You’ve never heard of Fawlty Towers? For shame!
Fawlty Towers is one of the funniest sitcoms to come out of Britain in the 70s. Perhaps, one of the funniest sitcoms of all time. The genius behind it was John Cleese (and his wife at the time Connie Booth.)
The premise is straightforward - Basil Fawlty and his wife Sybil (his “little nest of vipers”) own a hotel called Fawlty Towers. There’s a maid, Polly (Connie Booth) and a waiter, Manuel (Andrew Sachs). A few other fairly regular characters rounded out an amazing cast. And what happens at Fawlty Towers? Basic insanity, hilarity and absolute stupidity!
Even John Cleese says it was some of his funniest work, and would be difficult to repeat. In the Montreal Gazette, just before the 2006 Just For Laughs Festival, John Cleese was interviewed, and said:
“Basil was about as funny as I could be. If you did something that was really, really good and then you do something that’s only quite good after, people are rather rude about it. So you’d just be setting yourself up for failure. You could never meet that expectation.”
Only 12 episodes were ever written, but each one is hysterical. There’s tons of physical comedy, “farce” (as Cleese puts it), and general absurdity. It was just great writing.
Even if you don’t want to get on the list go out and rent or buy Fawlty Towers and laugh yer arse off!
The Germans is probably the best episode, followed by Manuel’s Hamster (Basil the Rat)… I lved and survived this era, have lots on VHS, have met a couple like Cleese who had a hotel on the Isle Of Wight who called the hotel “Faulty Towers” as the name was copywritten at the time. It was the best period in comedy times… Cleese &Co, the Two Ronnies, Allo Allo, Dad’s Army and many more all came along at the same time. For all the Vids and DVD have a shufty at the www.bbc.co.uk shopping site as most are available.