Smarter Than The Average!

So what happened to John Cleese and his relationship with Amnesty International after An Evening At The Court? Expectedly, after The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball Amnesty had lost all enthusiasm for doing all-star charity benefits; not only had they effectively buried the Secret Policeman name after all the controversy, but there was now so much competition from the may other charities holding their own galas in the wake of Amnesty’s success. (Losing the organiser of the last two Balls, Peter Walker, couldn’t have helped Amnesty’s self-esteem either.) Furthermore, as the number of charity shows increased so did the public’s disinterest – as early as 1983 Time Out stated, in a review of An Evening For Nicaragua in their 1st to 7th September 1983 issue, that “these benefit shows are usually as funny as the state of the country they’re trying to help”. Indeed, benefit concerts even began to double up on each other – on Sunday the 20th of May 1984 the charitable comedy fan had the choice of saving the Croydon Warehouse at the venue itself with comedy poets such as Claire Dowie and Joolz, or helping the miners at the Half Moon Theatre with Fascinating Aida and, having just played for a week in January at the Soho Poly Theatre under the name Brave New Comedy, the quartet of Norman Lovett, Arnold Brown, Nick Revell and Paul Merton (then still going by his real name Paul Martin). It was the Miners’ Strike in particular that increased the amount of benefit shows; in January 1985 there were as many as three benefits for the miners taking place over as little as two days – the Special Miners Families Benefit at the Finborough Arms and the Labour Party Gala Night at the North Peckham Civic Centre on Friday the 18th of January 1985, and the Camden Solidarity With The Miners Cabaret at the Camden Centre the following day. Things became so over-the-top with the amount of obscure benefits being held that by March of 1984 The Live 32 Borough Touring Show could advertise itself as being “A Benefit For You”.

Some of these post-Ball benefits rather cheekily went so far as to not only swipe Amnesty’s idea but their name, too – The Pretty Policeman’s Ball was held at the Piccadilly Theatre on Sunday the 21st October 1984 to raise funds for the London Gay Switchboard (the show’s organisers claimed, in the 18th to 24th October 1984 edition of Time Out, that the name was a reference to “the recent efforts by deliberately selected attractive plain-clothes policeman being used to entrap gays”; a follow-up, The Pretty Policeman’s Ball ’85, was held at the same venue on Sunday the 10th of November 1985), while Censorama: The Offical Secrets Ball was held also at the Piccadilly Theatre on Sunday the 7th of December 1986 to raise money for the Campaign For Press And Broadcasting Freedom and the Campaign For Freedom Of Information. These shows had further connections to classic Amnesty benefits than just the names: The Pretty Policeman’s Ball featured Tom Robinson who had been such a hit at The Secret Policeman’s Ball five years earlier – indeed, London listings magazine City Limits referred to the LWT censorship of the Amnesty show in its 19th to 25th October 1984 edition, stating “Perhaps Tom Robinson won’t be cut out of the film this time!” – as did The Pretty Policeman’s Ball ’85 where Robinson was on the bill with The Secret Policeman’s Ball star Billy Connolly. Censorama: The Official Secrets Ball, meanwhile, boasted an appearance by A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick) veteran Terry Gilliam.

Press ads for The Pretty Policeman’s Ball and The Pretty Policeman’s Ball ’85.

