THE creator of silly walks, empty cheese shops and an excruciating hotelier called Basil is pioneering a new form of entertainment. John Cleese can now be found performing at his ranch in California via his website which charges $50 a year (£27) for the privilege.

Fed up with television executives and studios, the star of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers set up the website last month as a vehicle for his humour and personal philosophy. Cleese is promising to update the site every day with new sketches, pictures of his home life and biographical information.

“It’s like having a tiny TV station or a magazine. The simplicity is delightful,” said Cleese last week.

He explained that the website would make him money and allow the public to see his comedy without him having to travel.

Above all, however, it will enable him to escape “control freak” executives forcing him to change his work.

“What I find now is that I write scripts that I and other people think are pretty good and the executives tell me I need to change them and improve them,” said Cleese.

“So I was getting tired by the travelling and frustrated by the fact that the executives are much more control freaks than they used to be, and won’t really trust me, because they think they know better. It’s hard to see since they’ve never written or acted in comedy.

While access to some of the site, www.thejohncleese.com, is free, much of it cannot be viewed without paying a membership fee. Cleese, 65 last week, says he hopes people will visit “and make an old man very happy . . . otherwise I’ll have to keep driving down to Los Angeles and work in someone else’s studio”.

He introduces the site in a clip in which he appears to be wearing a tea-cosy on his head. “I can sit here and do silly stuff for the website instead of the boring things I’ve been doing for the last few years,” he says.

It is not entirely a one-man show as his family also feature prominently. The initial pages show video footage of Cleese and Alyce, his wife, recently attempting to capture Batman, a frightened orange-and-black guinea-pig, with a fishing net.

His daughter Camilla, 20, explains on the site that as a child her father told her she had been bought from Harrods. He only had to show her a Harrods shopping bag to make her fear she would be returned as defective goods.

In addition to new sketches, Cleese has posted a compendium of family photographs, anecdotes and ephemera to tempt in web-surfers. Recent photographs, taken at his ranch, include snaps of one of his three alpacas — called Beethoven — several cats, many of which are named after cheeses, a pet rabbit, two horses, hens, an aviary, stables, a pristine burgundy sport-utility vehicle and shots of his sitting room.

Older black-and-white pictures include the baby Cleese in a pram, his father and his regiment shortly before departing for the western front in 1915, houses in Weston-super-Mare, where Cleese lived as a child, his parents and a selection of formally dressed aunts and uncles.

Cleese explains under one truncated photo that his mother would often cut herself out of photos.

The comedian writes next to a portrait of himself as an adolescent: “This is me towards the end of my time in Weston-super-Mare. My jaw has begun to exceed its proper dimensions. As you can see, I have adopted the expression of a very clever poisoner.”

A postcard written to his parents from Piccadilly in 1959 reveals the thoughts of the 19-year-old Cleese at large in London. He writes: “Having a wonderful time. Glad you’re not here . . . Malcolm got drunk last night.”

In the autobiography section, Cleese describes how he found a useful outlet for his comic talents during two years he spent as a prep-school teacher in the late 1950s before going on to university.

He would burst into a classroom demanding answers to questions about geography and “rough up” pupils who gave wrong answers. He writes: “They pretended to be scared, and I pretended to be fierce, and there was a lot of laughter.”

Religion features on the site in a section called the “cyber interfaith chapel”, which is illustrated with an image of a temple decorated with Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist symbols. Cleese writes: “In these halls, you can read excerpts of works which are and have been important to me.” These include the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.

Cleese also includes a lecture he recently gave to students earlier this year, urging them to use their student years “finding something that you love just for itself” and suggesting they do not place too much importance on acquiring money in their future lives.

Camilla Cleese promises, on her page, to pour plenty of scorn on her famous father. She writes: “I, however, lucked out and did not inherit his huge jaw, bad teeth, or psychosomatic allergy to milk, and am therefore much better-looking and healthier.”

She jokes: “If you are reading this, you are probably a big fan of my dad and don’t really give a f*** about my miserable life anyway.”

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