John Cleese has played many roles in restaurants, not least the chef who cleavers the table in Python's Dirty Fork sketch. When I got to spend a day with him in 1989 he often related themes to dining out. Of the seven deadly sins, he said: "Anger is the one I've had most difficulties with. In a restaurant, instead of saying 'This isn't well cooked', I couldn't complain and became tight-lipped, very angry, going terribly pale."

We were in a caravan outside Hindhead in Surrey. Cleese was wearing only red Y-fronts on a break in filming an advert in a quarry. Before our meeting, he'd posted me two books – Arthur Koestler's Act of Creation and Henri Bergson's Laughter – so I was keeping a straight face. "I've always had the capacity to enjoy my own company," he insisted, offering grated cheese sandwiches. "The only problem is being with people who don't. Sometimes I've been on my own, drinking a beer in a restaurant, having a wonderful time with a fine book, and people have said 'You look soo low, John'. Well, clearly it is they who have the problem!"

He'd recently ordered champagne for the first time in a New York restaurant. "I thought, at 48, with a movie on my hands [A Fish Called Wanda] which is a genuine success, I'm bloody well entitled to it. And I rather enjoyed it. But there's a petit bourgeois part of me which is very cautious."

I said that the author notes for his book The Golden Skits of Wing-Commander Muriel Volestrangler were possibly the silliest – and so the best - thing he'd done. "Oh, all that rubbish about Muriel being poisoned by a kipper in Glastonbury," he scoffed.

"But it is true that I was poisoned by a kipper in Glastonbury. A terrible business."