“And thanks for dinner, Elon,” quipped the British comedian John Cleese on September 8 in an X post that opened with “Good bye, Twitter,” the platform’s original name before it was changed by its owner, the increasingly outspoken tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. Cleese had not dined with Musk, whom he has criticized for discontinuing older Twitter policies that censored political speech. His comment, rather, was a joke seemingly intended to spice up what was widely interpreted as Cleese’s intention to leave the platform, following other celebrities who disapprove of Musk’s management policies on ideological grounds.
If there was any joke, however, it is on Cleese, who seems to have returned to the platform in the days that followed and whose objections to free speech stand in jarringly ironic contrast to his legendary six-decade career in satirical comedy, which has at times resulted in the censorship of his work. Most recently, in 2020, the BBC removed “The Germans,” an episode of Cleese’s 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers, from its UKTV streaming service because it includes a short scene in which one of the show’s recurring characters, an addled British Army major quartered at the titular seaside hotel, uses racial slurs for blacks and Indians.
At that time, a bolder and braver Cleese rightly objected, pointing out that the character’s casual racism is there to be lampooned rather than extolled. “If they can’t see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?” The comedian asked before taking to Twitter (as it was then still called) to deride the BBC officials who had made the decision as “cowardly and gutless and contemptible” individuals “whose main concern is not losing their jobs.” (The episode was later restored with a warning note about “offensive content and language”). In an interview with the Independent a few months later, Cleese lamented political correctness as an “indulgence of the most over-sensitive people in your culture” and claimed that it threatened to “stifle creativity.” In late 2021, he canceled an appearance at Cambridge, his alma mater, in solidarity with the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, who was blacklisted from further appearances there after impersonating Adolf Hitler during a debate over whether “good taste” exists. Cleese apologized to those who were looking forward to seeing him, pointedly remarking, “Perhaps some of you can find a venue where woke rules do not apply.”
Several years on, however, it would seem that “woke rules” very much do apply where Cleese is concerned. After a lifetime of political heterodoxy, in which he has combined moderate center-left leanings (Cleese long supported the Liberal Democrats) with support for Brexit, traditional notions of English culture, more restrictive immigration policies, and even kind words for the UK Independence Party, a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to have driven him into the arms of the radical Left. His recent X feed consists almost entirely of bitter diatribes against the former U.S. president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee, with occasional digs at the recently ousted British Conservative Party, and Musk for allowing what Cleese appears to believe is pro-Trump ‘disinformation’ on his platform. The old John Cleese, who only a few years ago offered witty and spirited defenses of free speech amid mass protests against perceived racial iniquity, appears to be hibernating, even as hundreds of his countrymen are being arrested for politically incorrect social media posts, many of which are also labeled racist—not only by the BBC but, frighteningly, by the police knocking on their doors.
Cleese’s newly compliant political views have manifested as he revisited the universe of Fawlty Towers. In May, he revived for its London premiere a 2016 Australian stage adaptation that weaves together three of the series’ 12 episodes, including “The Germans,” along with “Hotel Inspectors” and “Communication Problems.” The production has been a smash hit, with its run extended through January 2025. Cleese has also revealed plans to revisit the series for television, setting a sequel in modern times to star himself in collaboration with his millennial daughter Camilla.
The idea of the stage adaptation is clever, though notably Cleese excised the scene with the Major’s racial slurs from “The Germans,” explaining that leaving it in could cause trouble from “literal-minded people” who “don’t understand metaphor, irony, or comic exaggeration.” Cleese, who is 84, may not have wanted the bother, but by any standards, this once outspoken defender of free speech chose to engage in self-censorship rather than challenge or enlighten his audiences. The inevitable artistic result is that the Major on stage is less offensive, less prone to ridicule, and simply less funny than the Major in the series.