For indeed the Pythons were still making appearances at charity benefits throughout the eighties – including Graham Chapman at Dinner At Albert’s, a gig for Ethiopia held Friday the 7th of December 1984 at the Royal Albert Hall; Michael Palin and Terry Jones at Rights And Revels: A Benefit For The National Council For Civil Liberties, held Sunday the 7th of October 1984 at the Aldwych Theatre; Palin and Jones at the benefit for Dr Rob Buckman’s Oncology Club Fund Stars On Sunday II: The Stage Show, held on Sunday the 9th of December 1984 at the London Palladium; Michael Palin at the We’ll Be GLCing You Erection Night Party; and Chapman, Jones and Palin at the live Comic Relief nights held at the Shaftesbury Theatre on the 4th, 5th and 6th of April 1986 – as too were members of Beyond The Fringe – Peter Cook and Alan Bennett joined in with the younger generation (and Frankie Howerd) for Farmyard Follies, a benefit in the presence of Princess Anne in aid of the Home Farms Trust held on Sunday the 17th of February 1985 at the London Palladium – but it was clear that at this time the new comedy face of charity galas was that of the cast and characters of The Young Ones. In the two years between February 1983 and February 1985 one could have seen: Rik Mayall (complaining that “they asked me to do a benefit for Nick Ragua – whoever he is”), Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and French and Saunders at An Evening For Nicaragua, held Sunday the 13th of February 1983 at Shaftesbury Theatre; ‘Rik Mayall and The Bastard Squad’ (i.e., Rik Mayall as Rick, Adrian Edmondson as Vyvvian and Nigel Planer as Neil) storming through a cover of The Who’s My Generation at the Stop Sizewell B Inquiry Fund benefit Too Hot To Handle, held Sunday the 10th of April 1983 at the Victoria Apollo; Nigel Planer’s Neil on stage at the 1984 Performers For Peace Festival’s …And Now For Something Completely Indifferent, held Sunday the 22nd of April 1984 at the Fortune Theatre; Elton, Mayall and Planer sharing the bill with Denis Healy MP and another infamous Neil, Neil Kinnock, at A Night For A Nuclear Free Europe, held Saturday the 3rd of June 1984 at the Wembley Conference Centre; Sayle and Mayall appearing not only at the first night of the 5 Nights For The Miners benefits held from Monday the 3rd to Friday the 7th of September 1984, but also the last with Planer’s Neil (this final night was named ‘Best Benefit’ in the City Limits 1984 Birthday Honours, as announced in their 19th to 25th October 1984 issue); Sayle, Mayall, Planer and French and Saunders at Stars On Sunday II: The Stage Show; and Mayall, by now appearing as the title role in Gogol’s The Government Inspector at the National Theatre, and Ben Elton, who compered the evening, at The Pit Dragon Miners Benefit, held Monday the 11th of February 1985 at the Islington Town Hall at the end of an all-day, all-star picket (at which tickets for the benefit show were exclusively available) which started at Neasden Power Station at 7am.

Press ad for 5 Nights For The Miners, taken from the inside back cover of the 24th to 30th of August 1984 issue of City Limits.

But the real peak for the Young Ones was, unexpectedly, almost two years after the final episode of The Young Ones aired. The quartet reformed in aid of Comic Relief to record with Cliff Richard what would become a Number One single in March and April of 1986, a cover of Living Doll, which culminated with a live performance of the song at the Shaftesbury Theatre Comic Relief nights. These nights took place almost ten years to the day after A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick), and like that show its television broadcast was an Omnibus produced by Roger Graef – there is no finer indication of how radically far comedy had moved in those ten years. But by this time the alternative comedians had not just taken over from the established acts, they had become the established acts – as Cliff Richard famously quipped when he joined the Young Ones on stage at Comic Relief one night, “I realise tonight that it’s me that’s the alternative” – and sadly the Young Ones’ glory at these events didn’t shine as brightly as the Pythons’. At Stephen Fry’s second Terrence Higgins Trust benefit Hysteria 2, held Monday the 18th September 1989 at Sadler’s Wells, John Cleese, still a comedy megastar twenty years away from the first broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, was given the mammoth task of introducing music megastar Tina Turner (an odd choice, considering his abhorrence to pop stars’ appearances at his own charity gigs); all a vaguely out-of-character Adrian Edmondson, a comparatively mere eight years away from the first transmission of The Young Ones, had to do was stroll onto the stage and tell a dirty joke. He introduces himself by saying: “My name’s Adrian Edmondson. I don’t know if you remember me. I used to be very funny. But it’s been a long time since The Young Ones, and I’ve just come to this benefit to boost my sadly flagging career”. Self parody, no question, but very telling of how the age of alternative comedy was coming to an end during the inevitable creeping up of the nineties.

John Cleese, it is worth noting, initially agreed to appear alongside the alternative comedians, as fellow Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Jones were doing, at 1984’s Stars On Sunday II: The Stage Show – Cleese was, after all, an old friend of organiser Dr Rob Buckman, who had performed comedy songs with Chris Beetles at The Secret Policeman’s Ball (to say nothing of playing Greek Dancers in that show’s Cheese Shop sketch) – but, according to Alexei Sayle in his Sunday Mirror column of Sunday the 21st of December 1986, “then we all got a letter saying he’d been offered a part in a real western movie (Silverado) where he got to ride a horse, fire six-shooters and wear a big hat so he wouldn’t be coming. Nobody could blame him for that and he made a big donation”. (This article by Sayle was primarily regarding the much-delayed TV transmission of the show which was to be shown on Channel 4 on Tuesday the 23rd of December 1986. The show was now renamed as the “appallingly-titled” Comedians Do It On Stage, and Sayle was complaining about the axing of himself (“The man from Channel Four said my act was ‘malevolent’ and had me cut out”), Mayall and Planer from the broadcast.)

