John Cleese: We're struggling to get guests to discuss woke issues

Comic says 'murder everyone at the BBC' as he praises GB News for giving him carte blanche

John Cleese said he is struggling to get guests willing to discuss ‘woke issues’ on his new GB News show.

Speaking on the beleaguered station, where his show starts on October 29, he said people feared getting the sack if they debated the topic, from whatever standpoint.

He also joked that aspiring new comedians should ‘murder everybody at the BBC’ and said he signed up to GB News for the ‘extraordinary’ creative freedom they gave him.

On ‘cancel culture’, Cleese said: ‘One university professor from Oregon told me that more people have been fired during the woke period than were fired during McCarthyism in the 50s.

‘They go after people and an awful lot of people are very, very scared of that, which is why people with a higher profile have to discuss it as they’re not frightened of getting fired.

‘Most people are frightened of getting fired and the people who employ them are frightened of getting fired and that end of woke is not very nice.’

Cleese also said he found it hard to get people on the programme who he would consider pro-woke. He said ‘One woman said, "It’s wrong even to discuss it". In other words, they just want us to accept all their ideas and they’re not prepared to discuss them.’

GB News has been in crisis since Laurence Fox made misogynistic comments on Dan Wootton’s show. Both have since been sacked.

And Cleese himself has been highly critical of Wootton’s replacement, former comic Mark Dolan, saying: ‘Mark Dolan is really appalling, isn't he ? It seems to me that GB News is harming itself by putting out this nasty, vulgar rubbish.’

The comic said his new GB News show, the Dinosaur Hour, is aimed at ‘dinosaurs who are out of touch’. It has signed up guests including Stephen Fry, Trevor McDonald and Sir Tim Rice.

But the 83-year-old said: ‘It also has a lot of very good guests who aren’t celebrities. Yes, you’ve got to have a certain number of celebrities to get people to turn on but then you can interview people who are really interesting. And a lot of celebrities aren’t interesting at all.

‘The show is for all those who are out of touch; all the dinosaurs who are out of touch. You can be out of touch for two reasons. You can be voluntarily out of touch because you’ve given up, which is a very sensible point of view.

‘Or you could be out of touch without knowing it but it’s for those sorts of people."

The new programme will be set in a castle and Cleese said he was given full creative freedom to make the show he wanted.

He said: ‘It was extraordinary. With the setting, I wanted to make it look like a very, very strange gentleman's club a little bit like the bar in Star Wars.

‘Because it seems to me that television falls for cliches so easily. You look at every news show now.

‘What happens is you get this very elaborate animatronic then everyone's sitting at a desk, which is pretty much the same on any show that you're looking at.

‘I just wanted to create something different because I thought that would start people out by saying, "what's this about?"

He also revealed how he almost ended up making a new series with Netflix, explaining: ‘I gave them six ideas and I thought two were really good and they never even called my agent back. And you kind of think, "What are you looking for?"

‘I’ve no idea what they are looking for. The main thing, as you get older, is you realise that very few people have any idea what they're doing. It's true.

‘When you get older it takes you some time to realise that most people don’t know what they’re talking about."

Meanwhile, the Fawlty Towers legend Cleese also offered some advice to aspiring young comics, saying: ‘I would say murder everyone at the BBC and start again with people who understand a little bit about creativity because otherwise it’s all done by committee.

‘Because people at the BBC, they only have one thought when they go into work in the morning. One thought which is "Today, I must not get fired.

‘They come out of it at the end of the day, they've still got a job. They've had a good day. They shouldn't be in the business of making the best possible programmes for the British public.’

Cleese also unveiled the trailer for his new programme on Andrew Doyle’s GB News show last night:

Published: 9 Oct 2023