Jokes about the Germans, goose-stepping - it's all still in the modern-day reboot of Fawlty Towers,...

‘Don’t mention the war!’ Basil is back after half a century, but as Fawlty Towers comes to the West End stage it’s not John Cleese barking out his best lines as the manic hotelier.

‘His timing is almost identical to mine and he seems to experience playing the character almost exactly as I did. It’s almost spooky.’ Cleese has earned quite a reputation as an anti-woke warrior in his old age, raging against political correctness, so it’s no surprise the war stuff has been kept in; but there was one cut he could not avoid making.

‘You can’t just bandy words about that people find offensive. But the rest of what we have is so brilliant you don’t need that stuff to make the play work.’ The Monty Python movie about medieval knights on a quest through the countryside ends with the sudden arrival of a modern police car. Clearly, Cleese thinks they could have done better.

‘Connie and I used to spend six weeks writing each episode. Nobody in the history of comedy has spent more than ten days writing a sitcom episode. If you give yourself enough time you’re rewarded with more ideas and more funny business.’ John Cleese married again, to the American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981. They had a daughter called Camilla three years later but divorced in 1990. By then he had written and starred with Kevin Kline and Jamie Lee Curtis in the Hollywood blockbuster A Fish Called Wanda and was living in Los Angeles.

Cleese’s new Polly, actor and singer Victoria Fox, was found by accident around a dinner table in LA. ‘I was travelling around the world and I had the great fortune of meeting this gang of friends in LA and one of the guys was dating John’s daughter Camilla,’ she explains. CJ says something similar when I ask if Cleese is as grumpy to work with as his reputation suggests. ‘Absolutely the opposite. He’s got such an intellect and carries the weight of having this big personality and yet he hasn’t lost his sense of play, like a child in the playground at an infants school.’

She’s worked with actor Sam West and hopes that his mother Prunella Scales, the original Sybil, may be well enough to come and see the play, although at 91 she’s living with dementia. ‘It would be wonderful if she could come but it might be overwhelming. Having worked on this material, I bow down to her genius.’

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