In 1986 Amnesty International held a couple of events outside of London which, though primarily not comedy events, certainly featured a substantial amount of alternative comedy content – these were, namely, the Elephant Fayre 1986 festival, held Friday the 25th to Sunday the 27th July 1986 at the Port Eliot Estate, Cornwell, and featuring on its comedy stage, amongst others, Skint Video, the Vicious Boys and Malcolm Hardee (previous Elephant Fayres had been more musical in nature, with the only comedy acts being musical ones – the 27th to 29th July 1984 event featured Neil Innes, The Joeys and The Popicians, while the Fayre of the 26th to 28th of July 1985 featured Ra-Ra Zoo and Pookiesnackenburger, who split up less than a month later at the Edinburgh Festival (The Joeys, incidentally, had split up less than a month before that)), and the Amnesty International Xmas Party, held on Tuesday the 23rd December 1986 at The Pink Coconut, Brighton, with comedians on the bill including Tony Haase, Simon Fanshawe and Malcom Hardee again. But it wasn’t until 1987 that Amnesty, now with a new team in charge, felt confident enough to hold another Ball, which they would call The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball and fill with the most modern comics and, following the huge success of the Conspiracy Of Hope tour, the biggest music stars they could imagine. John Cleese was, of course, asked to participate. He tentatively agreed at first, but not even Amnesty believed he’d show up, as evidenced by his entry in a two-page spread of comedy performers in the show’s theatre programme – it was cryptically captioned “John Cleese… will be appearing?”.

John Cleese’s picture in the The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball theatre programme.

On the day of the first of The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball’s four nights (held at the London Palladium on the 26th, 27th, 28th and 29th of March 1987 – the first two dates devoted to comedy, the second two music), John Cleese suddenly pulled out. The official reason for this was that he had to appear in another SDP political broadcast, the recording dates of which would have clashed with the nights of Third Ball. A spokesman for Amnesty was reported as saying on page 17 of the Thursday the 26th March 1987 issue of the Evening Standard that: “We are upset to be let down like this. He’s been a great supporter in the past. All we know is he’s chosen to appear in an SDP commercial instead. Certainly a lot of people will be very disappointed”.

This reason for refusing to appear at Third Ball seems so implausible that even SDP leader David Owen was skeptical: “I don’t know what’s happened with Amnesty International but I know John supports it,” he is quoted as saying in the Evening Standard article mentioned above, “I would be surprised if he dropped out at the last minute because our filming schedule has been fixed for some time”. The real reason was finally uncovered some years later to Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for his book Life Before And After Monty Python, where John Cleese revealed that as he dropped out of the show he told Amnesty he “would only do another one under certain conditions. I would say to them ‘Look, you want to do a show with all the pop people, that’s terrific. Good luck, I hope you make a fortune. But that’s not the one that I want to be in. If you’d like me to organise one for you next year, well, I’ll do that, but it’ll be the sort of show that I want to enjoy doing’”.

Despite all this disillusionment about charity events, Cleese did in fact make a surprise appearance at one of the Third Ball nights in a deceptively cruel sketch with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. In the sketch they award “Jim Cleese”, as they insist on calling him, a “Silver Dick” statuette (named, of course, for Dick Emery) whilst analysing exactly why his life and career no longer have any worth: “What was it that finished you off, Jim? Was it the hairweave or the move to the SDP?”. Fry and Laurie then alluded to the attacking Cleese received by the media, and indeed Cleese’s reaction to this attack, for refusing to do this show “until, of course, you caved in at the last minute because the press kept ringing you up”. In the film version of the show, released late September 1987 to terrible reviews (apart from Time Out, who loved it), Cleese can also be spotted briefly in the backstage spoof interview footage, tersely telling an unctuous Ruby Wax to fuck off.

Press ad for the theatrical release of the film version of The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball.

