John Cleese to host new GB News TV show

John Cleese rose to fame as part of the British surreal comedy troupe Monty Python

Actor and comedian John Cleese has confirmed he will host his own GB News TV show from next year.

The Fawlty Towers star told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the new show will see him work alongside satirist Andrew Doyle, and encourage "proper argument".

Doyle currently hosts Free Speech Nation on the channel which launched last year.

Cleese warned that GB News audiences "may not be used to hearing the sort of things I'll be saying".

"I was approached and I didn't know who they were," he explained to presenter Amol Rajan on Monday.

"I don't know much about modern television because I've pretty much given up on it - English television."

He added: "Then I met one or two of the people concerned and had a dinner with them and I liked them very much.

"And what they said was, 'people say it's a right-wing channel [but] it's a free speech channel'."

(Left to right) Monty Python's Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin in 1969

Before creating and playing the much-loved misanthropic hotel owner Basil Fawlty, Cleese rose to fame as part of the British surreal comedy troupe Monty Python in the late 1960s and early 70s.

He told Rajan that entertainment bosses had said the show would not get commissioned today "because it's six white people, five of whom went to Oxbridge".

Adding he had not been offered an opportunity to return to the BBC but that if he did his reply would be: "Not on your nelly."

"Because I wouldn't get five minutes into the first show before I'd been cancelled or censored," he said.

Cleese been a vocal critic of cancel culture in comedy and so-called "woke" politics. Last year, he cancelled an appearance at Cambridge University after a visiting speaker was banned for a doing a Hitler impression.

He later walked out of a BBC interview due to what he described as the "deception, dishonesty and tone" of the conversation. Though a BBC spokeswoman said at the time it had been a "fair and appropriate interview".

GB News launched in June last year, becoming the UK's first TV news start-up for 30 years, since the launch of Sky News.

A few months ago, Cleese questioned the extent to which his soon-to-be new employer was "influenced by Russian interests".

He told Today he had "kind of lost interest" in British politics in recent years after the country "sunk to the lowest intellectual level I can ever remember" during the Brexit debates.