Two relevant quotes of Cleese from the article:
"we’ve gone from being a reasonably literate, reasonably well-informed nation to being a tabloid culture, where we have reality television and very few plays in the West End, because they’re all musicals. This is not a culture I admire. So I have a lot of reasons for not being there."
"I’m saying it’s not English. For a lot of people that’s not a problem, but I like the English, and I’d like to be in a place where the culture is more English. And a lot of that is a lot to do with the fact that America now has always been obsessed with money. England used not to be. Now England is as obsessed with money as America. That’s not to do with race, is it? So a lot of misreporting in the papers has been taken seriously by someone as smart as you."
It seems that for him the Englishness as he defines it was not being "obsessed with money as America."
One interesting detail from his biography: before he was famous with Monty Python, and during or shortly after his studies he already preformed on Broadway.
It's not not about money, but to the British sensibilities the American expression of wealth is vulgar.
Obviously I don't subscribe to the above notion as a real positive, but I understand it well!
Which, coming from a tax exile, is quite funny.
Absolutely.
Also, watching from the distance (and while considering myself privileged to be able to do that, please note in advance this disclaimer before reading further, whoever reads past this voids his right to become offended and yadda yadda) I consider this admission of the interviewer quite... Pythonesque (like I've said -- when reading from a safe distance):
"I watched “The Germans” episode this week, and it was jarring to hear the N-word bandied about in such a casual way. It threw me out of the story for five minutes."
I mean, really. Watching the show made on another continent around 50 years ago. Well, newsflash, Mr. interviewer:
1) the world does not consist of the U.S. of A. alone.
2) the world didn't start to exist at the moment you've learned to tweet.
3) it's possible to have a... perspective and an awareness of the existence of the passage of time and of the existence of different continents. It's not that hard.
Not to mention that in 2020 there are enough people that claim being anti-racist also at the same time happily support ideologies which are provably inherently racist and misogynic, because they believe that not doing that would be racist.
Now for a slight digression, another interview with Cleese:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/spiegel-inter...
Just checked: pythonesque is definitely an already existing word.
It's so easy for humans to support at the same time something and the opposite of something and not even being aware of that and of the absurdity of being in that state. I guess there must be some studies about the effect.
Accordingly, as seen around 1970:
"Dear Sir,
I wish to complain in the strongest possible terms about the song you have just broadcast about the lumberjack who wears women’s clothes.
Many of my best friends are lumberjacks, and only a few of them are transvestites.
Yours faithfully, Brigadier Sir Charles Arthur Strong, Mrs.
P.S. I have never kissed the editor of the Radio Times."
Obviously I'm one person, maybe Americans really are more obsessed with money than British folks, and maybe this expression means something something different in England, but typically when people say a city is becoming "UnAmerican", or something similar, it's a dogwhistle for some underlying racism, usually some kind of crap about Mexicans dealing drugs or something; it's a really useful strategy, because when you call them out on it, they can always have some level of plausible deniability of saying "I don't care about race! I care about culture!" or some such nonsense; point is when Cleese says "it's not English", a part of me thinks that this is just code for something much worse.
I like John Cleese and don't want to accuse him of racism willy-nilly but this interview does kind of make me wonder.
I mean, is it possible to desire prosperity and justice for all peoples, without requiring that every nation on earth resemble the global average of cultural and genetic makeup?
This would not mean no further admixture of people and ideas. Indeed the English identity has long consisted an admixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Roman, Danish, and Norman peoples and cultures.
As an American, I don't desire the "Americanization" of England any more than Cleese. But I think it's hard for many people to say what makes England English, or what might be good about that.
(FWIW, I'd be somewhat less cynical about Cleese's motivations, personally, than I would about certain other Brexit-supporting exiles. However, the guy who came up with "don't mention the war" probably knew very well how it would be framed.)