The Dinosaur Hour, GB News review: John Cleese delivers a thoughtful, wonderfully wacky hour of TV
There’s nothing like John Cleese in full flight. Whether attacking his car with a branch in Fawlty Towers or blowing raspberries in the general direction of King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no other comedian has made outrage and indignation so hilarious.
There were flashes of that fury early in the first episode of the now 84-year-old’s new GB News show, The Dinosaur Hour. Cleese shared the results of a European-wide survey of trust in the press. Again and again, he reported with rising incandescence, the UK finished bottom. Apart from that one year when “we’re above North Macedonia and Greece – makes you proud to be English.”
Cleese has emerged as a voice against “cancel culture”. He has pointed out Monty Python were early victims of the phenomenon when satirising religious dogmatism in Life of Brian. Yet this enjoyably unorthodox and quietly wacky 60-minute affair was anything but another GB News broadcast.
Neither right nor left, it was instead an idiosyncratic current affairs revue in the image of creator Cleese. Eccentric and serious at the same time – and thought-provoking throughout.
The Dinosaur Hour is filmed at 12th-century Hedingham Castle in Essex, which Cleese has cleverly turned into a living tribute to Monty Python. Playing chess in the background, men in bowler hats doffed cap to Cleese’s famous Ministry of Silly Walks.
There were also nuns, cats and a stuffed weasel. The slot’s first trailer, meanwhile, featured Cleese recreating Holy Grail’s “taunting Frenchman” sketch. Python aficionados, even those who don’t care for Cleese’s politics, will have been flabbergasted to see so much comedic iconography. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition – except this time, you almost did.
Cleese will focus on a single topic each week. First, it was press reform. He explored the subject knowledgeably and with sensitivity. Interviewees included Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? host and tabloid target Chris Tarrant and Danno Hanks, a private investigator Cleese had befriended after Hanks hacked his phone.
Guest-wise, the big guns will arrive in future weeks– including Stephen Fry, Caitlyn Jenner and Trevor McDonald. Let’s hope they’ve been briefed on what to expect because this was the strangest 60 minutes of prime-time TV since the end of Twin Peaks.
“Sorry, I’ve just sat on a cat,” said Chris Tarrant at one point – a sentence you are unlikely to hear elsewhere on GB News or any other news network.
Forty years after Monty Python’s prime, the Dinosaur Hour was a charmingly cock-eyed outlet for Cleese’s talents – and while some may have come for the politics, most viewers will have stayed for the deliciously grumpy weirdness.
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