John Cleese is truly a comic legend, though few of us will have seen a live performance from him.

We owe a debt of gratitude, then, to his former wife Alyce Faye Eichelberger — “a cross between Bluebeard and Heather Mills,” he says — for getting him out on the road. His Alimony Tour was designed to supply some of the £12m he is obliged to give her following their acrimonious divorce.

His two-hour show — on last weekend in Oxford — was a delight for fans but could have been slightly puzzling for punters expecting anything in the way of a stand-up routine. In fact, with the star addressing us from a lectern with notes laid out before him, the atmosphere was more that of a lecture. The performance, one felt, might have gone down well at the Rotary Club.

The evening began with a few choice insults for Ms Eichelberger and her legal team, with a number of telling statistics flashed up in a PowerPoint (or similar) presentation behind him. These included the fact that she netted more than $3,500 a day for the 16 years they were together.

If this all seemed a little ungallant (and it did), the same was true of the character assessment of his phobia-ridden mother, who lived to be more than 100.

But some comedy, of course, is cruel, as we heard in a couple of the more risqué lines he offered from his Python heyday.

As a great schoolboy admirer of his work on I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, I was disappointed that he made absolutely no mention of this seminal radio show. Possessed of so much of the zaniness we were later to see on Python, the series was also a training ground for all three members of The Goodies.

I thought it odd, too, that Cleese seemed unprepared to deviate from his script to tell us, for instance — when A Fish Called Wanda was under discussion — that a number of key scenes were shot in Oxford.

His favourite Fawlty Towers moment? The fire drill — and with video clip to hand we could see why. In fact, many of us ‘see why’ quite often in our own viewing of this hilarious sitcom. Everyone also knows of the real-life hotelier on whom Basil was based — but it was no hardship to hear it again from the horse’s mouth.