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“This is just getting silly.” Yet somehow this new spirit of zaniness would prevail – it represented such a spark of life in the English soul that even an uptight, bowler-hatted Whitehall zombie could end up working in the Ministry of Silly Walks.Yet perhaps, even then, we sensed that English silliness had nothing to do with real comedy – indeed it was its antithesis. It was the panicky giggle of a man (no woman has actually tried to be silly) who was suffering that great national dread – that he lacked a sense of humour. It was the embarrassing “Ying-Tong Song” in The Goons, the feebler, self-indulgent Monty Python moments. It was The Goodies.The more talented people in those shows moved on to other, usually better, things.

Cleese, most notably, created and performed the astonishing sitcom series which, because its central joke was the tragic misery of a middle-aged English marriage, made the final, definitive case against the need for silliness in comedy.Then something odd happened, and it was good news for John Cleese, but bad news for the rest of us He lost his sense of humour. Quite why this happened has always remained a mystery, but it probably had something to do with finding happiness in his private life, entering the gentle, po-faced world of therapy, and joining the SDP.Since then his career has been a perfect mirror for the times. When business and money-making were all the rage, Cleese made highly successful management videos. At the moment we all started looking inwards and fretting about caring and sharing, he co-wrote some rather good handbooks on relationships and the family.He joined the celebrity circus, making the obligatory appearances in TV ads, and writing, directing and starring in that small classic of self-adoration, A Fish Called Wanda. Recently, he has joined the property game, selling his Notting Hill house for a canny £5m.Now, with the perfect timing of a former comedian, he has become a celebrity victim. I’m tall, I write satire and I’ve been well-known in England for 26 years, he says.

Put these things together with an active, unimaginative media, and I couldn’t do anything.Wearied by our intolerance of silliness, he’s going to live in Santa Barbara and, in doing so, he has effectively turned his Python act on its head “No, sorry, that’s enough of that,” he’s saying. “This is just not silly enough.”It sounds like a very sensible decision. No one who has seen Cleese being interviewed recently could doubt that he will be ideally suited to the Californian lifestyle. Meanwhile those of us who are left behind can enjoy the comic brilliance of Chris Morris, Caroline Aherne, Paul Whitehouse, Rob Brydon, Sacha Baron Cohen and others, content in the knowledge that the grim and ghastly age of English silliness is gone for ever.Terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker. The wheel is coming full circle. A generation ago Pink Floyd’s groundbreaking album The Wall had children singing: “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.” Now the better-than-ever A-level results last week and the GCSEs out this Thursday have become headline news.Of course there are the usual batch of “grade inflation” worries. Of course, sadly, there are still many schools where children are not getting nearly as good an education as they should.

Measured internationally, UK school performance, while apparently rising slowly, seems to be a bit below the average for developed nations.
And of course there are now worries about lack of demand for university places. Last year there were 10,000 excess places and – since the number of students taking A-levels fell by 23,000 this year – we can expect even greater oversupply now.So there are still many obvious problems with both the quality of school system and the appropriateness of the university one. But the mood is quite different from the Pink Floyd era: results matter. The Government’s relentless focus on testing in education (and its enemies might add its efforts at “thought control”) is testimony to that. As a society, we clearly want more and better education, and the Government has been forced to respond to those demands.But the debates about standards, failing schools, struggling universities and so on are really sideshows to four seismic changes taking place in education worldwide. Education is moving from being supply-led to demand-driven; from one-shot to continuous; from national to international; and from public-sector to private.Supply-led to demand-driven? The point is simply that people are, to a much greater extent than ever before, choosing to learn what they want to learn, rather than being forced to learn what the education establishment wants to teach them.Sure, there are and always will be children who, as Shakespeare noted, are “creeping like a snail unwillingly to school”. Thank heavens for that: the new earnestness needs a bit of tempering.

But if you look at education as a whole, much less of what we learn – and where we learn it – is determined by educational establishments and much more by students.There are a host of examples of changes in education that illustrate one or more of these shifts Look at languages. In Britain there has been a slump in the numbers of people learning foreign languages, including mainstream European ones: some, like Italian, are in dramatic decline. In one sense this is terrible, for culturally we will be the poorer. But this is the choice people are making.At the same time there has been a surge in language schools in the UK – the ones teaching English to foreigners. Young Europeans realise that good command of English adds to their job opportunities, so they come here to learn it. I have read that it typically adds 20 per cent to their earnings, so there is a direct financial benefit.This changes the structure of our education industry. Universities are finding it hard to fill places in their language departments and are having to run them down.