This is John Cleese telling us what it was like to be John Cleese before he was Monty Python John Cleese or Fawlty Towers John Cleese or Fish Called Wanda John Cleese. Those projects basically go unmentioned in this book, though the build-up to Python is covered and Wanda director Charles Crichton is met on a previous project and Fawlty co-star Connie Booth was Cleese’s first wife. The Monty Python story is so well chronicled that it’s hard to imagine Cleese would have much to add to it. Frankly, I opened the book looking for anecdotes about his involvement with the film of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr. While there’s not a lot, there’s more than anywhere else, and it’s part of a pivotal time, when he and Graham Chapman were a sought-after writing team but hadn’t made their mark yet. In a different world, the pinnacle of Cleese’s career might’ve been writing the pilot episode of the long-running Doctor in the House TV period. But Python happened, and Doctor in the House gets a single parenthesized sentence.