John Cleese; founding member of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers finally lets rip on himself.
Starting with his early childhood & schooling, Cleese walks us through his rather cold education and family experiences and then on to university and the start of his (purely accidental) public career.

Studying to be a lawyer, Cleese meets and makes friends with a number of students that share his love of comedy. He describes (in varying degrees of detail) his university years and twenties, going on to explain how he met his first wife, Connie (Polly in Fawlty Towers) and, eventually, how the Pythons came about.

Light-hearted reading - I'm not a big autobiog fan, but received this for Christmas and enjoyed it.

The discourses on education (Cleese became a teacher at his old public school) and mini-rants (close friend & fellow Python, Graham gets a few mentions).

John Cleese has had a surprisingly (unsurprisingly?!) diverse life; school teacher, law student, writer, comic and actor.
He talks right through the façade of working for the BBC as a new writer and doesn't mince his opinions on any of the subjects, yet doesn't really ridicule anyone (much).

Most of the book focuses on Cleese up to (probably) his mid-thirties and then jumps to the Python re-union at the O2. If you read this as the autobiography it is, then that leaves a massive gap in his life.

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Created Jan 26, 2015 at 4:27pm • Submit your own review...