Although in this sketch Cleese showed he still had a sense of humour about his refusal to contribute to Amnesty events, he was obviously not happy at this point in his professional life – so much so a couple of days after his appearance at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball he informally announced his retirement from showbusiness. “I can’t think of anything that bores me more than a big showbusiness occasion,” he is quoted as saying in the Friday the 3rd of April 1987 issue of the Daily Mirror, “It’s not that I don’t like the people, just that I don’t like the way they behave when there is a camera around. It is all so phony. As I settle into middle age, I want more and more the quiet life”. Obviously he changed his mind about the phoniness of showbusiness, as two months later on Monday the 15th on June 1987 he was on Prince Edward’s team alongside Peter Blake, Steve Cram, Duncan Goodhew, Eddy Grant, Sarah Hardcastle, Kiri Te Kanawa, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Barry McGuigan, Christopher Reeve, Tessa Sanderson and Toyah Wilcox at The Grand Knockout Tournament.

The following year, 1988, saw the publication of a comedy book by one – or, rather, by two – of the performers at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball, Smith and Jones’ Janet Lives With Mel & Griff. It featured a delicious parody of an advert for a charity gala, The Secret Policeman’s Further Pun On Testicles, taking place “Any weekend in late summer, early summer or any other seasons, AT A LARGE THEATRE IN LONDON. In aid of The London Palladium Overtime Fund and Sunshine Holidays for Freelance Television Technicians. A host of familiar faces and even more familiar sketches’ faces in an AMNESTY FOR ALL THAT OLD MATERIAL (Just hand it in and no questions asked)”. There then follows a long list of comics that have performed at previous Balls and a description of which old routine they’ll be rehashing: “ROWAN ATKINSON in something from Not the Nine O’Clock News”, “JASPER CARROTT doing insurance claims with a different jacket on”, “BEN ELTON with some brand new stuff, just like the old stuff” and so forth. There’s even some neat self-parody, as third on the bill is “MEL SMITH and GRIFF RHYS JONES reworking some duff old chat”. Whoever wrote this parody obviously knows the Amnesty shows very well as the list contains a number of in-jokes, including allusions to Cleese’s refusal to appear at Third Ball – “JOHN CLEESE, hilariously failing to turn up again” – and Eric Idle’s refusal to appear at any of the charity benefits – “ERIC IDLE lives in California”. But the writer reveals their ignorance of backstage politics with the entry “ALEXEI SAYLE doesn’t do this sort of thing any more”; Sayle was, of course, effectively banned from appearing at Balls following his rude manner to John Cleese at Other Ball. The piece ends with a cutting reference to the scandal that forced Cleese’s refusal to appear at Third Ball – this benefit show is revealed to be “For the benefit of MARTIN LEWIS”.

A photocopy of the script page Rowan Atkinson read from while performing the Schoolmaster monologue at The Secret Policeman’s Ball. Note that Atkinson was ticking off all the names as he read them, except for Zobb whose name is marked with a capital “A”, for “absent”.

1988 also saw Amnesty putting on an elaborate weekend-long charity event at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, the Amnesty International Festival of Youth, on Saturday the 18th and Sunday the 19th of July. Unfortunately for Amnesty the potential audience were too fatigued to go, this event taking place between some far more impressive benefits – it took place the weekend after the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Concert held on Saturday the 11th of June 1988 at Wembley Stadium (featuring appearances by Amnesty show veterans Graham Chapman and Billy Connolly) and was closely followed by the worldwide Human Rights Now! tour for Amnesty, launching at Wembley Stadium on Friday the 2nd of September 1988. The Festival Of Youth was a mammoth financial disaster for Amnesty, and so in 1989 the organisation went back to their roots to create a show marking ten years since The Secret Policeman’s Ball. Cleese, as he could have predicted, was taken up on his offer to “organise one for you”, and Amnesty left him alone to make The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball “the sort of show that I want to enjoy doing”.

