The legendary comedian arouse interest from the audience as he recently revealed his talk on a TV channel about ‘important information that gets censored’.
According to The Guardian, Monty Python star John Cleese has agreed to work as a broadcaster for the right-wing television network GB News and laments the ‘cancel culture’ that keeps individuals like him off of television.
John Cleese's view on his new role
Following the announcement of his new role, the Monty Python star, who will present shows on GB News next year, teased:
‘There’s a massive amount of important information that gets censored, both in TV and in the press. In my new show, I’ll be talking about a lot of it. You should be prepared to be shocked.’
Cleese explained on BBC Radio 4's Today program how his program with GB News, which he claims is a 'free speech channel', came to be:
‘I was approached and I didn’t know who they were … And then I met one or two of the [GB News] people concerned, and had dinner with them, and I liked them very much. And what they said was: ‘People say it’s the rightwing channel – it’s a free speech channel.’
The 82-year-old said that the BBC would not provide him with such a show:
‘The BBC has not come to me and said: ‘Would you like to have some one-hour shows?’ And if they did, I would say: ‘Not on your nelly!’ Because I wouldn’t get five minutes into the first show before I’d been canceled or censored.’
Cleese disclosed that he will be collaborating with comic Andrew Doyle, who now presents for GB News and previously wrote material for the fictitious news reporter Jonathan Pie that appears in web videos.
GB News' reconstructing effort
Despite a difficult beginning in 2021 that led to Andrew Neil's resignation as chair, GB News has rebounded to build a small but loyal fan base. It easily outperforms Rupert Murdoch's far better-funded TalkTV when they battle for television ratings with cancel culture coverage, complaints about ‘wokery’ in modern life, and anti-lockdown stories.
Discovery, a US media corporation, has ceased to be a stakeholder in the station. The pro-Brexit hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall and the Dubai-based investment company Legatum now provide the majority of its funding.
The media regulator Ofcom is looking into whether GB News violated the broadcasting rules when it made assertions concerning the effects of Covid vaccinations.
Asked whether free speech should extend to those overwhelming misinformation about public health issues, Cleese said: ‘
If there’s a factual response to something like that, then that should be made. That’s the job, to put the facts out there, and then to have opinions slightly separate and have a proper argument about it, but not to try to avoid a public debate.’
He expressed despair about the condition of British politics and praised the virtues of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a fringe political group established by David Owen backers who rejected joining the Liberal Democrats in 1990. For those who are ‘economically a little bit to the left and culturally a little bit to the right,’ he claimed, the SDP is for them.
Additionally, he said that the BBC would not commission Monty Python today ‘because it's six white individuals, five of whom went to Oxbridge.’
He added that it's BBC's job to 'produce the best programs':
‘If people enjoy something, then the BBC should be making more of it. And if people don’t enjoy something, they should probably be making less of it. But their job is to produce the best possible programs.’
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