John Cleese waiting to begin when Cleese's offer arrived. Palin agreed to work with Cleese and Chapman in the meantime, bringing with him Gilliam, Jones, and Idle. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" ran for four seasons from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC Television, though Cleese quit the show after the third. Cleese's two primary characterisations were as a sophisticated and a stressed-out loony. He portrayed the former as a series of announcers, TV show hosts, and government officials (for example, "The Ministry of Silly Walks"). The latter is perhaps best represented in the "Cheese Shop" and by Cleese's Mr Praline character,
John Cleese he was religious. Cleese stated that he didn't think much of organised religion and said he was not committed to "anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think". Cleese has a passion for lemurs. Following the 1997 comedy film "Fierce Creatures", in which the ring-tailed lemur played a key role, he hosted the 1998 BBC documentary "In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese", which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's