Although the show was closer in spirit to what John Cleese’s intentions were with the first few Amnesty shows, he still did all he could to get out of directing it because, as he is quoted as saying in the 28th of October to the 3rd of November 1989 issue of the TV Times, he was “trying incredibly hard not to work at the moment”. After the event, in the Tuesday the 5th of September 1989 issue of the Daily Mail, Cleese expanded on his need for a rest: “Nobody will believe it, but I’m tired of being in the public eye. I want anonymity. I just feel after twenty-six years in showbusiness I have a great need of privacy for a while. If you’re never still or quiet enough then the deepest part of you never emerges”. “But,” he added, perhaps recalling the premature announcement of his retirement from showbusiness after The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball two-and-a-half years earlier, “I have to be careful what I say, otherwise there will be a headline in the Sun saying: ‘Last night John Cleese stunned showbusiness colleagues by the announcement he will never act again’”. Cleese even tried to have a holiday in France during this period, but it had to be cut short to allow him to direct this show; as he told the TV Times, “For three months I’d tried to find them another director because, as I said, I really am trying not to work. But in the end two people who said they’d do it had to cancel and I realised that if I didn’t do it, the whole thing might not happen”. Incidentally, The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball was the first of three reunion projects in rapid succession that John Cleese was guilted into doing. On Sunday the 3rd of September 1989, the day after the final night of Biggest Ball, Cleese shot two sections, one of which was never used, with Steve Martin and the other Pythons for the Monty Python’s Flying Circus twentieth anniversary compilation show 20 Years Of Monty Python (Parrot Sketch Not Included), which aired on BBC1 on Saturday the 18th of November 1989. When asked in the same TV Times article quoted above whether he did the show through a sense of moral obligation, Cleese replied “Well, I thought if Steve Martin is going to fly in all the way from America to do it, I can’t really say I won’t work on a Sunday, can I? And I was due to go to New York the following week. Then just as I thought, ’Well, at least now there’s nothing else that anyone could ask me to do that I’m morally obligated to do,’ what happens? There’s a letter from my old friend Humphrey Barclay, saying, ‘John, do you realise that it’s the 25th anniversary of the I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again radio programme (which I’d taken part in) and we want everyone to do a big anniversary show to raise money for Save The Children’. What can you do?”. (The I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again 25th anniversary special, including Cleese, was broadcast on Radio 2 on Christmas Day 1989.)

With John Cleese on board as the director of the latest Amnesty show the prominence of musical acts was accordingly removed so as to make the gala nothing but comedy, with comedians old and new performing not only their own comedy but also a variety of classic Python sketches (some updated for the Thatcher era). As this was the case the show featured the return of such Ball legends as Michael Palin and Peter Cook, this time joined by Dudley Moore who was performing at an Amnesty benefit for the first and, it turned out, only time; it also turned out to be Cook and Moore’s last time onstage together. Dudley Moore only agreed to perform at the show if his appearance could be kept secret – he was flying into England to organise a surprise party for his sister’s sixtieth birthday; Cleese kept the secret and, much like how he felt reuniting three-quarters of Beyond The Fringe back in 1976, was delighted with the coup of reuniting Cook and Moore on the London stage for the first time since their show Behind The Fridge in 1972 and 1973. “It’s been over sixteen years since Pete and I last performed together,” Moore is quoted as saying in Central Television’s press release for the show (they produced the television version which aired on ITV on Satirday the 28th of October 1989), “and amazingly we can still recognise each other – and remember the words! We decided to do our Tarzan sketch and the Frog and Peach because we still get a kick out of performing them and the audience still seems to like them. Pete wrote the Tarzan sketch when he was eighteen and he’s been going rapidly downhill ever since!”

Peter Cook and John Cleese backstage at The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball in a photograph poorly reproduced in issue 27 of Publish And Bedazzled, Spring 2002. The same picture partially appeared in colour on the inside back cover of How Very Interesting!: Peter Cook’s Universe And All That Surrounds It.

Even appearances by several of the alternative comedians at this new show didn’t bother John Cleese – as we’ve already evidenced, by 1989 the alternative crowd were establishment, so much so that Jennifer Saunders was appointed as the show’s co-director. “We finished up with two Pythons, half the Young Ones, two Beyond The Fringe, and French and Saunders, who I think are the two funniest women we’ve produced along with Victoria Wood,” Cleese is gleefully quoted as listing to Lynda Lee-Potter the Tuesday the 5th of September 1989 issue of the Daily Mail (with extracts from the article cheekily re-edited and reprinted in the Wednesday the 6th of September 1989 issue of the Sun). In the 28th of October to the 3rd of November 1989 issue of the TV Times he further praised French and Saunders: “Dawn and Jennifer do a piece called Dancing, which takes the roof off. It’s a slight surprise when Dawn launches into something from A Chorus Line”. Cleese was also pleased to have one of the younger crowd co-directing this time around; “She dealt with the young, I deal with the middle-aged,” said Cleese of Saunders in the above quoted Daily Mail piece (and partially reused in the Sun the following day), “Doing the last Amnesty show I really did feel the audience, who were mostly in their twenties, weren’t laughing at quite the same things I was. They found one or two of the young aggressive comics than I did. I thought: ‘Well, this is no great surprise’. When you get beyond the age of forty-five your tastes are different”. But this time the feeling was mutual, with Cleese having hand-picked the cast himself and with all the alternative performers being more respectful to Cleese than some had been at Other Ball. One alternative act went so far as to pay homage to John Cleese their own unique way – Spitting Image built a puppet version of Cleese specially to appear in a sketch with the real-life version.

There was only were a minimum of musical guests taking part in the show, as per Cleese’s request, and most of these were still comedians – some bad jokes sung by Lenny Henry, a cover of Memories by Kathy Burke as her Tina Bishop character (with Simon Brint on piano), some honky-tonk from Jools Holland and Roland Rivron and a finale of Pete and Dud’s Goodbyee-ee sung by the entire cast. The only non-comedy musician on the bill was John Williams, and his set, though a source of humour (his solo of Cavatina is interrupted by the directors telling him that they think the audience may be “bored”), didn’t make it to the televised version.

The show, which took place at London’s Cambridge Theatre on the 30th and 31st of August and the 1st and 2nd of September 1989, was closer in spirit to A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick) than any of the shows since. It also marked the end of an era, the last of the comedy charity benefits devoted solely to comedy and featuring a happy mixture of comics from at least three generations. As such it was a fine way for John Cleese to bow out of organising Amnesty International’s charity galas. His sole contribution to 1991’s thirtieth anniversary television extravaganza Amnesty International’s Big 3-0 (recorded in Nottingham’s Central Television studios on the 13th and 15th December 1991 – it was the first time that the show being a taped event took preference over it being a stage event – and broadcast on ITV on Saturday the 28th of December 1991, with the last five minutes inexplicably overlapping with the first five minutes of The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball making its network television premiere over on Channel 4 (though an hour of music from the show, released on VHS in 1987 under the title The Secret Policeman’s Ball – The Music, had aired under Channel 4’s The Late Shift strand on Wednesday the 21st of June 1989)) was a pre-recorded serious monologue about the kinds of imprisoned and tortured people that receive help from Amnesty. The clip was introduced by no less than Alexei Sayle, the man who gave Cleese such a hard time at Other Ball all those years earlier. Cleese’s only other impact on the show came in a pre-recorded ‘Head To Head’ dialogue by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones, two people who had also performed at the Cleeseless night of Third Ball. “How would you describe the typical Amnesty supporter?” Mel asks. Griff replies: “Well, I don’t know – he’d be about six foot tall, have his own psychiatrist, and have seven million quid in the bank…”.

Every year from 1988 to 1993, three nights at London’s Duke Of York Theatre were devoted to another series of Amnesty concerts which went under the banner of The Famous Compere’s Police Dog (full titles in order: The Famous Compere’s Police Dog; The Famous Compere’s Police Dog: The Movie; The Famous Compere’s Police Dog: The World Tour; The Famous Compere’s Police Dog: Barf Bites Back (the only one of these shows released on video, which was subsequently shown on ITV on Saturday the 24th of August 1991); The Famous Compere’s Police Dog: European Leg; and The Famous Compere’s Police Dog: Superbowl), and from 1996 Amnesty began to hold annual comedy benefits at the Edinburgh Festival titled Stand Up For Freedom. In the next few years Amnesty also held two benefits at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, both called Amnesty International’s Gala Of Irish Comedy; they took place on Sunday the 2nd of February 1997 and Sunday the 1st of February 1998, and edited versions aired on ITV under the titles So You Think You’re Irish and So You Think You’re Irish 2. In addition, at the Wiltern Theater in Hollywood on Wednesday the 18th of March 1992 Amnesty held their first comedy benefit show abroad, Free to Laugh: A Comedy and Music Special for Amnesty International, which aired on the USA Lifetime network on Tuesday the 14th of April that same year.

Press ad for The Famous Compere’s Police Dog: The World Tour, held at the Duke of York Theatre on the 24th, 25th and 26th of January 1990.

