COMEDIAN John Cleese says the BBC has lost the art of developing comedy.
The Monty Python and Fawlty Towers legend, 86, claims it is because the corporation is now run by bureaucrats.
He told Nick Ferrari on LBC radio: “In the case of the BBC, there isn’t the executive understanding of how to nurture comedy, which is why there’s not much great comedy these days.”
In a dig at a former director-general, he said: “I think it’s because John Birt turned the BBC into a bureaucracy.
“And bureaucrats aren’t very good at humour — because they try to decide things in committee.”
His brilliant Fawlty Towers was a sitcom masterclass, with hapless hotelier Basil one-liners going down in history.
But John Cleese, who co-wrote the BBC show’s two series in the Seventies with fellow star Connie Booth, and starred as Basil, says fans who loved it will never see any new work from him on the Beeb.
In a blistering takedown of Aunty, speaking on stage at the Slapstick comedy festival in Bristol, John said: “If you put a script in now it has to go through a f***ing committee who have no idea what they are doing.
“There has been nothing funny since The Office. It is sad and it is because the people in charge have no idea how to make comedy happen.
“The whole process has been replaced by a bureaucratic process which does not begin to work.”
He said of British comedy: “We used to be really good at it and now we are not and that is very sad.
“There weren’t committees when we started. Comedy now has to be clean. You must not play for laughs.
“I am going to write a book about writing comedy to make people aware how difficult it is.”
But he added: “The people organising comedy have never been very good but at the moment particularly at the BBC they are clueless.
“I don’t think it is a lack of talent — except among the executive classes. Those classes have no idea what they are doing.”
