What is John Cleese so desperate to say that he can’t say already?

When John Cleese appeared on BBC Radio 4 to tell listeners that he could no longer say what he wanted to say on the BBC, it was, shall we say, a rather Pythonesque thing to do. The Today presenter, Amol Rajan, was alert enough to point this out before Cleese said a warm goodbye.

He’s off to GB News now, which, he says, he’d never heard of before, never watched and – on the basis of a meeting with some of its executives – isn’t so much a far-right channel as a “free speech” channel. They also reassured him that there was no real substance to the channel’s witty nickname, KGB News.

Cleese is going to be presenting a show produced by a chap he calls “a stand-up comedian”, Andrew Doyle, who is a satirist and not an especially good one (and certainly not in the same league as the Pythons). I wonder how well this pairing will get on, and whether Cleese will really find it to his tastes. For example, GB News is an unbalanced channel at the best of times, and most of its presenters are more or less rabid Trumpites.

Indeed, Nigel Farage quite often appears on stage with Trump, where “Mr Brexit” acts as a sort of warm-up man. He is enthusiastically cheered on in corners of Georgia and Florida, where the former UKIP leader must be little known. Farage and the other GBeebies regard Trump’s second coming as akin to that of the good lord himself. Farage’s only criticism of the Great Orange Hustler is that he should go easy on the idea that he, Trump, is still president of the United States. There’s a satirical sketch in there, somewhere.

Cleese, on the other hand, sees Trump as the biggest threat to western civilisation he knows, and is a properly free thinker. He liked the idea of a Brexit, which is fair enough, but I wonder what he makes of the current government. I wonder what he makes of Boris Johnson.

I wonder also what he will make of Mark Steyn, who spends most of his shows trying to discredit the Covid vaccines and spreading conspiracy theories about them. As Rajan asked, and Cleese didn’t quite answer, is disinformation about public health in a pandemic simply a matter of free speech?

For those who – like me – watch GB News just to see how wacky things can get, it seems clear that their idea of free speech is just the speech they like, and that includes some hateful and rather unfunny stuff, which all too often veers into the realms of fantasy. It claims to be a free select channel, but it is the opposite.

Scarcely a day goes by without the foam-flecked mouths of its intellectually uniform presenters calling for some lefty or “woke” personality to be banned, sacked or – to use the fashionable phrase – cancelled. They even ejected one of their own presenters, Guto Harri, when he took the knee live on air. 

Maybe Cleese should look up what Andrew Neil said as he fled in despair from this caricature of broadcast journalism: “I had always made it clear that it wouldn’t be a British Fox News and I think you could do something different without going anywhere near Fox. Fox deals in untruths, it deals in conspiracy theories and it deals in fake news. That’s not my kind of journalism and I would never have set out to do that.”

The channel will certainly be by far the most amateurish media operation Cleese has ever encountered. And it isn’t a free speech channel – it’s a hate speech channel, and Cleese has never seemed to me to be a hateful sort of bloke.

Cleese is rightly suspicious of conventional wisdom and a free thinker – but he’s always been rational, and his arguments based in fact and reason. He made fun of the kind of bigots who pop up on GB News – in fact, he’s made a career out of it. Put it this way, I’d pay to watch a discussion about The Life of Brian and statutory blasphemy between Cleese and GB News’s resident vicar, Calvin Robinson, who goes around dressed up like he’s on his way to the Spanish Inquisition.

Cleese runs on smiles; GB News runs on bile. In the case of the blameless Meghan Markle, the very terrors of the earth wouldn’t be sufficient to sate Dan Wootton’s bloodlust. He always looks fit to explode at the very mention of her name, like the obese Mr Creosote in the Monty Python “wafer thin mint” sketch. We’re just waiting for the Wootonian entrails of hate to splatter all over the GB News studio, which, to be fair, could do with a bit of a renovation. Cleese played the obsequious head waiter in that scene, so he could reproduce it with Wootton by handing him a copy of Finding Freedom towards the end of a particularly stressful rant about the Duchess of Sussex.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment, sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

In fairness, I’m finding it hard to know what Cleese – not the other hate-mongers, fear-mongers, xenophobics and anti-vaxxers – could do on GB News that he couldn’t do on the BBC. If he wanted, he could reprise his goose-stepping Hitler impression he made so famous on Fawlty Towers, which was a BBC production – provided it’s still funny to the audience of today, and his joints are up to the task.

Tastes in satire and comedy change, as in entertainment as a whole, and people no longer laugh so easily at certain things in the way they used to – just as they no longer found Norman Wisdom or Charlie Chester so funny by the time the Pythons turned up in 1969 (commissioned, of course, by the BBC). Half a century on, some people don’t find Monty Python as funny as they did when they were students, and it may be lost on the rising generations (though it retains a massive following).

There are plenty of projects that the restless Cleese could do for the BBC of today, but it seems to be Cleese who’s done the cancelling, not the other way round. I fear he’s badly miscast at GB News. I very much hope he doesn’t end up, Heart of Darkness-style, like poor old Neil Oliver muttering about believing no one and trusting nothing. Oliver looks very much like the Messiah these days, but he’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy.