Basil's back!
Don't mention the war, as the comic cast return. By Declan Cashin
Together again: Fawlty Towers cast, from left, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs, John Cleese and Connie Booth
Friday May 08 2009
It's enough to get comedy fans goose-stepping with excitement. This weekend, it will be Waldorf salads and inappropriate mentions of the war all round as digital channel GOLD checks back in to Fawlty Towers, the jewel in the crown of British comedy for the past three decades.
On Sunday night, the four original cast members -- John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Connie Booth and Andrew Sachs (a household name again thanks to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand) -- reunite for the first of two special documentaries to mark the 30th anniversary of the broadcast of the comedy's second and, as it turned out, final series.
Given its immense stature in television history -- topping several comedy polls and being named the greatest TV programme of all time by the British Film Institute in 2000 -- it is always surprising to note that only 12 half-hour episodes of the series were ever made.
That was enough, however, to immortalise in the comic pantheon manic, tragic-comic hotelier Basil, his sharp-tongued wife Sybil, put-upon waitress Polly and long-suffering Spanish waiter Manuel.
But as John Cleese reveals in this weekend's special, the landmark comedy very nearly didn't make it into production at all. The actor says he still has in his possession a letter from a BBC script editor, dating from 1974, that describes the pilot script for Fawlty Towers as "a collection of cliches and stock characters which I can't see as being anything other than a disaster".
The genesis of Fawlty Towers has been traced back to the summer of 1970 when Cleese and his fellow Monty Python crew -- Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Eric Idle and Michael Palin -- set up camp in the British seaside town of Torquay for two weeks to shoot some sketches. The team checked into an ordinary four-star hotel, the Gleneagles, which was well-known in the area for its eccentric and short-tempered proprietor, a one Donald Sinclair.
The Irish-born Sinclair was by all accounts easily stressed and was notorious for his irritable manner towards both guests and employees.
The Pythons became targets of Sinclair's bile on their first night in the hotel restaurant when he lectured the American-born Gilliam about how he was using his dinner fork, and then later chastised Palin for requesting a wake-up call.
All of the performers were horrified at this man's rudeness -- all but Cleese.
"He was the rudest man I've ever met," he later said. "He was wonderful."
For the next four years, Cleese concentrated on his writing and performing duties with Python and several other comedy shows, but the spectre of Donald Sinclair haunted the actor, so much so that he wrote a short sketch based on the man for the series Doctor at Large.
It was in 1974 that Cleese eventually had the time and head space to sit down with his then wife Connie Booth to write a comedy based on his experiences in that Torquay hotel. The script may have solicited a less-than-enthusiastic response from the BBC initially, but luckily, others could recognise its potential.
In January 1975 producer John Howard Davies came on board the project. Having worked with John Cleese on Monty Python's Flying Circus, Davies became determined to get the show on the air, saying: "I fell out of bed laughing at the first script, and was subsequently banned from reading it at home. It was just so good."
The quality in the writing was due to the fact that Cleese and Booth agonised over the scripts, sometimes spending as long as four months poring over 10 drafts to get just one episode right. The exterior shots of the hotel were not filmed in Torquay at all, but rather at the Woburn Grange Country Club near Buckinghamshire (which mysteriously burned to the ground in 1991).
The first episode went out on September 19, 1975 and drew respectable audience figures, but the reaction from critics on the whole was not good, with the Evening Standard calling the show "thin and obvious" and The Mirror decreeing that "Long John is short on jokes". However, a repeat showing the following year was a huge success, pulling in 12 million viewers, and the critics finally united in praise.
Demand for a second series was feverish, but fans had to wait almost four years for new episodes.
This was due in part to the various work commitments of the cast, but it later emerged that Cleese and Booth's marriage had broken down in the interim, and they split in 1978. Despite any acrimony, the pair managed to produce six further instalments of Fawlty Towers that aired in 1979.
Both of them then announced that they were calling it a day, and vowed never to make a third series.
Unwittingly, Cleese and Booth invented something of a template for British sitcoms: the makers of such hits as The Young Ones, The Office, Nighty Night, Extras and Spaced have all stated that they followed the Fawlty Towers example of going out on a high after two series, and indeed there is now immense pressure on James Corden and Ruth Jones, the writers and co-stars of Gavin and Stacey, to buck the trend and produce a third series that's on a par with the previous two.
Naturally, American TV attempted several remakes of the show (amongst them the dire Payne with John Larroquette). But perhaps most surprising of all, the Germans made a one-episode adaptation in 2001 called Zum Letzten Kliff (To the Last Cliff), proving conclusively that even Basil's arch-enemies can enjoy their stay at Fawlty Towers.
Fawlty Towers: Re-opened, UKTV GOLD, Sunday 9pm. Basil's Best Bits will be broadcast on GOLD on May 17 at 9pm
