John Cleese's Alimony Tour at Birmingham Hippodrome - review

John Cleese — The Alimony Tour

Birmingham Hippodrome

The signs were not good; opening night tickets still on sale, rows of empty seats and a rickety merchandise stall knocking out signed pictures of the "legendary" John Cleese for a fiver. Quite cheap, I thought, in every way.

But has it really come to this? One of this country's finest comic talents reduced to little more than a name-dropping pub bore who wouldn't have been out of place guest speaking at the WI? Sadly, it has.

"I can tell you're wondering what an international megastar like me is doing in a dump like Birmingham," he says in an opening line which you suspect is more truthful than he'd like to admit.

"I am here because I need the money."

Now, to be fair, old JC has been shafted by some bonkers American judge who handed over $20m of his fortune to his ex-wife. It's enough to make anyone bitter and, in the hands of an old master like Cleese, the first 20 minutes of this show is pretty good.

Imagine "An Evening With Basil Fawlty" having lost the hotel to Sybil. Cleese is comfortable playing — some may say hiding behind — his most famous creation and the laughs flow. But then it's as if he couldn't be bothered to write any more new material, so he simply reopened a trusty back catalogue which was guaranteed to raise laughs, but which everyone in the audience had seen or heard many times before.

Well-worn clips are shown as Cleese exits stage left before returning to briefly illuminate them with titbits normally found on DVD extras; the producers wanted to cut the Black Knight, each episode of Farty Towels took 20 hours to edit, etc, etc, etc.

He rattles through the script dead parrot fashion and while he tries to look comfortable in Jeremy Clarkson chic, he can't disguise the air of a man seething like a Torquay hotelier at the way life has pooped on him.

A great deal of the show revolves around fairly mundane anecdotes about his family but as he starts talking about "the relationship I had with my mother", well, the gates of Comedy Hell are opening wide. As a final insult he presents a three-minute compilation of other (ie rubbish) stuff he's done in the past 20 years before soiling the legacy of his greatest work by attempting a half-hearted "silly walk" as the Python theme plays him out and the crowd is abruptly dispatched with a sign saying "This is an ex show". (Sheesh! Is nothing sacred man?)

It's a rubbish show, quite frankly, lazily done and a huge disappointment to see a genius content to squeeze the life out of former glories for minimum effort and — at up to £32.50 a ticket — maximum reward.

Whether it's worth the cost to his reputation, only he will know.

Review by Keith Harrison. Has Keith been unfair? Were you there? Post your own review using the reply form below.