John Cleese brands reality TV 'sad' and suggests writers should fire executives
John Cleese delivered the sinister warning that creatives' livelihoods could be under threat, as he suggested replacing executives with AI - but not writers. Talking on the Chris Moyles Breakfast Show on Radio X this morning, the 84-year-old exclaimed: "It's very sad now with reality television, where I think we'll just get rid of the writers because people don't need them."
He blasted that "the people in charge don't know what they're doing" - and that both unscripted programmes and artificially generated plots could be detrimental to the industry. The star, who is renowned for writing the Fawlty Towers storylines, added that his daughter Camilla recently posed a question to AI - which people would be the most easily replaceable by computers.
"The answer was the executives - because AI is very good at all the things that executives do, and it's not very good as all the things that creative people do," he exclaimed. "The creative people should be firing the executives.”
Despite also being an actor, John speaks up passionately for the writers who shape stories behind the scenes. It's something he's worked studiously on over the years, taking six weeks to create each Fawlty Towers episode.
"I always said I was a writer-performer - but the writing always came first," he explained. John went on to reveal that taking so long to painstakingly perfect each show was almost unheard of in his industry.
