Don’t Mention the Culture War

British comedy legend and soon-to-be GB News talk show host John Cleese won’t cut a controversial scene from his new stage adaptation of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. He’s also developing a third series of the iconic 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers with his real-life daughter, Camilla.

So what? Predictably, the prospect of “new” Fawlty and Monty Python material is giving comedy purists the heebie-jeebies. The question critics are asking is not whether anyone will still laugh at Basil and Brian, but whether they should. Both projects have become a cipher for a contested version of Britishness at the apex of the culture wars. 

Don’t you oppress me. Actors at a reading of the stage version of Brian a year ago advised Cleese, now 83, to remove the famous scene in which Stan (played by Eric Idle) says he wants to be a woman called Loretta because: “It’s my right as a man.” When Cleese’s character calls Stan “ridiculous” he replies: “Don’t you oppress me.” Cleese has vowed the scene will remain in the new version. 

Less is more. Fawlty Towers’s famously short run – 12 perfect episodes over two series in 1975 and 1979 – is the reason Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant only made two seasons of The Office. Castle Rock Entertainment, the US production company making the new series, has decent comedy credentials but restraint is not its vibe. It produced all nine (nine!) seasons of Seinfeld and founder Rob Reiner, who will act as executive producer on the new Fawlty Towers, is working on an original cast reboot of This Is Spinal Tap. Cleese has said that the reboot “won’t be as funny as the original… but it can still be funnier than a lot of stuff out there.”

Reboot wars. Even without the circling culture war vultures, the odds are stacked against the new Fawlty Towers – not least since the original was voted best British television programme of all time by the BFI. Has a reboot ever worked? 

• American producers have tried and failed three times to capture that Fawlty magic – Chateau Snavely in 1979, Amanda’s in 1983 and Payne in 1999. None included Cleese.

• Even bringing back the original cast is no guarantee of success. Twenty-eight years after Ronnie Barker closed Arkwright’s doors for the last time, Still Open All Hours returned with David Jason as a grown-up Granville. It ran for a respectable six series on BBC 1 but failed to trouble the BAFTAs.
• Perhaps Paramount will have more luck with its new series of Frasier, currently in production. The Cheers spin-off ran for 263 episodes and won 37 Emmys. Kelsey Grammer will reprise the lead role in the series, which is due to air later this year. 

A very naughty boy. With 5.6 million followers, Cleese is a prolific tweeter, an outspoken defender of free speech and a fierce advocate of liberal democracy. He’s called Donald Trump a “demented creature”, is highly critical of the UK government and a prominent supporter of press reform group Hacked Off. 

• 2011: Cleese’s divorce from his third wife awarded her a $13 million settlement. He was forced to return to stand up with The Alimony Tour to make the payments.  
• 2015: Cleese accused parts of the press of “monstrous” and “sociopathic” behaviour. “Of course they want to regulate themselves, we’d all like to regulate ourselves wouldn’t we? Builders, accountants, murderers, they’d all like to regulate themselves.” 
• 2016: he joked on US chat show Conan O’Brien that “I wish [my ex-wives] dead in the nicest possible way. Not dead in a slow agonising death over a number of years. Something quick like a tree falling on them.”

• 2020: Cleese accused BBC staff of being “cowardly and gutless and contemptible” when they temporarily pulled a famous Fawlty Towers episode called “The Germans” due to its use of offensive language. 
• 2023: Describing King Charles III’s coronation as “people in silly costumes pretending it was all very serious”, Cleese said he would have taken “a big supply of whoopie cushions” had he been invited.

Don’t get too excited. None of these projects is imminent. His stage musical adaptation of 1988 movie A Fish Called Wanda has been in the works since 2008 – and Cleese says he’s only been working on the new Fawlty Towers “for about a week”. His GB News show, targeting the “much-neglected demographic… people who are completely out of touch,” is currently being filmed but has no confirmed air date.