There is a palpable end of term feeling here at Fawlty Tours. It’s not just me that’s on his last leg. Tonight we play our final gig in Melbourne. It’s been cold and rainy for days but as if to break our hearts Australia has turned on the sunshine. That’s nice for the Grand Prix which will be roaring away less than a mile from our hotel. I can never quite make up my mind about F1. Sometimes I think it’s very interesting and at other times I think it’s incredibly boring and just loud valet parking. My friend Martin in France watches every moment avidly, all the testing and the various Q’s, which I don’t understand at all and he emails me from Provence that he is watching live at 3.30 a.m.and is disgusted and amazed I show no interest in being there. John is hooked on the cricket and watches late at night, until convinced that England are going to be thrashed and then finds out to his chagrin in the morning that they turned it all round and won.
His wife announced something wonderfully bonkers in an interview in the UK. She said that everyone knows that John Cleese is her husband but what most people don’t know is that Eric Idle is her father. That’s a wonderfully silly quote and I use it on stage to remind John that as his father in law I order him to sit down and start the show instead of ranting on about marriage. Fish, as he calls her, is clearly very funny. I just hope that Momma Fish is happy with this, and that Poppa Fish is not coming after me for something I would have had to have done in the late 80’s. John’s in laws are actually younger than he is. In this club they join Terry Jones’ in laws. Michael meanwhile celebrates 50 years of being married to Helen in April, but as John points out cynically he hasn’t been home much. “He’s always on the road making those…….travel….programmes” he yawns naughtily.

While we are waspish about the other chaps there is quite a surprising degree of affection that comes through, and I think they would be surprised.

Melbourne has some nice late-night spots for food and drink after the show that we failed to find in Sydney. I guess they have curfewed Kings Cross. The first night we squeezed into The Supper Club and last night we met our friends Jo and Glenn Shorrock at Cumulus Up, where the food and drink was excellent. We had far too much fun as they had been “doing a Corporate” entertaining toy manufacturers and sadly not sex toys. Yes of course I asked. I ran away from our show early, skipping the vast line that has started to form outside the stage door with endless stuff to sign and selfies to take. Let’s make this clear. We don’t do selfies. We have banned the buggers. They are intrusive and annoying and take for ever, and then everyone wants one and then they take fucking hours because no one can operate their stupid I-things, then they give it to someone else who has it backwards and all this time you are grinning like a lunatic so you won’t come across like a cunt… So no more.

I was writing a little song backstage and I started to ad lib it on stage and John added the last line..

I’m the elf who invented the selfie

I’m an egotistical prick

I’m the elf who invented the selfie

Be in my picture click click…

There’s more which I haven’t quite finished but I think it’s time to fight back against this rampantly rude and intrusive waste of time. One guy pursued us through the airport and even ran ahead to snatch a selfie. What is it with these people? Don’t they believe they exist unless pictured next to some old celebrity fart? Oo look who I bumped into on Instagram. Get a fucking life.

I have been reading the questions from the audience at the intermission while John does his racist jokes lecture and I must say they are not terrible nice at all. Apart from the predictable tedious and boring ones – how did you get the name – will there ever be another Fawlty Towers – can you do the silly walk – there is quite a lot of abuse about showing up at all. They seem to think we are millionaires, that I am the wealthiest of them all, showing a profound misunderstanding of the nature of show business, but also that we are somehow gouging them by entertaining them for two hours. Have they never heard of “earning a living?” Ungrateful bastards. Not only that but the Melbourne audiences show a marked reluctance to stand up at the end. They do at the back in the cheaper seats, but the closer ones just sit there. Finally we get them after the encore, but we are used to a much greater degree of sycophancy if you don’t mind Melbourne. If you’re not careful I shall tell them your city was founded by Batman. True. A Mr. Batman who was famous for being a racist bastard who killed off most of the aborigines in Tasmania.

I’m sitting looking out at the sinister Gothic pile of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Was it a coincidence that on St.Patrick’s day this hotel was filled with drunken clerics at the same time as they were holding a Boy Scout convention?. Perhaps they were the party favours. It’s true I don’t like the Church. Any Church. It attracts the same kinds of people. A civil service for fantasists. And the damage they do to young people, their lives, and their knowledge of the universe. It’s shameful. Of course I would never say these things in public….

For what it’s worth I think people of Melbourne are more formal and behave more like New York while the Sydney-spiders are a bit more bonkers and behave like LA.

Tomorrow we move on to New Zealand where we play two nights at Auckland, some seats still available nudge nudge, before we travel overland, I should imagine by sleigh, to Wellington, home of the boot. Where all ends and we shall celebrate a Missa Solemnis and bid farewell to the antipodes. My wife deserts me to pop up and visit my son on the Sunshine Coast but we shall be reunited on the beaches of Tahiti where my personal tour continues, while poor John flies for 33 hours to Amsterdam, making his way up to Malmo, the home of the suicidal Swede in his filmed monologue. That should go over big.

Now it’s time to get out and see something of Melbourne. We’re going up the Tower to see what it looks like from a distance. So if you spot us, no fucking selfies, or we’ll push you over the edge….

