John Cleese

The real reason I had to join The Spectator

John Cleese says the magazine has been so consistently horrible to him over the years that the only way to ensure favourable reviews is to join its writing team

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Over the past four decades I have received many reviews in The Spectator, all of them mixed (in the technical theatrical sense of ‘extremely bad’). For example, in 1976 The Spectator wrote about Fawlty Towers:

I’ve been bellyaching, ever since I started writing this column, about the low standard of the programmes.

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