Nevertheless, Cleese deftly wove the triptych of episodic plots into a comprehensible whole, with “Hotel Inspectors” serving as a frame story. Alerted to the presence of anonymous inspectors who might discover how poorly run his hotel truly is, an agitated Basil Fawlty sets out to identify them among his guests so that he can flatter them into writing a favorable evaluation. Since he must sleuth the inspectors among a rolling cast of characters, the episode’s plot is elastic enough to extend around the more contained comedies of manners within the other two episodes. In “Communication Problems,” Basil must deal with the imperious Mrs. Richards, a demanding guest who is also comically hard of hearing. In “The Germans,” Basil, mentally off after being clocked by an inadequately hung moose head, offends foreign guests by making gratuitous and upsetting references to the Second World War and their country’s Nazi past.
The jokes still work and the gags are still funny, but looking around the ornate Apollo Theatre—a Grade II listed building in the heart of the West End—I wondered whether the play’s real draw was the same sort of nostalgia for the fading Middle England in which Basil Fawlty indulges. Indeed, in 2019, London’s radical left mayor Sadiq Khan mused that Cleese sounded like he was speaking in character when the comedian remarked that the capital was “not really an English city anymore.” While today’s theatrical audiences normally skew older, it was palpable that hardly anyone else in the hall was under 65, and that we all knew and anticipated every line before it was uttered. In the rare event that any British Gen Z kids are either aware of Fawlty Towers or have a hundred quid to spend on theater tickets, I wondered how many of them would understand a gag involving the hotel’s rotary telephone or get a joke about Eva Braun.
More than anything else, the stage production reminds us of the passing of the pre-Thatcher England depicted in the series, one season of which ran in 1975, when she became leader of the Conservative Party, and the other in 1979, when she became prime minister. Basil Fawlty’s universe was still very much the Britain of cold baths and warm beer, of bad food (cheese salad, anyone?) and questionable dentistry, of musty class distinctions and faded empire. Throughout the series, Basil mutters fulminating asides against slackening morals, changing fashions, rising informality, declining patriotism, a weakening work ethic, American manners, the then-just emerging phenomenon of mass immigration, and other harbingers of change. For all its nationalist clowning, “The Germans” even affords him a snide comment about Britain’s 1973 entry into the European Economic Community, a concession of national sovereignty at the time of the series, which, as recent events have shown, never really went down well.
To audiences today, the Basil of the television series—based on a real Torquay hotelier whom Cleese remembered as astonishingly rude to him and other guests—may come across as too snobbish and too stodgy to be funny. Cleese’s genius, however, was to impart to the character a barely contained rage that mocked the likeliest source of Basil’s chronic dysfunction: his immense fear of change. That sensibility was rather lacking in Adam Jackson-Smith’s incarnation of the role. Though a skilled actor who is energetic in the part’s physical comedy, his Basil was curiously introspective, seemingly driven more by petty resentments and outsized neuroses—debilities increasingly common on both sides of the Atlantic today—than the unresolved anger lurking just beneath the surface of Cleese’s deranged authority figure, who knows he must cope with the decay of the culture he knows but has no idea how to move forward.
Anna-Jane Casey drew out Sybil, Basil’s long-suffering wife, with rather more vulgarity than Prunella Scales did in the television series. On stage, the character is introduced by her awful laugh, which Basil compares (in the series but not in the play) to a machine gun’s recoil. She can cajole and threaten, but never quite matches Scales’s ability to summon, when necessary, the gentility to which Basil aspires or the determination Sybil needs to solve the problems he creates. Hemi Yeroham delivered a skilled impersonation of the legendary Andrew Sachs’s Manuel, the hotel bellboy with comically deficient English whom Basil has reluctantly imported from Barcelona. He did not, however, go beyond the ethnic caricature, if that is even possible. Paul Nicholas’s Major and Victoria Fox’s Polly, the hotel maid played in the series by Cleese’s first wife and series co-writer Connie Booth, serviceably rounded out the main cast. It probably says a lot about the play’s authenticity, which Caroline Jay Ranger’s direction and Liz Ascroft’s sets meticulously adapted from the series, that the best acting came from Rachel Izen’s unstoppably fierce Mrs. Richards. Ill tempers and demanding personalities remain ever present, after all, and not just on John Cleese’s X feed.
