JOHN CLEESE EXCLUSIVE: FAWLTY TOWERS WON’T BE BACK ON THE BBC

TV LEGEND John Cleese says the new version of Fawlty Towers will NOT be returning to the BBC – because he wouldn’t get the freedom to make it in the way he wants.
Fans were left overjoyed earlier this week when it was announced the programme was coming back.
Confirming its return this evening (Thursday) the Basil Fawlty actor, 83, said it wouldn’t be on the BBC.
He told Dan Wootton Tonight on GB News he would be finding a new home for the sequel which will be written alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese.
He said: “I’m not doing it with the BBC because I won’t get the freedom. I was terribly lucky before, because I was working for the BBC in the late Sixties, Seventies, and the beginning of the Eighties.
“That was the best time because the BBC was run by people with real personalities who loved the medium and who were operating out of confidence, which was okay because there wasn’t so much competition.
“Then John Birt came in and said if the BBC didn’t match the viewing figures that the commercial channels were getting they’d get their license revoked.
“So then they started going for the biggest audiences and tended to go for the lowest common denominator while always denying they were doing that.
“If you look at a paper now from 1985 and look at the TV shows available that evening and compare what they are now – basically in Britain we’ve gone from what was a middle-class culture with all its failings to a tabloid culture and that is why there is so much of this screaming at people.”
When Fawlty Towers was originally broadcast in the 1970s, it won several Baftas, including for best scripted comedy, with Cleese also picking up the award for best entertainment performance.
But Cleese admitted he was going to shake things up a bit. “My daughter and I have been writing together for 16 years – which people don’t know – and she met a guy and they chatted briefly and we were all in Las Vegas together because I was doing a show with her and we had dinner and we suddenly realised that if we do a sequel, first of all it’s interesting.
“Secondly, it doesn’t rely upon Manuel – dear Andy Sachs who’s not with us anymore, and Prue Scales who has difficulty remembering stuff – and certainly almost everyone else is dead.
“When I look at old clips now all these wonderful English character actors aren’t with us anymore, so suddenly we thought that if the only continuing character is Basil, then we can come up with something surprising.
“Then we thought, ‘Where?” Not in a small English town, but somewhere more fun and much more different – say a Caribbean island or something like that with a small bijou hotel with a few rich people coming to stay!’
Meanwhile Cleese said he couldn’t wait to start fronting a new GB News programme called the Dinosaur Hour. He said: “I’m excited. I’ve been working with a couple of guys on it. And the whole idea of being able to create a show from scratch without anyone looking over our shoulders is extraordinary. I mean, you wouldn’t get an offer like this anywhere else on the planet. It’s extraordinary. And I’m really looking forward to it because I think that there are so many cliches in ordinary television so it would be nice just to try and avoid those.”