John Cleese's memoir is an eminently sensible book. Perhaps one needs to be very sensible underneath to be very funny on the surface. His method is to recount tales from childhood, through school, Cambridge and the early part of his TV, radio, writing, acting and stage career and extrapolate from them some general truths in a series of intermittent digressions.
School and schoolmasters are an inevitable source of some fascination and public school stories are all the more exotic for those of us who didn't go and JC is soon back at Clifton College teaching, and wily enough to pick up some essential tricks of the trade very quickly.
In the same way that Danny Baker's career just seemed to be one enormous stroke of luck after another, Cleese is rarely far from the next job offer but whereas the devil-may-care Baker rides the crest of any wave so jauntily, Cleese doubts himself regularly and appears to work much harder at it. Who would think that a day's writing would produce only four minutes worth of screenplay time and yet one could thus write a film in six weeks. But the main point, for those of us who don't quite have it, is that it is natural talent in abundance that causes these opportunities to arise, not mere flukes of good fortune.
Bankers and The Daily Mail are inevitable targets whenever a comparison for some evil-doing is required but, by and large, Cleese sees the best in most people. He has great admiration for Ronnie Corbett and Tim Brooke-Taylor, whose careers went on to be equally as successful as his without earning quite so much critical acclaim; David Frost is an enormous benefactor, a busy and generous sponsor of the early work but my favourite sub-plot is the emergence of Marty Feldman, surely the under-rated and too easily overlooked genius of the period. But nobody gets a better report than Harry Secombe, a hugely bottomless source of bonhomie, kindness and intelligence.
There is no denying that the creative friction in Monty Python was between John and Terry Jones but there is no malice in it. The one figure singled out for a few pages of well-directed spleen is actually...the late Ned Sherrin. But apart from that, Cleese is an amiable raconteur. Of course, there are plenty of observations of various absurdities but they are not the most abiding memories one comes away from the book with.
We are told about the origins of the classic Python sketches and how they evolved into the timeless texts that have now passed into the language and no apology is quite specifically made for filling a few pages with the scripts from some favourite sketches as Cleese aims towards 45000 words for the book.
And presumably a second volume is being written now so that Christmas 2015 becomes another pay day when we all want to read about the full Python story, Fawlty Towers, the films, divorces and subsequent marriages. This volume jumps from the inception of Python to some feelgood reflections on the recent live shows at O2. Perhaps the end came sooner than he thought, just like it did in many of his sketches.
Having seen Patrick Moore bowling in a brief clip on Brian Cox's programme last night, all we could really ask for is old footage of the Cleese leg break with an off break action. Apparently, he was a footballer and a very respectable cricketer in his day.