Now the bloody bells are banging away…Oy Oy. Time to play the Python Sketch Church Bells.

Fawlty Tours 

I’ve decided that Fawlty Tours is the perfect title for being on the road with John. Although I’m not exactly Manuel material. The play version of Fawlty Towers opens in Sydney in August and stars our ex Australian Lancelot as Basil. I hope they have better luck than Spamalot did. It was always a tremendous disappointment the way it was produced here, for it opened very well in a wonderful production in Melbourne and then having spent (wasted) a fortune on lavishly shipping things and people back and forth from New York, instead of moving on to other cities they simply closed. The entire production. They said they couldn’t find anywhere else to play. Not Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth or Auckland. I couldn’t believe it.

Our New York producers, who knew everything about Broadway, sadly repeated the same pattern in London, flying people and costumes back and forth from New York, as if theatre had never been done before in the UK. The most egregious waste of money was they sent one actor all the way from Melbourne to Broadway to “show to” Mike. Because he was busy she was holed up in a NY Hotel for 8 days before he could hear her sing one song and then said “She’s fine” and she was flown all the way back. They did the same with costumes. For London they simply flew in a NY producer to sit in the UK for a couple of years to produce. Nuts.

Happily, shortly thereafter we split with the Producers, and now in conjunction with the admirable TRW we license performances all round the world. And instead of lavishly flying Broadway people in we permit them to make their own productions, like real theatre. This has worked very well in Spain, France, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Japan, etc etc. It’s Denmark’s turn next year, although the Danish producers keep bugging me to produce a little promo film for their big announcement in May. I hesitated for a while as I misread it as a little porno film, and I felt even for Denmark that was too much, but now I get it. They want something for the launch about how thrilled I am they are mounting this in the homeland of the depressive schizophrenic ham. Alright, alright, I’ll get to it, but I am working you know. We haven’t got much longer on the road. Three nights in Melbourne, from tonight and then just Auckland and Wellington and we’re done and dusted. Mind you this tour has done very well. Totally sold out, and standing room in Sydney, and I don’t think there are any seats left here in Melbourne. I believe you can get into the second night in Auckland, but you have to bring a sheep. It’s a two for one deal.

Anyway I’m sure Fawlty will do very well here. Every night in the Q and A there are always at least eight questions about The TV Series. Usually all the same, about whether it will come back, or was Manuel really hurt. John never picks them, though he does talk about the production. As I say I think it will do very well and he comes back in August to keep a watchful eye on his players. It was first mounted very successfully in Scandinavia by our great Scandinavian Spamalot director Anders Moon, who made a huge hit of it. So there is a great precedent.

The one amazing thing John reveals to me is that while there are Fawlty Towers characters and dining experiences all over the world, that clear a million dollars of profit a year, they do not pay him a single penny! So I hope he cleans up on the play.

Fawlty Tours spent Saint Paddy’s day flying to Melbourne, where it was a lovely warm day and then I took the bride out to a nice romantic dinner in The Atlantic restaurant which is part of the new Crown hotel and casino which has magically arisen since we were last here. The food was excellent, but their “pours” were extraordinarily parsimonious. I asked cheekily if there was a wine shortage in Australia after one sommelier hardly reached the half way mark in a wine sold by the glass. Same with the wife’s champers, and she looked shocked. Barely half way which at thirty bucks a glass is a real rip off. Not good chaps.

Perhaps they felt we had had too much the night before in Sydney saying farewell, with the amazing Erica Gregan pouring. Now there’s a lass who knows how to fill a glass. We were sad to leave Sydney, it all went too fast, and the audiences were great. And now for the great St.Patricks hangover day it’s raining here. Ah well, a good day to catch up with correspondences and grumble about producers.

Farewell to the New South Welsh.

Another rainy day in Sydney and sadly our last, for tomorrow we to Melbourne go and so it’s hi ho for the open road and on to the Quantum of Qantas..

Our tour is fast disappearing and that’s rather sad, although John goes on immediately to tour Malmo and Belgium. He confesses to being anxious and a tour of Malmo and Belgium is enough to still anxiety into anybody. Of course he will have to answer questions about why I am not with him. What can he possibly say? The truth is I am going on a tour of Tahiti. The audiences are tiny, in fact mainly fish, but the scenery man…

We were both very relaxed at the show last night, and another great audience gave us standing O’s and left happy. Bryan Adams came to the show and then backstage to say hello. We have a few friends in common, the adorable Jeff Lynne, with whom he recently recorded some tracks and the late and constantly lamented Michael Kamen, whom we both adored and with whom he wrote his two enormous hits “ Everything I do I do for you” and my personally favourite
“Have you ever really loved a woman?” which I play all the time.   

He brought with him a lovely lady Gwendoline Christie a very funny English actress whose presence in my dressing room has caused consternation and envy in my daughters Message feed, for she plays the warrior Brienne of Tarth in the HBO series Game of Thrones which has replaced the Bible in young people’s lives, and is not dissimilar, although I don’t remember Dragons in the Bible and I personally think they would be an enormous improvement.

