Funny money

JOHN CLEESE is stretched out in a chair in a dressing room at York’s Grand Opera House, in York. But the only show today is for journalists to spread the word about his first-ever UK tour at the age of 71.

He’s doing a rece in advance of The Alimony Tour, a title that is both a joke and deadly serious as the result of a divorce settlement with his third wife, Alyce Faye Eichelberger.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’d be doing this if I didn’t have to provide a million dollars alimony every year because what I really enjoy doing best of all is writing,” he explains.

“Writing is always what I valued and performing, which is what people know me for, is just closing the circle. So, once I’ve written something I think I might as well perform it because it’s better paid than writing and I won’t screw it up because I understand why I’m doing things.

“So that’s what I would be doing, but if you need to earn this sort of money then this is about the nicest way of doing it.”

His age – he’s 71 – gives him an advantage.

“Now that I’m old, the audience is pre-selected because nobody said, ‘We can’t stand him, let’s buy two tickets’. So almost everyone out there likes what I’ve done. There’s a very warm and affectionate response which totally relaxes you. You know they’re going to like the kind of jokes you’re doing because that’s why they’re there.”

The man who describes himself on his website as “British actor, writer and tall person”

says in relation to more than one subject that he’s looking at it from a psychological perspective.

He’s certainly worked out the mechanics of his show – “an evening of wellhoned anecdotes, psycholanalytical titbits, details of recent surgical procedures and unprovoked attacks on former colleagues, especially Michael Palin.”

The show comes direct from a successful tour of Scandinavia. He goes into great detail explaining not just the content, but the dilemma of how much to alter for the British tour.

There were things the Scandinavias didn’t know. Like Ronnies Barker and Corbett, with whom Cleese worked on TV’s The Frost Report (he does a throwaway David Frost impression as he tells the story). Now he must decide whether to put them back in.

“Here’s the thing. It’s very easy for people to go on too long, and everyone tells me about Ken Dodd. He does four and a half hours. I want to do 50 minutes because that’s what I want to see when I go to the theatre. I don’t want anyone to think I’m short changing them.”

And if you’re wondering how he came to be touring Scandinaiva, well, that’s another (longish) story. He was in Copenhagen “insulting some bankers for large quantities of money” when asked to do his show for seven dates in Norway.

“That was so successful, it was a sellout everywhere because the Norwegians have got the oil and can pay the prices. What happened was he said what about 25 shows in Scandinavia?

So that’s what I did in September and October.”

How big is he in Scandinavia? “Huge,” he replies. “Quite seriously. I can walk down the street in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and they have no idea who I am. If I go to Northern Europe – Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and even the German-speaking countries – I will be recognised. And, to my surprise, I’m really quite, quite big in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

“I used to say it’s Northern Protestant Europe but, of course, the Poles are Catholic.

There seems to be some sort of fault line and north of that they like the BBC comedy shows and see a lot of them, and south they don’t really want to know about British humour.”

The idea for The Alimony Tour show follows on from the charity shows he does in the US – introduces a Python film or A Fish Called Wanda, has dinner at a restaurant round the corner and then returns for an hour-long Q&A session. The stage show elaborates on that, taking the audience through his career with, of course, much mention of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers. If there was ever a time he was tired of talking about those shows, it’s long gone.

It’s a fascinating career – although lack of space means you’ll have to go and hear about it firsthand in the show – with even the potted version Cleese relates proving vastly entertaining.

He’s been visiting venues beforehand to suss out the theatres and find a decent hotel to stay in. It must have a swimming pool otherwise his girlfriend won’t want to come with him.

The list of tour towns was drawn up by his manager although it has a Northern bias. And he won’t be taking the show into London. “I said to him this is a very good fan show and, as a fan show, I will defend it and promote it, but I don’t think you can go to the West End and show people clips of Fawlty Towers and tell people stories about it. Fans will love it but I don’t think it’s quite West End entertainment,”

he says.

HE’S surprised to be embarking on the tour. “This is for me now – and I never thought I’d say this five years go – the best way of earning a living,” says Cleese.

“Everything else that I’ve relied on over the years has dried up for one reason or another. I used to make a very good bit of money out of business speeches. Film, particularly, has dried up because they don’t write the cameos they used to. When I first went to the States and did Third Rock from the Sun, they used to pay me $60,000 an episode, a lot of money. I did Entourage in the summer and got $7,000. That’s a major salary cut.

“So I began to think to myself the safest thing to do at the moment is stand-up because people spend so long on their computers and watching things on their own that there seems to be a reaction against that.

“People want to go into a theatre and be part of an audience and especially to laugh as part of a group, as though there’s some deep human need to socialise, to connect.”

■ The Alimony Tour plays at York Grand Opera House on May 28 and 29. Tickets 0844-847-2322 and online at grandoperahouseyork.org.uk