-half of their Fawlty Towers reboot. In it, Basil’s long-lost daughter (and how extraordinary it is to imagine he once had sex, he joked) is running a hotel in the Caribbean and asks her estranged dad to help. It is, he tells me, “very funny”, and I believe it, though it’s been put in abeyance because he is so busy. He probably won’t take it to the BBC when it’s finally finished. But maybe he should give it a go. Even if only for old times’ sake.
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