Revenge is sweet. Ask John Cleese, who has begun writing for The Spectator after enduring years–hell, decades–of abuse at the hands of the journal’s lesser writers. They hated Fawlty Towers, they hated the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, they hated his performance as Petruchio on the BBC. Basically, they hated everything John Cleese has ever said, written, or done. Including Monty Python’s Flying Circus:
Monty Python’s status as a national treasure has blinded people to its shortcomings and created a tedious tradition of puerile, half-baked humour dressed up as real comedy… When sketches ended abruptly, with a shooting, or a 100-ton weight falling from the sky, or a camera turning round to show the studio, or credits appearing midway through a programme, these cheap tricks were saluted as Brechtian devices or surrealist statements. In reality, they were there to disguise the lack of proper sketch endings, or simply to pad the programme out…”
Fortunately, Cleese is too big a man to take that criticism to heart. More accurately, he regards The Spectator as so inconsequential a rag that its criticism is simply beneath his attention, a point that he’s more than happy to explain in The Spectator’s own pages:
Whatever one does, there will be critics who dislike it, and all one can do is to hope that they will write for journals with circulations as tiny as that of The Spectator 20 years ago. It also helps to know that such reviews will never be read by one’s colleagues in the creative arts, or, indeed, by anyone who might offer one work.
The Spectator assures its readers Cleese will be writing for them from time to time on a range of subjects, hopefully moving beyond the issue of the shabby treatment he’s received from The Spectator. At any rate, nice to see the old duffer has kept his sense of humor.
