Fawlty Towers

"You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, while I’m trying to run a hotel!"

“Can’t we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant – Sybil Fawlty from Torquay. Special subject – the bleedin’ obvious.”

“Is this a piece of your brain?”

“A satisfied guest, dear. We should have him stuffed!”

^{Fawlty Towers review by Brian Slade}

In this land of endless ‘Britain’s favourite sitcom’ type of shows and the understandable thirst for comedy nostalgia in the modern world of ‘you can’t say that,’ a number of shows have held their spot consistently over the years. Porridge, Steptoe and Son and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em are regular favourites, along with more recent efforts like Only Fools and Horses, One Foot in the Grave and The Vicar of Dibley. While most people can’t agree whether they’d prefer a female vicar putting her head in a chocolate fountain or a dirty old man having a bath in the sink, one thing does seem consistent. Most people believe that of all British sitcoms, Fawlty Towers remains if not top of the pile, certainly a prominent member of the leading pack.

The seeds of Fawlty Towers were sown when the Monty Python gang were looking for somewhere to stay in the West Country in 1971. They found a hotel in Torquay called Gleneagles, run by a man named Donald Sinclair, who was so absurdly rude that all the other Pythons left, allowing John Cleese and then wife Connie Booth to remain and observe this absurd character for whom all guests were a nuisance.

When Cleese departed the Python team after its third series, he set about writing a sitcom for the BBC with Connie and it was no surprise that it took little time to return to that diminutive grouch of a man as a rich source of comedy. They provided a pilot for the BBC that some in the corridors of power immediately dismissed, suggesting that they could not see, ‘…anything but a disaster if we go ahead with it.’ Safe to say, that assessment was consigned to the same embarrassment bin as the one that said television would be ‘the box they buried Morecambe and Wise in’ when the boys’ first series failed in the 1950s.

The real Basil, the unfortunate Mr Sinclair, was a hen-pecked man of less height than his domineering wife, so with that option not available, the appearance of Prunella Scales as Basil’s wife Sybil turned out to be all the more ingenious. Somehow, her lack of physical stature compared to the beanstalk figure of Basil made his obvious fear of her all the funnier. Sybil is the dominant force in the hotel. Although Basil believes the lion share of the work is done by him, Sybil’s contribution is on a far more economical level and invariably at odds with how Basil would run things if she weren’t around. The marriage is a bizarre one as they sleep in separate beds, albeit in the same room, and any suggestion of physical relations would appear way off the mark.

Perhaps the best member of staff in the hotel is Polly (Booth), an art student who is invariably trying to keep the peace between Basil and Sybil while attending to her duties in housekeeping and waitressing. She is the buffer between Basil and Sybil’s disagreements and the voice of reason when Basil’s antics get out of hand.

Probably the worst member of staff in the somewhat skimpy Fawlty Towers workforce is Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs) whose mastery of the English language is only marginally better than his talents as a waiter. The phrase ‘he’s from Barcelona’ would be used as an explanation for Manuel’s more public mistakes, and it is left to Polly to defend him when under attack (often physically) from Basil.

In series two, the staff swells as Terry the chef appears (Brian Hall), whose most famous contribution comes when trying to decipher which piece of veal they can give the public health inspector in Basil the Rat, hoping it’s not the one with rat poison!

Most of the two series of Fawlty Towers finds Basil attempting to raise the standards or the level of clientele coming to the hotel. The first episode, A Touch of Class, found Basil fawning all over the kind of guest he wanted to be hosting. Lord Melbury would of course turn out to be a trickster leaving Basil red-faced at having not only been duped out of money and his expensive coin collection, but also having been rude to pretty much everybody else in the hotel to obsess over the fake Lord. But the themes of class and snobbery would return several times.

Another common theme would be Basil’s financial situation. Sybil controlled his life, and that included his finances. Basil was of course miserly, cutting corners at any opportunity if it saved him money – all the better if it saved him money that Sybil had no knowledge of. He would use the cut-price builder Mr O’Reilly in The Builders, he’s trying his utmost to conceal racing winnings in Communication Problems, and the list of things wrong with the hotel in Basil the Rat suggest little has been spent on maintenance of the building.

While Basil is keen to try and encourage a better standard of guest with minimal outlay, he cannot help being somewhat paranoid about life. He is completely thrown by the arrival of a shrink in The Psychiatrist, keen to appear completely ‘normal’ while attempting to catch another of his guests concealing a girl in his room. He is equally nervous when he hears that inspectors are in town in The Hotel Inspectors and is absolutely terrified that serving gone off fish may have killed a guest in The Kipper and the Corpse.

As glorious as the leading quartet are, Fawlty Towers managed to attract some excellent guest stars as well to really sell the chaotic stories. David Kelly was hysterical as the hopeless Mr O’Reilly. Bernard Cribbins was quite superb as Mr Hutchison, a spoon salesman that Basil mistakenly believes is one of the hotel inspectors. Hutchison has Basil bowing to his every need, despite being a challenging guest, and the site of Cribbins receiving a jug of milk in his briefcase and a pie in both face and lower regions is one of the highlights of the first series.

Series two, which took several years to come to fruition, started with one of the most memorable episodes, Joan Sanderson guesting as the infamous Mrs Richards, a troublesome pensioner with intermittent and somewhat selective hearing and absurdly particular demands. The line that Basil offers when she bangs her head on a shelf – ‘Is this a piece of your brain?’ – will have been used by many since its transmission, despite almost being cut during rehearsals. It was restored only at the request of Sachs, who felt it too good to be lost.

Geoffrey Palmer provided a quietly hysterical turn, as he always did, as the unfortunate Dr Price, bemused at how a guest had died and yet Basil had still managed to deliver breakfast to said guest without noticing he was deceased. Palmer’s face-off between him and Sachs as Manuel insists it is too late for breakfast is comedy gold.

There are a few other guests taking permanent residence at the hotel, seemingly oblivious to how badly run the place is. Miss Tibbs (Gilly Flower) and Miss Gatsby (Renee Roberts) are elderly residents, as is Major Gowen (Ballard Berkeley). The Major was mostly just interested in whether the papers had arrived, along with the latest cricket score, and would frequently baffle Basil with his absent mindedness. Although some of the Major’s language is no longer permitted, nothing can cut his finest scene in Basil the Rat as he fires off a gun in the bar when he sees a rat on the table. As Basil thinks Major is talking about Germans, not vermin, the elderly gent explains, ‘he was sitting there, on that table, eating the nuts if you please!’

All good things must come to an end. Everybody has their favourite episode or favourite scene – Basil beating the life out of his broken-down Austin 1100 with a tree branch, the exchange with the bemused Germans when a concussed Basil reminds them ‘who started it,’ or the increasingly frustrated American tourist irately explaining how simple it is to make a Waldorf salad. But Fawlty Towers amazingly lasted only 12 episodes. Quality over quantity has never been more accurate, as each episode had comic farce combined with sitcom to perfection.

Basil’s destiny may yet be revealed. In 2023, John Cleese announced that Basil will return. If it comes to fruition, as seems likely, it will be without the other characters from the original series. The news was met with a mixed response. Some felt you shouldn’t tinker with perfection, but since so many consider there to have not been enough of the original, there is a feeling that Cleese can’t win either way. If he brings back arguably the funniest character in British television history, he will be playing with fire for certain. But given the dearth of quality sitcoms amongst the plethora of reality, phone-in talent shows and depressing soap operas, perhaps even a diluted Basil will be a welcome sight. And surely nothing will detract from the quintessentially British hysterically funny original Fawlty Towers.