The real reason I had to join The Spectator

sebastian

Moreover he's a first class Roman Centurian - and there're far too few of those around these days.
Excellent to know you're adding your own considerable height to this already truly upstanding organ.
Brilliant!

Junk Male

What a load of crap! 80% of it at least consists of quotes from critics over the last 20 years.
If Mr Cleese intends to 'write' for the Spectator he could at least write something rather than cut and paste 20 year old material from his detractors

Junk Male

What a load of crap! 80% of it at least consists of quotes from critics over the last 20 years.
If Mr Cleese intends to 'write' for the Spectator he could at least write something rather than cut and paste 20 year old material from his detractors

Steve Earl

Something that Mr Cleese fails to acknowledge however is that the critics, whoever they were, were of course completely correct in their opinion.
Still his cameo in Pink Panther 2 was side splittingly funny; you know like being slapped in the face with a dead fish.

RW

It never does to take much notice of the media commentators. They are so often blinded by their own prejudices! I rarely agree with the commentator in one daily, he seems incapable of enjoying anything that isn't deadly serious, in fact he ignores pretty well everything I like! Good article.

Hezkyden

I quite agree with 'Junk Male' and with the critics of Cleese in the piece itself.

A. MacAulay

Dear Mr Cleese, were you always a Spectator reader, who despite the pompous, puffy critique of your oeuvre enjoyed the rest of the magazine? In other words, are you a good sport?

Or do you have a scrapbook containing every article that was ever written containing your name, including the Zagreb Bugle?

I enjoyed and laughed at all of your productions as far as I have seen them, although in retrospect none of the characters you portrayed was particularly sympathetic. But then, you were acting weren't you?

You must have done 101 interesting things, met 101 interesting people, had 101 interesting thoughts, but the feeling that a wonky actor ego has to get its day of reckoning is somehow disappointing.

One reads the Spectator to be intellectually entertained, and now that you've got that behind you, I look forward to your next contribution.

David Short

I agree with Junk Male. The piece is mostly anti-Cleese quotes so JC hasn't 'written' for the Spectator but simply copied and pasted stuff he purports to dislike.

It's true that writing dialogue is a skill, but so is good criticism. One does not have to be good at one to be good at the other.

I suspect JC has been made a 'contributing editor' for the same reason other showbiz people have been added or featured in the Spectator; someone in the senior management would like to be 'matey' with these peopld.

And by the way, Fawlty Towers was very funny, but oh dear, Monty Python was not, never was, and never will be.

In my student days, we all fooled each other into thinking it was, pretended to be desperate not to miss it, and made ourselves laugh for fear of being seen not to get the 'joke', by others who did not get it either.

And it was hugely snobbish. Whenever a Monty Python character wanted to appear stupid, he would adopt a working class accent.

The next lot of university comedians did the same, Jones of Smith and Jones being the worst culprit.

N

" It is deeply funny that people who cannot write dialogue, and who cannot direct or act it either, are appointed to pass judgment on those who can."

Two comments: 1) maybe it's like art and we the unqualified on this comment board just don't "get it." and 2) He forgot to mention that just because one can do all those things like write and act doesn't mean that person is neccesarily good at them.

Lydia P Troyer

"When sketches ended abruptly, with a shooting, or a 100-ton weight falling from the sky.... credits appearing midway through a programme, these cheap tricks were saluted..." At first I thought this was Mr Cleese owning up to a certain amateurishness in his English Dadaist past escapades but, alas, no. Towers was often funny and just as often gratuitously unkind to someone or other but I assumed the 70's BBC insisted on editorial control and so it resonated towards the prejudices of the target viewers, as imagined by the pseuds at Shepherds Bush. There's a tragi-comic inside Cleese somewhere, hope he writes some of it out himself.

Reinhard Bimashofer

Wonderful and fair. We learn all about critics we should know about. And by the way the Holy Bible already told us: The way you judge others you will be criticized...

Jens Knocke

If you have really recruited John Cleese, could you engage a copy-editor to continually look over his enormous shoulder and weed out his "a person … their", and "a person … they can … they have"?

US publications don't accept this sort of BBC English. Should The Spectator?

Nicholas Storey

Jens Knocke - given that my previous entries to this thread fell into cyberspace, there is no reason to suppose that this'll have a better fate - but, even if a person were to overlook your sploit infinitive, there is no reason to suppose that they would not choose to ignore your main point - using the plural after a reference to a person of unknown sex is a usual and sensible usage as it avoids the cumbersome reliance on "his or her" - and I rest my case upon a box of (Brazilian) crunchy frogs to which, at the moment my attention is deeply committed.
NJS

Archie

ignore the knockers, Mr. Cleese. Here's one fan who was only occasionally turned off; specifically by 'The Life of Brian' and 'The Meaning of Life'. Monty Python was very rarely toe-curlingly bad, mostly very funny and not infrequently outstanding. (One rather wearied of seeing Terry Jones taking his clothes off!). What many people here ignore or were perhaps unaware of, is that Basil Fawlty was based on a real person! I for one look forward to reading your Speccer contributions.

Gavin Gaughan

Cleese is not funny any more, as his recent movies show, and Americans who see the whole of British comedy as "Marn-ty Py-THON" are infuriating. But he and it were great once, and Fawlty Towers still is. Most of the carping reviews he quotes, including the one of Taming Of The Shrew, were by the old toad Richard Ingrams, always jealous that he himself failed as a performer. The reason Ingrams has always accused the Pythons of ripping off Milligan's Q5 is that he actually appeared in the latter.