John Cleese has told the BBC that he would be “cancelled or censored” if he appeared on the BBC.
The former Monty Python star aired his opinions in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Cleese, 82, said he had not been offered a BBC show but would definitely turn it down if he was.
“The BBC have 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 cancelled or censored.”
Cleese said he had instead accepted an offer to host a show on GB News.
'I’ve pretty much given up on English television'
“I was approached and didn’t know who they were. I don’t know much about modern television because I’ve pretty much given up on it. I mean, English television.” he said.
“And then I met one or two of the people concerned and had dinner with them, and I liked them very much.
“What they said was, ‘people say it’s the Right-wing channel - it’s a free speech channel.”
Cleese described himself as “an old-fashioned liberal” and said he had lost interest in politics “after that appalling debate on Brexit, when I thought this country had sunk to the lowest intellectual level I can ever remember”.
He added: “But I don’t think that this country is in a good state at the moment. In fact, I think the last three Tory administrations have been progressively more and more disastrous.”
Asked for his thoughts on the limits of free speech, Cleese replied: “Somebody once said to me, ‘everyone’s in favour of free speech, particularly for the ideas that they like’.”
Cleese’s Monty Python co-star, Eric Idle, was asked about him in an interview last week. Idle said of Cleese: “He’s who he is now. The thing I try to remember is the good times when we were young and funny.”
