John Cleese Shares His Lifelong Love of Cricket

“In that moment I went absolutely rigid with real terror, far worse than facing Jeff Thomson.” That is John Cleese, sharing with Peter Oborne and Richard Heller on their latest cricket-themed podcast his experience as a performer of the “yips”, that dread loss of control which can blight cricketers on the field. He shares joyous memories of a lifelong love of cricket, which began watching the postwar Somerset team play at Clarence Park, Weston-super-Mare. A previous guest, Jeffrey Archer, might also have been in the crowd but he cannot remember meeting him there. He does remember the fast bowler and mighty hitter, Arthur Wellard, hitting a six so high in the air that it when it fell it burst through the roof of a tea tent and shattered much crockery beneath. He recalls two other personal favourite Somerset players. Horace Hazell was a very accurate slow left-armer but so portly that he was forced to pause before each delivery to reposition his flannels. Bertie Buse was an all-rounder with an eccentric run-up which he tried to imitate as a fledgling bowler, “like an Edwardian butler serving tea on a tray.” Somerset were a happy team to watch, regularly bottom of the County Championship. John remembers his shock of adjustment, even sense of vague disappointment, when they broke the pattern by winning the Gillette Cup in 1979.There were darker moments in Somerset cricket, and he shares movingly the experience of watching two of them. Harold Gimblett was an explosive opening batsman subject to deep depression, which eventually drove him to take his life. John describes seeing him walking back to long-off so sunk in gloom that he was not even aware that the ball had been struck towards him; his belated attempt to catch it resulted only in falling over and injuring himself on some scaffolding on the boundary. The second was watching Maurice Tremlett get “the yips” at Taunton,  losing the bowling action which had earned him selection for England and delivering endless wides and no-balls.  He recalls the horror of the crowd as they desperately willed him to complete the over. John reveals his long fear of a similar experience in his performing career, a fear which especially haunts comedians.  He tells the story of his own “Tremlett moment.” It came during a sketch with Ronnie Corbett on live television for The Frost Report. Mercifully for posterity, John got through the awkward line which had given him sleepless nights, but he remembers Ronnie Corbett’s surprise at his nervous amendment, when he described him as the tallest person he had ever met.John is modest about his prowess as an off-spinner at Clifton College, where he contributed to two victories at Lord’s over their rivals, Tonbridge. Already very tall, he claims that his greatest successes came on the school’s mid-season pitches where his hand appeared over the sightscreen against the background of a red brick building. (Joel Garner, another famous Somerset cricketer, would later enjoy a similar advantage.) John shares his joy at dismissing Denis Compton in a Clifton match despite an unco-operative wicketkeeper who wanted to see the great man bat. John explains why he did not play much after leaving Clifton, but shares the experience of a happy tour of Corfu with the Lords Taverners (renamed the Lords Tavernas) with Ken Barrington, Roy Kinnear and John Price of Middlesex and England. Discussing the influence of cricket on his work, John mentions his deep affection for the cricket-crazed Major in Fawlty Towers, a loving caricature of his father. He examines the treatment of English cricket in Monty Python as a monumentally dull experience narrated by idiotic backward-looking commentators. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6dl8ogAnd more...