At the age of 71, John Cleese is preparing for his first ever UK tour, including four nights at The Lowry. He spoke to Paul Taylor ...

John Cleese says it with a certain pride: "I’ve offended lots of people."

The movie Life Of Brian, for instance, was banned in parts of Britain, while in New York, protestors greeted it with placards branding Monty Python "an agent of the devil".

When it comes to giving offence, Cleese is something of a connoisseur. And, as we chat at The Lowry in Salford Quays, he confesses an unexpected soft spot for another great giver of offence, the late Bernard Manning.

"Oh, he was wonderful," says Cleese. "I thought he was very funny. He did a joke once, I remember, about a time when all the groups can get together: the catholics, the protestants, the blacks, the browns, the Chinese... and we can all beat up the Methodists".

And then Cleese laughs heartily. He prefers the Alf Garnett approach to racism.

"By mouthing what some racist would say and making the context and background ridiculous, you discredit it," he says. "There will always be some people who take it seriously. But as Bernard Levin once said, just because there are foot fetishists, it doesn’t mean you should stop issuing shoe catalogues."

Political correctness is, says Cleese, "like a maiden aunt – you’re all having fun at Christmas, and she walks into the room and it all goes quiet".

"What is so funny is that it’s all right to tell Jewish jokes if you’re Jewish. You can use the ‘n’ word if you’re black. It’s a very complicated area.

"One of the things I do, I tell a number of jokes, a joke against Australians, one against Americans, one against English, one against the Swiss, one against the Germans, and then I start telling a joke: ‘There were these two Mexicans..’. And in America, the whole audience freezes. I point out that it’s kind of patronising. If you make jokes about Germans and Australians and English, why can’t you make jokes about Mexicans? Because they can’t take care of themselves? Because they are a feeble species that has to be specially protected?"

There’s one controversial "joke" Cleese didn’t find funny, though. Cleese may have assaulted and insulted Andrew Sachs in a rich variety of ways in the creation of possibly the greatest sitcom ever, Fawlty Towers, but Cleese didn’t much care for the way the actor better known as Manuel was treated by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, with the answer machine messages about Sachs’s grandaughter which provoked a furious debate on the limits of comedy and the state of the BBC.

"In the case of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, I thought that was a terrible miscalculation on their part," says Cleese. "It was just awful. It’s absolutely legitimate to be very rude about people if there’s some kind of social context.

"I wouldn’t hesitate to say rude things about Rupert Murdoch because I think he’s done more damage to the culture of my country than anyone since the Luftwaffe. But I’d try to say something that was accurate, and I don’t think I’d bring up any bathroom habits that he had.

"I thought it was absolutely out of line."

There’s not much in comedy today which interests Cleese.

"When you’ve done comedy for 50 years, you’ve heard most of the jokes," he says.

The last comic to really thrill Cleese was the late Bill Hicks, who was "everything Lenny Bruce wasn’t. I think he was brilliant".

Ricky Gervais’s The Office – one of the very few British comedies to represent the same kind of seismic shift as Monty Python – was "very clever and fascinating but not as laugh-out-loud funny as the stuff we used to do".

Cleese has come to Salford Quays to discuss what is a debut of sorts – his first UK tour, which includes four nights at the Lowry.

"It’s strange," he admits. "We did the Python tour here in 1973 and played Manchester and Liverpool, but I haven’t done it before and this whole tour idea started out of the blue."

Fellow Python Eric Idle once said that Cleese was "a difficult man", adding: "He’s so funny because he never wanted to be liked. That gives him a certain fascinating, arrogant freedom".

At brief acquaintance, Cleese, now 71, seems genial, garrulous but is still possessed of that lofty, military bearing which makes him a natural to play English establishment figures – men with an air of punctured dignity; serious chaps with legitimate complaints to make about defective parrots or wayward Spanish waiters.

It is billed as his "Alimony" tour, helping towards the £12m divorce settlement owed to his third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger. But it might more accurately be called the Life And Times Of John Cleese. He will talk about childhood in Weston-super-Mare, his mother – whose "very black sense of humour" was a huge influence on his comic development – his time in Cambridge Footlights, his work with David Frost, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, Marty Feldman, Peter Sellers ("I know he was a bit crazy but I liked him"), then Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers.

You get some sense of Cleese’s meticulousness when he says that, having honed the show performing in such unlikely places as Norway, he has slimmed the first half down from 57 minutes to 49 minutes, just by editing words, phrases, the odd paragraph which proved redundant. Not 50 minutes, you’ll note, but 49.

It was such perfectionism which meant Cleese was the first to want out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The TV show ran to only four series between 1969 and 1974, and Cleese left before the last series.

"The first series and a half was terrific, and then two things happened," he explains. "First I felt we were beginning to repeat ourselves, and that troubled me more than it would do now. I was much more of a purist in those days. And the other thing was that after the first series, Graham Chapman (Cleese’s writing partner, who died in 1989) did really become a full alcoholic, and no one else was volunteering to write with him. There were days when he couldn’t remember in the afternoon what we’d written in the morning, and he was screwing up a lot of the sketches."

Cleese says he only agreed to stay for a third series because the BBC had intimated to his agent that without Cleese, there would be no third series.

Similarly, Fawlty Towers – written by Cleese and his first wife Connie Booth – ran to only 12 episodes.

"I could have done as many as I wanted," he says. "But Connie and I were absolutely clear that we’d done the best we could do and anything else would not be quite as good."

Since then, we’re more accustomed to seeing Cleese in movies – Clockwise, A Fish Called Wanda and many more, even a couple of Bond films.

But in recent years he has been "fed up" with the Hollywood movie-making machine.

"I’d written two scripts which I thought were good and they started telling me to make changes I knew were wrong, because I know more about scriptwriting than those executives," he says. "In the end I walked away from both the scripts, neither of which has been made."

It was the promise of being allowed to do exactly what he wanted on stage that drew Cleese back to live performance.

Cleese has lived for many years in California, though he takes a keen interest in English politics, at one time appearing in party political broadcasts for the Liberal Democrats.

"Although my inclinations are slightly left of centre, I was terribly disappointed with the last Labour government. Gordon Brown lacked emotional intelligence and was never a leader.

"I think what’s happening at the moment is rather interesting. The coalition has made everything a little more courteous and little more flexible. I think it was quite good that the Liberal Democrats had to compromise a bit with the Tory government. I’m rather impressed by Cameron. There’s more courtesy and intelligence at work than I’d noticed in recent years."

» John Cleese’s Alimony tour comes to The Lowry, Salford, from Tuesday May 24 to Friday May 27.

Tweet