John Cleese's Towering Legacy

It's a busy year for comic legend John Cleese: touring with a new one-man show, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the inimitable Monty Python troupe and hawking a remastered set of Fawlty Towers DVDs. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his immortal portrayal of slow-burning, silly-walking hotelier Basil Fawlty, Cleese also has some feedback to offer the hospitality trade. A familiar face in film (A Fish Called Wanda, the Harry Potter, James Bond and Shrek franchises) and television (Will and Grace, Cheers) for decades, Cleese shows no signs of slowing down as he turns 70. Rolling Stone recently caught up with Cleese by phone from Los Angeles.

Tell me about the Fawlty Towers DVD set. I understand it has new commentaries and new interviews by you.
That's right. I did it last year. The BBC said to me, "Would you like to put commentaries on them?" I said, "I think that might be interesting. What are you going to pay me?" Since I've discovered you need this stuff called money, because you exchange it for food, you know, clothing. And they said, "Well, we can't pay you, but what we can do is give you a hotel for a few days." And I said, "That's a good deal." So they gave me a hotel [room] that is literally 30 yards from the recording studio. It was very, very interesting to see the shows again because there were some of them I literally had not seen for 20 years.

Did you deliberately hold back Fawlty Towers stories in anticipation of one day getting complimentary lodgings?
No, I'm not clever enough to do that. One or two of my Python colleagues would do that sort of thing, but I think the truth is I can't be bothered. Occasionally I hold things back because I do want to write an autobiography eventually when I'm too old and broken-down to do anything else.

Since you mentioned that you were staying in a hotel for this: knowing who you are, do hotels these days seem to give you better service?
[Laughs] No, not really. I will tell you frankly that I'm pretty appalled by most of the hotels that I've stayed in. They seem to me to have gotten worse.

Two of your most famous Python sketches — the Cheese Shop and the Dead Parrot — also featured disgruntled customers. I wonder whether you're really a consumer advocate trapped in a comedian's body.
That's a good point! Yes, I think you got me won.

Given the stereotypical perception anyway of British hospitality, do you think Fawlty Towers encouraged tourism to Britain or do you think it scared people away?
I tell you, Hyatt used to show those to their employees as training films, on the basis of, "Watch this; whatever the characters do, do the opposite." That's absolutely true. In the one-man show I'm doing at the moment, one of the lines I say is that the basic British hotelier's motto is: "We could run this place properly if it wasn't for the guests." I think that that's the kind of feeling: that the guests are the people who come in — they mash the process up, otherwise everything would run smoothly.

I've got to ask you about your name. Is the plural of Cleese also Cleese — like at your family reunions, do you get a lot of Cleese?
Well, you know that it was originally Cheese, don't you? It's a story I've told many times. It's absolutely true. My dad was born in Bristol in 1893 and his name was Reginald Francis Cheese. His dad was John Edwin Cheese, who was the white sheep of his family. He did not like the rest of his family; they were in the baking business. We don't know much about them because he left them and came to Bristol and settled there and became a sort of lawyer's clerk. And we really don't know what happened to the black sheep Cheeses, but my dad had to go to the First World War in 1915. Well, he didn't have to — he volunteered — and he changed his name — changed the H to an L because he was fed up getting teased. Now, I don't know what he achieved by that because when I was in school, I was always called "Old Cheese." So I suppose if you had a plural of Cheeses, what would it be? A round of Cheese? A tray of Cheeses, maybe?