Miriam Margolyes portrays her experience with Cambridge Footlights as one of exclusion by a competitive male group, while John Cleese says there was no abuse and that fellow performers withdrew from her manner.

The dispute has revived six decades after the 1962 Footlights review Double Take, with both performers agreeing that the period was unhappy but disagreeing fundamentally over why.

Speaking about the production, Margolyes said women could not join Footlights when she was at Cambridge and accused Cleese and Graham Chapman of being “particularly venomous” towards her. She said the cast stopped speaking to her off stage — “being sent to Coventry” — and excluded her from a cast party, an experience she said “wounded me terribly.”¹

Her account frames the episode as more than an old professional slight. Margolyes acknowledged that retaining “rage and irritation” so long afterwards reflected badly on her, but said she had never forgiven the pair. Although she called Cleese and Chapman “really brilliant young men,” she argued their comedy was ultimately “soulless,” adding that she was glad Cleese was “old and unfunny.”¹

Cleese’s response contests the suggestion of deliberate mistreatment. He wrote that several members of the group were “rather repressed and socially unskilled lower middle class boys” who had “literally never met someone so brash and vulgar,” and so “shrunk away from her.”¹

He maintained that there was “No abuse or anything” and that the group merely kept out of her way. Cleese also rejected any attempt to assign responsibility to Bill Oddie, saying Oddie was not in the show that year. The opposing accounts leave the central question unresolved: whether Margolyes was intentionally isolated or encountered a socially awkward group unwilling to engage with her.¹