If you’ve ever been puzzled whether to pronounce John Cleese’s surname as “clees” or “cleez”, this first volume of his autobiography makes it clear.
His grandfather’s surname was Cheese, as in cheddar, and so presumably it’s “cleez”. His father thought the name was difficult to live with, and changed it to Cleese.
But the ruse didn’t work terribly well. On Cleese’s first day at St Peter’s Preparatory School in Weston-Super-Mare, aged just 8, the other boys bayed at him: “Chee-eese! Chee-eese!”, and he wondered miserably how they knew.
It wasn’t just his name that made life difficult for the young John. He was also very tall, 1.83m before he was 12, gangly and awkward and described by his PE teacher as “six foot of chewed string”.
He was the only child of older, protective parents. He loved and admired his father enormously – “what sanity I have I owe to his loving kindness”– but his mother was, he says, self-obsessed, anxious and easily upset, throwing tantrums of “inconceivable volume and activity”.
Cleese says it cannot be coincidence that he has spent so much time in therapy, and that most of the problems he has dealt with have involved his relationships with women.
After an unpromising start, Cleese enjoyed his prep school, turning out to be quite good at sport (although not, of course, rugby, which was for large nasty rough boys) and discovering he could make the other boys laugh.
High school was at a public – read private – school in Bristol, followed by a scholarship to Cambridge. But because national service had just been abolished in Britain, creating a bottleneck of potential students, he had to find other things to do for two years before he was able to take up his place, and he spent the time teaching at his old prep school.
Cambridge and the Footlights liberated Cleese from being an anxious, gangly boy into becoming the successful man of comedy. In the 1960s former Footlights members dominated British comedy, producing and acting in shows such as I’m Sorry, I’ll Read that Again, That was the Week that Was and of course Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and Cleese was in the thick of it.
Cleese has a lot to say about humour and what makes it work, and early in the book explains what makes Basil Fawlty funny. Fawlty is angry, and that anger is underpinned by fear of messing up.
At the beginning of each episode he makes small mistakes, and trying to cover up be becomes panicky and desperate until he has dug himself into a hole. But, crucially, it is suppressed anger that is funny, not a real blow-out.
And Cleese reveals that Fawlty was partly based on a desperate fellow pupil at his public school called David Rogers, who would get into a frenzy in geometry.
To enjoy this biography you’ll need to be much more au fait with British comedy and its characters – Peter Cook, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Hugh Laurie, Connie Booth – than I am, but Cleese and his friends had such an influence on what we find funny today that his experiences and views make for a good – and often hilarious – read. – Vivien Horler