Say Cleese! John Cleese on buying a few extra years and re-opening Fawlty Towers

John Cleese may be approaching his 85th birthday, but he was full of beans and busier than ever when our own Saga Magazine caught up with him in Chicago.

The comedy legend says his secret is stem cell therapy which he’s been having every 12-18 months for 20 years.

“These cells travel around the body and when they discover a place that needs repair, they’ll then change into the cells that you want for that repair, so they might become cartilage cells or liver cells,” he explains. “So I think that’s why I don’t look bad for 84.”

He admits the therapy isn’t cheap – at around £17,000 every 12-18 months.

“But if you’re buying yourself a few extra years, I think it’s worth it,” he enthuses.

“I had suicidal thoughts…”

But Cleese also revealed the toll his divorce to ex-wife, Alyce Faye Eichelberger, took on him.

“I was never about to kill myself, but I had suicidal thoughts, but not really very serious ones.”

“I had to go into clinics for a bit. In a funny kind of way, when you have an experience like that I think you learn a lot from it. It wasn’t pleasant.”

He still blames the divorce for why he has to continue working in his 80s, but says he has finally let go of that anger – in part helped by his marriage to Jennifer Wade. She’s 30 years his junior and he says she helps keep him young.

“A lot of people comment and then the moment they actually see us together for two minutes they say, ‘Oh, I get it’, and it never arises again,” he explains.

Cleese is reopening Fawlty Towers

Cleese has adapted the much-loved TV sitcom Fawlty Towers for the stage and it opens on 4th May, at the Apollo Theatre, in London.

The show brings misanthropic Basil Fawlty (actor Adam Jackson-Smith), his long-suffering wife Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey) and hapless Spanish waiter Manuel (Hemi Yeroham) to the stage and comes almost 50 years after the TV show first graced our screens.

Cleese says he hasn’t watered it down to suit more sensitive modern audicnes.

“My audience now is 45-plus and I say, ‘I know why you’re such a good audience – it’s because there’s no young people’,” he told us.

He is also working on a new TV series of Fawlty Towers with his daughter – stand-up comedian Camilla. But the new series won’t see a return to Torquay, instead Basil will be running a boutique hotel in the Caribbean with his daughter – who he has only recently discovered.

‘There must have been a moment,” says Cleese, “because [otherwise] he is so wonderfully sexless. He must have had a fling – obviously with someone staying in the hotel.”