John Cleese bites his fellow Pythons

John Cleese has apparently torn into his former Monty Python colleagues, saying that he is glad he no longer keeps in touch with any of them. The 69-year old comedian - recently in the news thanks to an expensive divorce from his third wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger and a messy break-up with Californian comedienne Barbie Orr - was speaking on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show in the US when he launched into a series of character assassinations.

Whether Cleese intended his comments to be taken seriously was not entirely clear. "Only one of them is all right - the little guy who does the very boring travel programmes," Cleese started before deliberately pronouncing Michael Palin's name as 'Pallin'. Terry Jones was described as "an excitable little Welshman” who didn't understand that the Welsh were "put on the planet to carry out menial tasks for the English".

Cleese then went on to do an impression of Terry Gilliam – who will receive the Bafta fellowship on Sunday - saying that the way he talks makes him impossible to understand.

Eric Idle is apparently "quite entertaining", but the harshest comments were reserved for Graham Chapman who died from spinal cancer in 1989. "Good riddance actually," said Cleese. "He was a terrible sponger. He drank a lot at one stage. Actually what pissed me off is when he went sober. Within a year he was healthier than the rest of us. So I was very glad when he died." ·