JOHN Cleese seemed to loosen up, but only after he had delivered his scholarly hour-long lecture to 1,000 delegates at the Yorkshire International Business Convention.

Arriving on stage at the Yorkshire Event Centre in Harrogate to the wacky theme from his famous TV creation, Fawlty Towers, Mr Cleese solemnly spoke about ways of seeking creativity in business by finding time and quiet to tap into the subconscious.

There was, he told them, the small but vital “hare-brained” area of the mind which reacted solidly, intelligently and sensibly, and then there was the vaster “tortoise” area which could be tapped through quiet meditation. The trick was to bring them together The 6ft 7in writer of the classic Monty Python series and founder of the Video Arts Training Film Company spoke with all the authority of a professor of business psychology at Cornell University.

But it was at his press conference afterwards that he was more flamboyant, firing verbal barrels at Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Government, then alluding to his own broken marriage and finally talking about a species of lemur named after him.

What would he say to the beleaguered PM and the Government? “Oh, I think he should take a holiday. They are all a bunch of third-raters and I think they should go away”.

The effect, he said, would be “to make politics a bit more attractive to intelligent and reasonable people”.

Asked his age, he revealed that he is 69. He then alluded to his failed marriage to psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger in which he has claimed he is paying her one million dollars in alimony while lawyers haggle over a final payoff.

He said: “I will be 70 and six years after that I won’t have to pay my one million a year.”

The lemur? A new species was named Avahi Cleesiae, honouring his own favourite documentary, In Search Of Lemurs.

What characteristics do they share? “It is not very big, not very interesting and even endangered,” he quipped.

Later, he was flown by helicopter to The Spa at Bridlington, the convention’s twin venue, to give his talk there to 600 delegates.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Can Do” and also shoring up that message of hope was pop hero Dave Stewart who teamed up with Annie Lennox to create the Eurythmics, one of the most consistent pop-rock duos in the 1980s.

Since then his career has grown, encompassing all of the creative arts, and he works with some of the leading global business brands in the world.

As keynote speaker, Mr Cleese was following in the illustrious footsteps of other top speakers at the event, such as former US Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger, former US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African spiritual leader.

Convention’s other guest speakers