John Cleese has revealed he once jokingly offered to have his mother killed to help her stop feeling down after years of suffering from depression.
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The 'Fawlty Towers' star reveals the tale on Friday night's 'Graham Norton Show' during a chat about his new autobiography, 'So, Anyway...'.
John Cleese
“She had the most extraordinary sense of humour,” he said.
“She was a depressed woman and I would ring her up and say, ‘Hello Mum, how are you,’ and she would say, with a little bit of surprise, ‘I’m a little bit down this week.’
“I don’t know why she was surprised because she’d been ‘A little bit down’ for 50 years!”
He continued: “I did say to her when she was really depressed one day, ‘If you’re still feeling this way next week I know a little man in Fulham and if you would like I could give him a call and he could come down to Weston Super Mare and kill you.’
“There was a long silence and then she cackled with laughter. So from then on, whenever she said she was depressed I would say, ‘So shall I call the man in Fulham?’ and she would say, ‘Oh no dear, I’ve got a sherry party on Thursday.’”
The 'Monty Python' star appears on Friday's 'Graham Norton Show' with Taylor Swift and Kevin Pietersen
The 74-year-old also chatted about the recent Monty Python reunion show, but confirmed that it would be the last time the cast would perform together.
"That’s it," he said. "We all felt it had been very satisfactory and great fun and now we move on. There was no sense of regret at all.”
“It worked so well because Eric Idle put it all together and took it over and did an absolutely marvelous job producing a show that was probably quite different to a show that any of the other Pythons would have made,” he added.
The Graham Norton Show is on BBC One tonight (Friday 10 October) at 10.30pm.