John Cleese has revealed that he will be fronting a new show on GB News – claiming that he was attracted to the idea of working on a “free speech channel”.
The former Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star announced the news during an interview with Amol Rajan on BBC Radio 4 this morning, with further details expected to follow soon.
“I was approached and I didn’t know who they were,” Cleese explained. “And I don’t know much about modern television because I’ve pretty much given up on it… and then I met one or two of the people concerned and had dinner with them and I liked them very much.”
He also revealed that he would be working with the comedian Andrew Doyle – who has been hosting the weekly show Free Speech Nation on the channel since 2021.
“Well, the nice thing about talking to the GB News audience is that they may not be used to hearing the sort of things I’ll be saying,” Cleese added.
“I mean, the BBC have not come to me and said ‘Would you like to have some time on our 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 cancelled or censored!”
Last year, it was announced that Cleese would be fronting a new documentary series for Channel 4 titled John Cleese: Cancel Me which promised to “explore why a new ‘woke’ generation is trying to rewrite the rules on what can and can’t be said”.
Cleese has been an outspoken critic of so-called cancel culture in the past, regularly posting about the subject on social media.
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