All these Amnesty benefits were unrelated to the now-legendary Balls both in participants and spirit. It was not until ten years after Big 3-0, and a whole new millennium, that another all-star comedy benefit in the spirit of the early Balls was planned, this time to celebrate Amnesty International’s fortieth anniversary. Despite a deliberate move towards the earlier of the Amnesty shows, John Cleese was not asked to participate. Reasons for this were given by Amnesty’s head of fundraising Andy Hackman in the Sunday the 27th of May 2001 edition of the Observer magazine, where he said: “We felt we couldn’t ask him again because he’d already done so much, and it was partly our suggestion that he write to Eddie Izzard asking if he’d take over. Partly a symbolic thing”. Cleese, who couldn’t have organised the show anyway due to having parental duties in California, was delighted with this arrangement – he’d already gone on record as stating that Eddie Izzard was the funniest man in England, and approved of Izzard as the show’s organiser because, as he was quoted in the Sunday the 1st of April 2001 edition of the Observer, “I thought Eddie had the right touch because you can’t put too heavy a hand on it”. Izzard described his lightness of touch in the Observer magazine quoted earlier, where he said that “I didn’t really want to be that person who calls people up and asks them to do it, because I thought a lot of people could get very offended if I didn’t ask them”. His touch was also too light to threaten those who refused to turn up, Bob Geldof-style: “I did some phoning around,” he added later in the same article, “but I wouldn’t put their backs to the wall”.

Despite his apparent organisational skills being nil there was no way Eddie Izzard would have refused the post, as when he had watched the Amnesty stage shows of the seventies on video as a child he became incredibly envious of the performers involved. “I would have given left legs and left arms to be doing stuff like that,” he is quoted as saying the Observer magazine, “I never saw them live, and when the videos came out I never rushed to buy them because I thought it would have been so great to do that that it would have pissed me off too much. I never wanted to be a stand-up. I just wanted to be a Python”. Izzard’s admiration of the Pythons with regard to this benefit parallels the Pythons admiration of the Beyond The Fringe cast at A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick) – in the same way that Cleese delighted in taking part in, for example, Interesting Facts at The Secret Policeman’s Ball, similarly for the boy who used to quote Four Yorkshiremen in chemistry class there could be no higher thrill for Izzard than having the opportunity to perform that same sketch at an Amnesty benefit.

Roger Graef’s original script pages for The Secret Policeman’s Ball version of Four Yorkshiremen, with Graef’s sketch detailing seating positions of its cast.

In March 2001 Cleese and Izzard met on the balcony of the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills to officially pass the mantle of Artistic Director of Amnesty International from John Cleese onto Eddie Izzard – photographs from this meeting were taken by Robert Yager, and featured in the programme for the show and later as an extra on its DVD. Izzard’s first act as Artistic Director was the change the name of the stage show. “I always thought the name The Secret Policeman’s Ball was odd,” Izzard is quoted as saying in the Observer magazine, “Was it for secret policemen? No, we fucking hate secret policemen. So it always got me hoping that the Secret Policeman would do very badly out of his own gig”. The show became titled We Know Where You Live, Live!, a threat to those who violate human rights (and unrelated to the 1997 Channel Five sketch show We Know Where You Live), and was successfully directed and compered by Izzard, who kept the show’s content very close to Cleese’s original concept regarding both comedy and music – as Izzard told the Thursday the 31st of May 2001 edition of the Evening Standard, “The musical elements will follow the previous format because it’s the son of Secret Policeman’s Ball, so they’re more acoustic than electric”. That said, music from U2, recorded two weeks earlier at a concert in Toronto, was played at the event, making it Bono’s first appearance at an Amnesty show since he sat in the audience for one of the nights of The Secret Policeman’s Ball. We Know Where You Live, Live! took place on Sunday the 3rd of June 2001 at Wembley Arena, making it the largest comedy gig in the UK to date, and was broadcast on Channel Four on Friday the 15th of the same month.

John Cleese passes control of the Amnesty benefits to Eddie Izzard on this page from the theatre programme for We Know Where You Live, Live!.

