Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and performer.

Tall, public school and Cambridge education.

My castaway this week is a writer and performer.

Tall, public school and Cambridge educated,

he appears at first glance to epitomise

the sort of character he's lampooned for most of his life.

He became famous at the end of the 60s as the tallest

and many thought the funniest member of the team who made Monty Python's

Flying Circus. He followed this with the hotel owner Basil Falty who in only 12

episodes for television displayed the repressed radio. Hotel Since then he's concentrated on films, The Life of Brian clockwise and the hugely successful a fish called Wanda, whose sequel fierce creatures will be seen soon.

You feel an enormous pressure to conform, he once said.

A lot of what I've been doing is attempting to escape from that.

He is John Cleese.

So you don't like conformity, John.

It's something to be avoided, is it? I think it's something to be

very suspicious of but there's a great comfort in yes oh yes you can feel much

safer like that much safer but I think sometimes as I get older and I look around I think the world is even

sillier and madder than I used to think it was even when I was doing Monty Python and therefore I think it's awfully

important to try to make up your own mind about what you think about things and not take the established wisdom.

Certainly, but at the same time you want to stay comfortable.

...