Comic, 85, repeats his complaints agains bureaucracy and

John Cleese has made one of his regular moans about the BBC, complaining there’s ‘been nothing funny since The Office’.

The 85-year-old also repeated his complaints that the corporation is too bureaucratic and afraid of offence.

He said: ‘If you put a script in now it has to go through a fucking committee who have no idea what they are doing.

‘There has been nothing funny since The Office. It is sad and it is because the people in charge have no idea how to make comedy happen.

‘The whole process has been replaced by a bureaucratic process which  does not begin to work.’

His comments were made on stage at a fundraiser for the Slapstick comedy festival in Bristol last week but only reported by The Sun today.

The Fawlty Towers co-creator said of British comedy: ‘We used to be really good at it and now we are not and that is very sad. There weren’t committees when we started. Comedy now has to be clean. You must not play for laughs. I am going to write a book about writing comedy to make people aware how difficult it is.’

BBC comedies made in recent years include Motherland/Amandaland, Such Brave Girls, Ghosts, Here We Go, Things You Should Have Done, Mandy and The Cleaner.

Cleese – who made a show for GB News in 2023  titled The Dinosaur Hour complaining about modern issues – has been making similar comments about contemporary TV comedy for more than a decade.

As long ago as 2014 he said: ‘ What happens now is you have a new species, a "commissioning editor", who, as far as I can make out, haven’t actually written comedy, or directed it, and yet they seem to think that they understand comedy. 

‘This would be fine if they did understand it, but comedy is very difficult. Just look around – there’s an awful amount of crap. These decisions are being taken by people who don’t understand comedy but don’t realise that they don’t understand it.’

He last appeared on the BBC in 2018 with the sitcom Hold The Sunset.

Published: 2 Sep 2025