John Cleese

Maureen Lipman takes a swipe at John Cleese

Maureen Lipman suggests John Cleese has the mental age of a 17 year-old following the news that he has married for the fourth time.

John Cleese marries for the fourth time

With three failed marriages behind him - the last one forcing him to hand over more than £12million of his fortune - another trip down the aisle might have seemed the furthest thing from his mind. The 72-year-old John Cleese has married girlfriend Jennifer Wade, 31 years his junior, on the Caribbean island of Mustique.

It's been more than 40 years since the first episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC One and we never looked at comedy - let alone spam, parrots or lumberjacks - in the same way again. This documentary marks the first time the surviving Pythons have come together for a project since 1983's The Meaning of Life]. Directed by Alan Parker, it features interviews with Terry Jones, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Eric Idle, as well as archive chat from late Graham Chapman. All tell the story of how they met at Oxbridge and The Frost Report, created trail-blazing television, made the transition into movies and ultimately became a British institution. Which, like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected.

In Absolutely Fabulous, Edina wailed: "There's so much new stuff happening, I just can't keep up." She could have been talking about the comedy itself for this was a tired revival, proving yet again that John Cleese was right to institute a rule for sitcoms you could call the 12 Steps - two series of six then goodbye.

Archive correspondence: John Cleese vs The Sun

John Cleese's reaction to an inaccurate newspaper report in The Sun, in the form of a fruitless chain of correspondence between him and the newspaper's editor, Kenneth Donlan.

John Cleese was bullied as a child

Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese has revealed how school bullies taunted him with cries of "cheese".

The hilarious Secret Policeman's Ball is back to mark Amnesty ­International's 50th anniversary.

Recorded last Sunday at Radio City Music Hall in New York, it's the first time the gala event has been held outside the UK since John Cleese and his friends brought together musicians and ­comedians for the first show in 1976.

It might also be the first time that Coldplay and professional hecklers Statler and Waldorf, from The Muppets, have appeared on the same bill.

The all star-cast also features comics from both sides of the Atlantic, including David Walliams, Ben Stiller, Eddie Izzard, Russell Brand, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Carr, Noel Fielding and Jack Whitehall, with music from Mumford & Sons.

Steve Coogan interview

In Britain, Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge is as celebrated as John Cleese's Basil Fawlty or Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean. And in America, Coogan's cult status has been spreading, thanks to The Trip, the recent movie drawn from one of his wildly popular BBC shows. David Kamp explores Coogan's comic genius, his stormy history with the U.K. tabloids (once a target thanks to his romantic and chemical exploits, he's now a plaintiff in the Murdoch phone-hacking case), and his even more complex relationship with his most famous creation.

I remember being taken as a youth to a double bill of And Now for Something Completely Different and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and thinking even then that this was an ex-comedy, it had ceased to be. (Although for some reason I was quite taken with Michael Palin's Lumberjack Song.)

For many, of course, Monty Python remains timeless and here its original players recall how the show became a hit in America, leading to the aforementioned movies. They're still amazed at Holy Grail's success, bearing in mind Graham Chapman's alcoholism and John Cleese's self-confessed diva behaviour.