Monty Python legend and Fawlty Towers star/creator John Cleese is back to bashing the BBC, which means that we have roughly 48 hours until he declares that wokeness has killed comedy yet again.
At 86 years of age and with one of the most historically impactful comedy careers behind him, Cleese deserves to enjoy his golden years in peace, spending time on his family and reflecting on his decades of artistic excellence. However, the U.K. comedy icon is not one to rest on his laurels, and he instead keeps himself active by publicly cycling through the same handful of comedic gripes he has with the BBC, with cancel culture and even with Monty Python, depending on which stage of the Eric Idle Complaint Cycle we’re on that week.
In a recent conversation with Nick Ferrari for the London Broadcasting Company, Cleese once again slammed his former patrons at the BBC for how the publicly funded TV corporation handles comedy and comedians.
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“In the case of the BBC, there isn’t the executive understanding of how to nurture comedy, which is why there’s not much great comedy these days,“ Cleese lamented, "I think it’s because (former BBC director-general) John Birt turned the BBC into a bureaucracy. And bureaucrats aren’t very good at humor – because they try to decide things in committee.”
“It was wonderful when there was a collection of talent at the BBC,” Cleese reminisced of the stable of comedic talent at the BBC back in his day, “There’s so many good comedy actors in England, we should be celebrating them.”
In all fairness to Cleese, any member of Monty Python has a right to dislike the BBC. Many of the network's executives during the emergence of Monty Python's Flying Circus in the early 1970s openly despised the surrealist sketch show, with one internal memo revealing that the decision-makers of the BBC considered the series to be "disgusting and nihilistic," and the network habitually censored any Monty Python material they considered to be distasteful.
But, really, that was over fifty years ago, and, since then, Cleese has been beating the drum about the BBC to anyone that will listen in between his rants about cancel culture and immigrants. In one of Cleese's past complaint cycles, his stop at the BBC stage included the claim that the network hadn't aired a shred of Monty Python footage in decades, despite the fact that the BBC ran an entire evening of Monty Python programming the year prior, shortly before Cleese and his collaborators sold their catalogue to Netflix, thus ending the BBC's ability to air it at all.
Cleese's contributions to the canon of U.K. comedy cannot be overstated, but how long do we have to entertain him making the same gripes over and over again about the same topics? We know exactly how Cleese feels about the BBC, about wokeness and about each one of his Monty Python castmates.
And, it's worth noting, the BBC hosted eight of the U.K.'s top ten scripted comedies in 2024, and the corporation pumped in an additional 500,000 pounds to develop new comedy shows this year.
But, since none of those BBC-funded shows were Fawlty Towers 2, we can bank on Cleese launching another attack on the BBC in a few months, right after he calls out transgender teens for canceling J.K. Rowling.
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