John Cleese’s new show is headed to a network that’s been described as a “British Fox News”
John Cleese #JohnCleese
John Cleese
Despite the gruesome extent to which John Cleese’s Black Knight is willing to wave away a “flesh wound” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there’s one thing the actor himself won’t brush off: cancel culture. Cleese, who has become a vocal critic of cancellation and woke culture in his later life, will debut a new series on right-wing leaning U.K. network GB News, which launched in 2021.
Speaking to BBC Today on Monday, Cleese confirmed that he’ll bring a new series to GB in 2023. Cleese says he plans to collaborate with satirist and GB veteran Andrew Doyle to encourage “proper argument.” (Read: this one’s for the devil’s advocates out there.)
Cleese, whose series Fawlty Towers once aired on the network, says he has since been disillusioned by English television and has pretty much “given up on it.” But when representatives from GB approached, Cleese said he was interested in the network’s pitch.
“What they said was, ‘people say it’s a right-wing channel [but] it’s a free speech channel,’” Cleese recalls.
Cleese also took a moment to acknowledge that, although he has not been asked to return to the BBC, if they were to ask he would respond: “Not on your nelly.” His reasoning? “Because I wouldn’t get five minutes into the first show before I’d been cancelled or censored.”
After being an early backer of GB News, Warner Bros Discovery sold its stake in the company in August, citing a string of problems and low ratings, per The Hollywood Reporter. In the sale, the network lost chairman Andrew Neil in a very public fallout. In a September 2021 interview with the BBC (via The Guardian), Neil described his exit, explaining that he no longer wanted to be a “minority of one” at a “British Fox News.”
“More and more differences emerged between myself and the other senior managers and the board,” Neil added.
Any differences Neil may have perceived seem to look more like similarities to Cleese, who tells BBC he got along well with the GB team he met.
“I was approached and I didn’t know who they were,” Cleese recalls. “Then I met one or two of the people concerned and had a dinner with them and I liked them very much.”