Bryan is very complimentary about my guitar playing which is very gratifying for me and says he is working on a musical, so I tell them about the three years I spent writing Death the Musical and what a good idea I thought that was for Broadway! Gwendoline laughs her head off and then says she wants to see it. Brian wants one of the songs….

Perhaps I should make it a posthumous musical. I remember the songs were good thanks to the great John Du Prez, and even quite funny and as I say Bryan wants me to send him one.
If I can only figure out how to email songs…

An amusing email from Billy Connolly this morning with a picture of him being buggered by a bear, holding his nipples, entitled Nipple Donor, and announcing that the National Health Service in Scotland have chosen this picture to advertise their organ transplant programme. What a delight Billy is. For many years he entertained us annually celebrating Lonarch in his Scottish castle, which I skittishly once called Pamelot, for it was wondrously and efficiently ruled by the Lady Stephenson from these very Southern parts, who strove hard entirely for our pleasure, to amuse us and feed us royally, and where we comedic Sassanachs would dance the night away in kilted splendour, and I’m talking the funniest company, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Eddie Izzard, Billy and myself…. oh the laughs we had.. It was just down the street, in Highland terms, from the Queens summer digs, and occasionally the heir to the throne, having heard of the company we were keeping at Candacraig would call up and ask to come over. When he did we were always very cheeky and he would laugh and laugh. It was like Jesters Castle. Very healthy for him.

A request from the Discovery Channel to celebrate Haemorrhoid Day as
all we Pythons apparently have haemorrhoids named after us and apparently there is a severe danger that one will crash into the earth. I hope it crashes into the Discovery Channel because they constantly run shitty ads. I’m torn between making an elegant excuse or telling them to fuck off. Which is the polite response? I’ve been on the road so long I’ve forgotten. I wouldn’t like to be accidentally polite. 

This so called wonderful world of celebrity is a bombardment of people constantly demanding you sign bits of paper or pose for selfies, it’s a p in the a. John leads the way in denying these endless selfie requests. “No, I don’t know you,” he says perfectly reasonably which allows him to escape and I follow in his wake….

And so farewell to Sydney. If you didn’t come to the show at least you can tell your grandchildren you weren’t there….

Sydney A Night at The State.

Well we were a bit of a triumph last night in Sydney. The audience rose as one.

There was only one…

No, but seriously missus….

They stood and cheered.

Very sweet.

We both thought we were a bit off in Act One, but we were wrong, they went nuts at the end, and our friends, well they were frankly embarrassing in their praise. Of course they are our friends and we were giving them free drinks but still, the enthusiasm and the awe was amazing. You can see it in their eyes. And also they said it loudly and often. One of the Campbell sisters, the brilliant artistic one, said it was the best show she’d ever seen, which frankly is going to piss off The Lion King. The more voluble actress club owner one said, well she never stopped saying how amazing it was, and the third sister the clever designer and cloth maker has promised me a shirt. Well her husband did. The indefatigable Joffe beamed proudly and paternally in his Pickwickian way, and said very nice things. It was great to see Glen Shorrock and Jo, ancient friends, and he complimented me on my guitar playing – he’s a muso so that meant a lot, whilst the Umbilical Brothers, again old friends, were filled with nothing but praise. I think the nature of our show took everyone by surprise. It’s the oddity of conversation between old friends, and quirky tit bits about early Python days, that is unexpected, and then of course we show funny clips they haven’t seen, and perform sketches they don’t know, John discourses on racist gags with hilarious examples, and I sing rude songs. It’s a bit of a two man variety show and they really appreciated it. Of course Dave Umbie said it best. “PS – your show was just pipped at the post by Tania’s hair style. Hardly recognised her! Vavavoom!”

I really will have to get rid of her if she keeps on upstaging me, but I’ve grown terribly fond of her over the years, and she just keeps on getting better. I know John and I both agree we would never have any more wives, just a tour manager, but still Tania is exceptional and I would miss her even after 39 years.

So yes it was an amazing night and to cap it all our new best friend Erica Gregan threw a drinks party for us and we all had far too much fun. I met her lovely husband George, and of course he being a Rugby God knows my cousin Nigel Wray who owns the Saracens. Small world.

Sydney is a very social society and I always, always, always have fun here. It seems sad we have only two more days before our flying circus moves on to Melbourne. That’s really too bad. Someone should invent a really good reason for me to stay around here doing not very much. Actually John wrote his memoirs in The Four Seasons here for four months. That’s a very good idea. I should come back here and write his memoirs….

Well it’s a rainy Sydney morning so I’ve asked the wife to bring out her finest lingerie and I’m going to put it on. 

 After breakfast obviously.

 Then a good deal of resting and it’s back to the rather daunting dressing room at the glorious State Theatre, where the walls are filled with signed posters of the funniest people ever: Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, Eddie, Dame Edna, Joan Rivers etc etc. No wonder I felt a little anxious at the beginning, but the missus said I came on with a spring in my step and no one noticed the limp. That’s thanks to excellent Footlights Training…