Anyone who has ever tittered or giggled at the wild antics of the Monty Python team or guffawed loudly at the manic behaviour of Basil and Manuel in Fawlty Towers will enjoy his One Man Show, which came to the Liverpool Empire theatre last night.
The audience wait patiently and eagerly to be taken on a nostalgic trip down Memory Lane, which recalls some of the best times of their childhood, adolescence and adult days watching television.
The show is autobiographical and begins with a shameless rant about the moral and practical injustice of the Californian courts allowing such an enormous amount of alimony to be paid to his current ex-wife.
He even projects a papparazzi picture of her at an ATM clutching wads of money in 'her tight little fists.'
He is scathing about his home town Western-super-Mare, which he describes as a 'seaside last resort' and claims that nothing interesting ever happened there, certainly while he was a child growing up there.
John is coldly respectful about his father, who gave him the name Cleese, even though the family name was actually Cheese.
His mother, Evelyn Cross, he claims, shared the same dark and gloomy but wickedly funny sense of humour as he and tells how she suffered bouts of depression at times.
The show bursts into life when Cleese, the tallest of the Pythons, starts to show clips from the funniest moments, such as 'The Black Knight' and 'The Fish-slapping Dance' and expounds on the totally illogical logic of 'The Fire Alarm' episode of Fawlty Towers.
He starts promptly and strolls through almost two hours (including the interval) of happy memories dating back to 'At last the 1948 Show' and his early days with the now, Sir David Frost, finishing smoothly before 9.30 p.m.
Cleese is emotional when he talks about his good friend, his pal, co-writer and fellow Python, Graham Chapman who he obviously loved dearly and misses greatly even today.
You could describe the show as Cleese being characteristically guarded about being candid and one of the highlights is when he shows a clip of him giving an hilarious eulogy at Graham Chapman's memorial service.
But this is certainly the nearest anyone will get to having 'An Audience with' this extraordinary, intelligent and witty, comic genius who is the internationally famous... Mr John Cleese.
Click rating 7/10
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