I would certainly be doing everyone, including myself, an enormous disservice if I wasn’t to flag this fascinating article by my friend James Cullis up. I must admit to still being quite a fan of John Cleese, but here Cullis takes a really interesting look at Cleese’s recent politics and dabbling with the far right, placing it within the context of Fawlty Towers. I don’t want to summarise my friend too much, but as he explains, the whole point of Fawlty Towers was to take the piss out of Basil Fawlty and his insecurities, rather than to mock the object of his ire. As a character, Fawlty is a man at odds with the fast modernising world around him, refusing to adapt: the audience were supposed to laugh at rather than with him. As Cullis writes, “The show was written to mock him, not endorse him. We laugh at a man who is classist, racist, sexist, and obsessed with wealth and prestige — a man whose worldview is brittle, anxious, and deeply insecure.”

Fifty years or so on, however, Cleese seems to be trying to reframe his creation as some sort of right-wing hero giving voice to vitriolic opinions now being silenced. He has got into bed with p’tahks like Rupert Lowe to try to subvert the whole point of his classic comedy. In trying to re-frame Fawlty in this way, Cleese actively perverts the reason he was so hilarious and so resonant: “Cleese’s backing of Rupert Lowe signals something dangerous and counterintuitive about the legacy of Fawlty Towers. Basil’s stereotyping of migrants and his overall conservative disposition were part of a comedy that the audience was laughing at — his outlandish views, his prejudices, put on display for ridicule.” In trying to pretend that we were supposed to be laughing with rather than at Basil, Cleese is effectively attempting to bastardise and usurp his own creation.

Of course, you could just put it down to the changing views of an aging comedian, far past his prime; but if we are going to continue to cherish classic comedy series like Fawlty Towers, surely we cannot allow them to be rewritten by the reactionary right in this way. The very reason such comedies were funny was that they poked fun at the anachronistic views and behaviours of their protagonists, so desperately at odds with the fast changing world around them. It was the comedy of the cultural clash or fish out of water. For Cleese to now try to go back and put a completely different meaning upon it surely simply exposes his own discomfort with the modern world.