Deadline: Monty Python’s John Cleese Joins GB News To Front “Free Speech” Show

Story from Deadline:

Comedy star John Cleese is returning to British TV by making a show for right-leaning channel GB News.

The Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star, who campaigns against “wokeism” and “cancel culture,” will become a presenter on the network, which launched in the UK last year with an ethos to present an alternative to rivals by focusing partly on culture wars content.

Cleese will debut on the channel next year, working alongside satirist Andrew Doyle on the currently unnamed program. Together they will encourage “proper argument,” said Cleese.

Doyle already presents Free Speech Nation on the channel, which boasts a presenting line-up that includes Dan Wootton but has rarely rated in a meaningful way in the UK.

Cleese appeared on BBC radio program Today this morning to talk about the show. Somewhat ironically, he claimed he would not have been approached by the BBC to make the same program and that he would have turned any approach down regardless because “I wouldn’t get five minutes into the first show without being canceled or censored.”

Cleese also claimed he did not know about GB News before the organization’s execs approached him, though he tweeted about it in August, linking it to Russian influence as “KGB News.” He told the BBC: “I met one or two of the people concerned and had a dinner with them and I liked them very much. And what they said was, ‘People say it’s a right-wing channel. It’s a free speech channel.'”

Cleese is best known as the curmudgeonly hotel owner Basil Fawlty, who was the star of the seminal 1970s comedy Fawlty Towers, and sketch show Monty Python‘s Flying Circus, which made stars out of its members in the second half of the 20th century.

Cleese, who has become increasingly outspoken against what he perceives as “cancel culture,” told the BBC Monty Python could not get commissioned in the UK today, “because it’s [from] six white people, five of whom went to Oxbridge.”

He has spent much of the morning on Twitter discussing the show and criticizing TV rivals. He claimed he would present “ideas you won’t have heard much about on British television” and that he has had “a very low opinion of the BBC for over 20 years.”