This event launched a new wave of smaller Amnesty comedy benefits, held annually at: the Belfast Festival under the name Stand Up For Justice since 2003; various places in Australia under the name Stand Up For Your Rights, also since 2003; and at the Manchester Comedy Festival, Stand Up For Amnesty International, since 2006. Amnesty was also held The Rocky Horror Tribute Show at London’s Royal Court Theatre on Wednesday the 3rd of May 2006, a concert of songs from The Rocky Horror Show performed by some of the show’s ex-cast members and held at its original venue. Adrian Edmonson, in his first Amnesty show since 1989’s The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball, reprised the role of Brad Majors for the first time since 1990, while other Amnesty alumni including Mel Smith and Edmonson’s wife Jennifer Saunders were in the audience. But Amnesty were still lacking their major event, something as big as The Secret Policeman’s Ball had been back in 1979. Their next step in order to try and recapture that magic was a logical one – the next Amnesty event, held on Saturday the 14th of October 2006 at the Royal Albert Hall and broadcast on Channel Four that month on Halloween, reverted back to the name The Secret Policeman’s Ball.

John Cleese was not involved this 2006 version of The Secret Policeman’s Ball (to avoid already-created confusion, for television transmission and DVD release the show added to the end of its title the appellation “The Ball In The Hall”) despite the fact that he was happy enough to perform some new sketches at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal just three months earlier; at this new Ball audience members had to be satisfied with impressionists Ronni Ancona and Jon Culshaw performing Monty Python sketches in imitations of various celebrities, including Biggest Ball director Jennifer Saunders. In fact only three people involved with this show had any connection with previous Amnesty benefits, all three highly dubious – Martha Wainwright, whose father Loudon Wainwright III performed at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball; Terry Gilliam, who didn’t make an appearance on the night but did write a piece about Amnesty’s good work for the theatre programme; and Eddie Izzard, who closed the show primarily with material he’d performed five years ago at We Know Where You Live, Live!. At this time it appeared that over thirty years on from A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick), John Cleese’s relationship with Amnesty International had, to paraphrase a famous sketch from that very show, ceased to be.

Or was it resting? Saturday the 4th of October 2008 saw the most recent of the major Amnesty benefit shows to date, The Secret Policeman’s Ball ’08, also held at The Royal Albert Show and broadcast on Channel 4 the following night (with a repeat on Friday the 19th of October 2008, now slightly reedited so as to include Channel 4 golden girl Sarah Millican), and Cleese topped the rather uninspired bill by making a surprise (although it had been heavily alluded to on Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball blog on Thursday the 25th of September 2008) pre-recorded twelve-second appearance as the voice of God. (He also appeared in one of Amnesty’s sponsorship bumpers on the TV broadcast.) This was hardly as big a coup as Amnesty had been playing it up; not only had Cleese previously recorded an identical role for use in the stage musical Monty Python’s Spamalot, but a mere five days before the Amnesty event at which Cleese was not attending it was announced in, amongst others, the Tuesday the 30th of September 2008 edition of the Evening Standard that he would be make a live appearance performing something “extra special” for Prince Charles at his sixtieth birthday celebration show We Are Most Amused, to be held at the New Wimbledon Theatre on Wednesday the 12th of November 2008 in aid of The Prince’s Trust (this “extra special” something turned out to be a reunion between him and Andrew Sachs in character as Fawlty Towers’ Manuel). Also boasting rare appearances on the London stage by Robin Williams (a long-time supporter of Amnesty who had filmed a special commercial for the organisation in the early nineties) and The Secret Policeman’s Ball’s Rowan Atkinson, news of this royal event rather embarrassingly knocked the mundane The Secret Policeman’s Ball ’08 off the radar of both benefit-goers and the press.

The future of Amnesty benefits and, as importantly, John Cleese’s association with them is uncertain. The next show has been promised for 2010, but with the Secret Policeman’s Ball name being dragged and dumbed down into shows of increasing mediocrity, with the same attitude and calibre of performers as its weaker sister shows and rip-off benefits, it seems that the heyday of the late seventies when five Pythons, three Beyond The Fringes and all the Goodies could appear on the same stage is never to be repeated. But also never to be forgotten, as John Cleese’s involvement with Amnesty cannot be overlooked – not only did his creation of the first Amnesty show over thirty years ago lead to the archiving and availability of hours of unique and exceptional comedy and musical performances whilst raising incalculable amounts of money for and awareness of Amnesty International, it also inspired others to do the same and thus led directly to, the name the most successful, the world-changing Comic Relief telethons and the record-breaking Live Aid concert, amongst a great many others. The simple act of joining Amnesty in 1976 has ensured John Cleese a place in history as the showbusiness personality who has, directly or otherwise, done more good than any other for humanity.

After recording the voice of God for The Secret Policeman’s Ball ‘08, John Cleese displays his continuing support for Amnesty International.

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