John Cleese lost virginity on NZ tour

Post virginity: John Cleese in Monty Python's Flying Circus. BBC / Screengrab

Legendary British funnyman John Cleese has revealed that he lost his virginity in New Zealand at the age of 24.

Cleese, 74, has spoken candidly about his formative years in a new autobiography So, Anyway, which is published next month.

In the book, the Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda star reveals that he did not lose his virginity until he was almost 25 while on tour with the Cambridge Circus show in New Zealand, at the start of the Swinging Sixties. Before then, there had been little more than innocent hand-holding with girls, he told the Sunday Times in an interview yesterday.

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"Don't forget, I came from a particular section of society. In Weston-super-Mare, it was a very asexual atmosphere," he said. "Girls just weren't around. I know that's an extraordinary thing to say but they weren't around.

"When I was teaching [at his prep school before going to Cambridge], I took out the local doctor's daughter and we had a perfectly nice, polite conversation but the idea that anything would have happened physically just wasn't on the cards."

Cleese, who is on his fourth marriage and performed an "alimony tour" to raise more than NZ$24 million for his latest divorce settlement, told the paper how he was caned at school for failing to complete a complicated equation.

It resulted in his disrespect for authority which is still very much with him today.

"In everything I've done, the people in charge always said, 'this is wrong, this isn't going to work'," he told the Sunday Times.

"When I did the first script of Fawlty Towers, Jimmy Gilbert, the head of comedy at the BBC, said you're going to have to get them out of the hotel, which was completely wrong.

"MGM spent hours trying to convince me not to call [the film] A Fish Called Wanda - they said it's a terrible title that will never work." He also blames his "tyrannical" and "emotionally difficult" mother Muriel for his problems with women and years of relationship therapy.

"It cannot be a coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy, and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women," he writes Cleese in the book.

"And my ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when dealing with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years."

The book also sheds light on how he broke into the famous Cambridge University amateur theatrical club, Footlights.

As a serious-minded young law student, he approached the club's stand at the Cambridge societies' fair.

After telling them he couldn't sing or dance, they asked what he could do."I try to make people laugh," he replied.

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