Fawlty towers

FAWLTY TOWERS
AWLTY TOWERS, the classic sitcom created by John Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth (they split up between the first and second series), lasted only 12 episodes (a series in 1975 and another in 1979) but numbers itself among the most beloved series in British comedy history. The writing, the performances, the sheer manic energy of the series make every episode a classic. It doesn't get much better than this.
From an interview by Kim Howard
Johson: "It was based on a hotel
I'd stayed at back when I was
filming Python – the
manager was just wonderfully
rude," Cleese recalls. "He was
like Basil, but much smaller, a skinny little guy about five-foot four-inches, with a large wife who dominated him.
We reversed the sizes.
" Sinclair was so rude
and graceless that
most of the Pythons
checked in and then rapidly checked out. Cleese stayed, fascinated. Sinclair told Terry Gilliam off for spearing his meat left-handed, "like an American" (he is an American)
that his bag had been removed and hidden behind
a distant wall in the garden: 'We thought it might
be a bomb,' the hotelier explained grumpily,
when quizzed. "Why would anyone want to
bomb your hotel?’ asked Eric. “We've had a lot
of staff problems lately, " was the reply. Mr.
Sinclair also threw a bus timetable at another
guest after the guest dared to ask the time
of the next bus to town.
"We don't eat like
that in this country,"
he was informed.
When Eric Idle
returned to the
Hotel , he found
Graham Chapman, described him as "completely round the twist, off his chump, out of his tree."
John fell in love with this appalling hotelier (and his formidable wife, Mrs Sinclair), for whom guests were a thorn in the flesh.
Thrilled with the comic possibilities of such a combination, he wrote the part and tried out his prototype character in an episode of Doctor In The House in 1971, entitled "No Ill Feeling." Timothy Bateson played the bad-tempered hotelier.
"I had written some Doctor in the House TV shows, and had set one of the episodes at a hotel that had
been based on this one. An old friend of mine said to me, 'There's a series in that hotel
I thought 'Bloody television producer, can't see a program without thinking about a series.' The extraordinary thing was, he was absolutely right.
When Connie and I sat down three years later, it was the second or third idea that came into our minds."
Michael Palin, who has kept a journal for many years, confirmed Cleese's account of that legendary
hotel in Torquay with his notes:
Tuesday, 12th of May. Our hotel, the Gleneagles, was a little out of Torquay, overlooking a beautiful
little cove, plenty of trees around. Eric and John were already there, sitting by the pool.
the start as a colossal inconvenience. When we arrived back at 12:30 A.M., having watched the night's filming, he just stood and looked at us with the same look of self-righteous resentment and tacit accusation that I've not seen since my father waited up for me fifteen years ago. Graham tentatively asked for a brandy; the idea was dismissed out of hand. And on that night, our first in Torquay, we decided to move out of the Gleneagles.
Decor was clean,
rooms nice. However
Mr. Sinclair, the
proprietor, seemed
to view us from
1

• Back at Gleneagles, avoided breakfast. Graham, Terry and I have been fixed for one night at the Osborne, from then on at the Imperial.

2

• Asked Mr. Sinclair for the bill. He didn't seem unduly ruffled, but Mrs.

3

• Sinclair made our stay even more memorable by threatening us with a bill for two weeks, even though we hadn't stayed. But off we went, with lighter hearts

There are several
advantages to
setting a series in
a hotel, according
to Cleese. "We could have almost anyone we wanted walk in, without trying to find an explanation. Plus, we had our basic regulars. It's a situation which almost everyone understands. Everyone knows what it's like to walk up to a front
desk, what it's like if someone's casual, rude, or inattentive. We didn't have to explain or set anything up. It's all very straightforward and conventional, so we could start right away with the jokes.
John Howard Davies, director of the first series of Fawlty Towers (and a few early Python episodes), and later head of comedy at the BBC, remembers the show: "When I first read the scripts of 'Fawlty Towers' it was one of those rare occasions when I laughed continuously and with mounting delight.
.
Its anarchic and totally individual flavor was and is unique. Certainly they were a joy to direct and produce and gave everybody concerned with the production enormous satisfaction but, probably more to the point, we never stopped laughing from the beginning until the final fade down."
Amusingly in hindsight, certain executives at the BBC didn't like Cleese's concept for the show, and didn't have high hopes for it. Even now, there is a framed memo in the Light Entertainment department: `This is a very boring situation. The script has nothing but very cliched characters and I cannot see anything but disaster if we go ahead with this."
The first series in 1975 received respectable
but not incredible ratings, but during the
repeats, word of mouth (it soon got around
that Cleese was up to something brilliantly
original) built up audiences to 7 million, and so it was repeated again, this time on BBC 1, and the audience jumped to 12 million viewers.
Fawlty Towers was becoming a national obsession. John and Connie were persuaded to write another six episodes for transmission in 1979. When those were subsequently repeated, 15 million folk tuned in gleefully and the show was firmly established as a classic of TV comedy.
Deep down in Basil’s repressed, irascible, hen-pecked personality, the British people saw something with which they could easily identity and they laughed and laughed at him until the tears rolled down their cheeks John and Connie got the scripts right through a combination of inspiration and a lot of hard work
Each episode took six weeks to write, an absurdly long time by TV sitcom standards, when ten days was the norm.
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