Comedy was perfect to a Fawlt
We look at how Fawlty Towers first opened its doors to television viewers 45 years ago
IT HAS been voted the greatest British TV show of all time, but BBC bosses were not convinced a comedy set in a hotel would work when they were first presented with the idea for Fawlty Towers.
It was the first TV project for John Cleese after Monty Python and he wrote it with his then-wife Connie Booth, who also played chambermaid Polly in the BBC sitcom.
After writing the first episode, John and Connie received a note which informed them: “This is full of clichéd situations and stereotypical characters and I cannot see it as being anything other than a disaster.” He said they framed it.
Fawlty Towers launched on September 19, 1975, with John as hotel owner Basil Fawlty, Prunella Scales as his wife Sybil and Andrew Sachs as the well-meaning but hopeless Spanish waiter Manuel.
The Spanish-dubbed version of the comedy changed Manuel’s nationality to Italian and saw him coming from Naples.
Only 12 half-hour episodes were made and the shows were intricately plotted with no dialogue written until the plot had been finalised.
Each script took six weeks to complete and five days to rehearse before the show was recorded in front of a studio audience. The character of Basil was inspired by a meeting with a real hotel owner who the Pythons encountered while staying in Torquay.
He reportedly threw Eric Idle’s briefcase over a wall as a “bomb scare”, when he left it in the reception, and served Graham Chapman an omelette with three fried eggs plonked on top when he asked for an omelette made with three eggs.
Basil was rude to everyone he met including his own wife Sybil describing the sound of her laugh as like “somebody machine-gunning a seal.”
Connie once summed up the comedy’s success saying: “It’s unique in being a farce with all the plot surprises and precision that the style requires. And it doesn’t hurt that the star of the show is a six-foot-five comic genius. If he was shorter I can’t imagine how it would have worked.”