"Are you Cathy with a 'C' or a 'K'?" John Cleese asks me without preamble.
"A 'C,'" I tell him.
"I'll pronounce it accordingly."
This is clearly going to be the best interview ever.
I'm so sorry, I'm sure you get this all the time, but I have to ask: What is the airspeed of the unladen swallow?
You know, people are asking that and I've never bothered to learn it. I ought to just learn it so I can give it straight back. Most of the questions I can answer, but that one… I'm going to listen to it tonight and learn the bloody thing.
I debated starting this Q&A with asking you if we could have an argument or telling you my parrot was dead, but then I realized you must get these sorts of questions reporters think are marvelously clever all the time. So, what's the worst interview you ever had?
Oh, let me think. The worst interview I ever had was an Australian radio interview. I went into a nice little studio and the interviewer, who was male, was sitting on one of those revolving chairs. Behind him he had a rack of CDs and he asked me the first question and I was just about to answer it and he swiveled on his chair so that his back was to me, and started putting CDs back on the shelf. It's very hard talking to someone who's completely turned their back to you, and just as I came to the end, he turned around again, asked me a question and then turned away again just as I started to answer. So I did the whole interview with his back to me. That was the strangest.
We have a podcast. If you want to come on our podcast when you come to town in November, I promise you, we will stare at you the entire time.
[Laughs, does not agree to come on the podcast.]
I am a longtime fan, and I want to know, why is Fawlty Towers not still happening?
Well, Connie Booth and I wrote it together, and there were two aspects to it.
One was that each episode used to take us six weeks — because I do think it is very well-written — but the reason is, we'd spend six weeks on it; nobody spends six weeks on a half-hour comedy. You're lucky to get 10 days; some people write in less than a week. We'd spend all that time and the result was that the plots were very good and if you can really get very good plots, the dialogue follows very easily. The only trouble is, to write six shows takes 36 weeks and then you record them, which takes a week, so that's 42 weeks, so then you do some filming and publicity. So it's taking up 44 weeks of the year, for a BBC series for which I was paid £6,000 [editor's note: translated for inflation and then calculated using the current rate of exchange, that's not quite $32,000/year] writing and performing, so it didn't work very well financially.
The other thing was, at the end of the 12 episodes, Connie and I looked at each other and said, "That's the best we can do and if we continue to do it, people will say, 'Oh, it's very funny, but it wasn't as funny as those first two [seasons]'." We thought, "well, why not get out while you're ahead?"
You were on The Muppet Show — and you have a writing credit for that episode. What did you write and who was your favorite Muppet when you were on the show?
My favorite person was Frank Oz. We met when they first came to America, because no one in America would give them an adult time slot, but the English would, so they came to England to make the show there because they wanted, really, to make a show that was watchable by adults, as well as by kids. I got to know Frank very, very well — he did Fozzie Bear — and I really loved that guy. I would love to have worked with him; he asked me to make a couple of films with him and I wasn't able to either time, which was a great shame. One of them was Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; I really wish I had been able to do it but I couldn't and I just got very fond of him and got to know the others as a result because they were staying in London in the course of making the shows and then they asked me on the show and I must say, it was as much fun as I've ever had, but I have no recollection about writing it at all. If I come into something I usually finish up doing a bit of the writing. Not always, I mean, Will & Grace, the writing was so good it certainly wasn't necessary, and the same with Cheers, but I usually finish up co-writing or rewriting a bit.
Do you have any scripts in the works? Any unpublished ones?
Well, I've got an idea, a film. It's a light comedy about cannibalism and it's called Yummy!
I can't tell if you're serious, and I hope you are.
I am. I am serious. I am describing it in a flippant way, but I think it's a very funny comedy and… it's very black but it's also very silly. That I'm thinking about. I making a short film about how absurdly unprofessional and dishonest the British press is. But that's just for the internet; that'll be out in about four weeks [editor's note: we taped this interview on Oct. 6]. Then I'm doing another tour like this and then I'm taking my wife and my daughter on safari to Africa, so this is a very nice thing. Then on the new year I shall escape from the English winter, because it's just so dull, you never see the sun for weeks, months, months. I should go and sit in a small island in the Caribbean and start writing volume two of my autobiography, which I really like. The voice book version of it just won a wonderful gold award in New York — an international, better than anything from 44 other countries, so I was very proud of that because I think it's a good little book and very funny. It's called So Anyway…
Listen to the interview here.
When you were in A Fish Called Wanda, that was your daughter who played your daughter?
You're absolutely right, but I have two daughters — one I've worked with sometimes, and another one who does a lot of writing entirely on her own. The older one was the one in A Fish Called Wanda; the younger one is the one I've been onstage with a number of times. She's stand-up comedian, incidentally. Her name is Camilla Cleese. I used to say, "Some of her routines are on YouTube," then she said "Don't say that, because I don't think they're very good anymore," which, actually, they were very good but she just loves to keep improving things and changing.
Who was more fun to work with, Kevin Kline or Jamie Lee Curtis?
They were both fun in a very, very different way. Kevin is — I've always called him an improviser, it's extraordinary what he comes up with. Before we did the movie, we went on holiday together for a week and I just worked with him on his part. He came up with stuff that was not in the script, like sniffing his own armpit. And he did it and I thought it was incredibly funny and then I said "It was so funny when you sniffed your armpit just now" and he said "Did I?" In other words, he's so spontaneous. Editors find him impossible to edit, because he never does anything the same way twice, but they all say it's worth it, because he is a bit of a genius. Jamie I found very, extraordinarily, chatty and cooperative. And the other thing was, Kevin would come up with lots and lots of ideas for his own character; Jamie would often come up with ideas for the whole film, which is very interesting. She was very good at seeing the whole project, not just her contribution towards it.
That's alright. That's what makes the future.
When you made an appearance on The Avengers, which was quite early in your acting career [1961], or at least your film and television acting career—
Oh, yes.
When you saw the 2012 film, did that do anything for you? Did you feel any, "hey, I was there the first time"?
Oh, no, no, because when you're somebody like me, you get off for the day or I did a half a day once on Dr. Who, that was more than 30 years ago, when Douglas Adams was on the writing team for it. I knew Douglas a bit. People ring you up, ask you to do things and you think, "well, that'd be fun," and then many years later they become a cult and everybody thinks it's very significant. On the day you just got up and went to work and had some fun. I liked very much the woman I worked with — now what was her name? She was Canadian. Ah… I bumped into her on holiday two years ago. Very nice woman. And we just had a nice day together, you know? And the script was OK. But you do it and then you come back and, as I say, 40 years later, people are asking you about this day that you can't remember.
[At this point his publicist breaks in and tells us our time together has ended.]
I hope you got enough.
I did. This was wonderful, thank you.
Thank you very much, darling.
Cathy Salustri is the arts + entertainment editor for Creative Loafing Tampa. Contact her here.
This article appears in Oct 19-26, 2017.