Fawlty Towers: 50 Years of Laughs

Fawlty Towers is arguably

the funniest sitcom of all time.

In terms of construction and delivery of laughter,

it is pretty much unequalled, I think.

Whatever age you were, everybody thought it was funny.

It was totally unique.

Trying to impress the illuminati of Torquay

and watching it all fall apart

is agonising, beautiful and wonderful.

And at Fawlty Towers, anything could fall apart.

Mr Moose is up!

It's done, done, done.

It's up.

It's down again.

The situations that he's in, and these amazing lines,

which I still remember nearly all of today.

I mean, I've got those 12 episodes stencilled on my head.

We watched in hysterics

as the world's worst hotelier

got himself into the most impossible positions...

both socially and physically.

I don't know how he does it.

He manages to get his feet flat on the ground

whilst his bum is practically touching the ground,

and he's got his hands behind the back of his head.

He's an acrobat. He's a dancer. He's a Nureyev of comedy.

And an artist when it comes to slapstick.

Really, Andre, he's wonderful!

This Basil's wife. This Basil.

This smack on head.

The cast is just solid gold.

Put this combo of people together,

you're of course gonna produce absolute magic on screen.

He put Basil in the ratatouille?!

Yes!

Ah!

He's from Barcelona.

I think what John wanted to do was a perfect comedy,

and John believes in perfection.

John Cleese is one of the most accomplished comedians

to walk planet Earth,

matching a brilliant comedy brain

with a unique physical ability to make us all laugh.

He was tall, he was lugubrious.

The whole movement of the man was extraordinary.

Everything is perfect about that man comedically.

In Monty Python, Cleese wrote and performed

in the most influential and funniest sketches of all time...

Hello, Polly!

..some of which involved the abuse of stuffed animals.

Wakey-wakey!

Rise and shine!

'A lot of the sketches that I played with John

'were customer and shopkeeper.'

And it was always the shopkeeper

who was the rather mild-mannered, irritating person,

who won the battle in the end.

Cleese's tall, patrician appearance

made him the perfect authority figure

in ground-breaking, iconic satirical skits,

where he could abuse those socially beneath him.

I look down on him because I am upper class.

I look up to him because he is upper class.

But I look down on him because he is lower class.

I am middle class.

I know my place.

John Cleese could play upper-class toffs like nobody else.

In something like the old Frost Report sketch,

"I look down on him" and all of those different things

about the nature of the upper class, he is in charge.

The great skill John had, of course,

was to play these great authority figures,

but undermine them.

It's that sort of wonderful juxtaposition

between authority and silliness,

which he did so well.

Many of you will have already heard the tragic news about Newton,

our faithful old retainer.

He fell to his death early yesterday morning...

from his bed.

Poor, dear old Newton.

And so I am giving the second form the entire morning off school

in his memory.

Get the spades from me and the body from Matron.

Someone like David Frost, who, of course,

was a great alchemist of comedy in the 1960s,

he would see people, whether it was The Two Ronnies,

whether it was multiple people who ended up in Python,

he would see them and think,

"Yeah, these are people who I need to be working with,

"because they're brilliant."

Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle,

working on a so-called children's show,

but very anarchic for a children's show,

called Do Not Adjust Your Set.

John Cleese and Graham Chapman

had been doing At Last The 1948 Show, Rediffusion.

And Barry Took,

whose job it was at the BBC to bring comedy to the masses,

sort of brought those two factors together

and became Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Their concoction of intellectual surrealism

paired with the downright daft

heralded a comedy revolution across the world,

with Cleese at the centre of it all.

If you look at Cleese's performance in Monty Python,

he's not the kind of fragile character that Basil is,

he's the very straitlaced announcer,

who speaks straight down the barrel of the camera

of all of these absurdities,

and the joke is that he is unflappable.

And now for something completely different.

An occasional supporting actor on Python was Cleese's wife,

Connie Booth, an American writer and performer

he'd met in New York in 1964.

Connie was a regular attender at the recordings,

and you can hear her, cos she laughs...

Connie, with this sort of... GASPS

..intake of breath.

She doesn't laugh out, she sort of...

GASPS

And Booth wasn't afraid to get into the ring with Cleese comedically,

dangerously throwing herself about to get a laugh.

I can see nothing wrong

with one healthy man beating the living daylights

out of a little schoolgirl.

Her intuitive sort of style, with Cleese particularly,

just sparkles on camera, so she really blossomed.

Python's surreal concepts often demanded unusual locations.

Filming a spoof of Scott Of The Antarctic,

but set in the Sahara Desert,

the Pythons needed a beach, and so headed to the south coast,

armed with inappropriate clothing and a stuffed lion.

And it was here,

while shooting this bizarre sketch on a beach in Torquay,

where Cleese found his inspiration

for an irate hotelier who hated his guests.

The roots of Fawlty Towers are in this experience

that the whole Monty Python team had

booking into this hotel, run by a Mr Sinclair.

I remember saying, "Can we have an alarm call?"

"Yes, yes, yes."

"And... perhaps a cup of tea or some..."

"Tea?!"

And it was all that sort of stuff.

And then, you know, "What time do you want it?"

"Well... erm... We have to leave at seven."

"Seven?! Seven?!"

"Seven o'clock?!" I mean, he was absolutely just like Fawlty.

Everything seemed to...

Everything to do with hotels and what the essence of hotels was

was something that he didn't want to deliver.

He took Eric Idle's briefcase and threw it over a wall,

thinking it was a bomb. And when one of them said,

"Why do you think someone would try to blow up the hotel?"

he just went, "Well, we've had staffing problems."

Graham, Terry and myself just couldn't take it.

We thought, "We can't stay here a moment longer."

So we went somewhere else.

We could not believe that John had decided to stay on.

And now we realise what a great move it was to stay there.

And he must have been just filling the notebook at night

with all these wonderful Sinclair-isms.

It wasn't long before a caricature of Sinclair

appeared on our screens.

John Cleese was working on a show called Doctor At Large,

and he wrote an episode called No Ill Feelings.

And there is a character in that that's played by Timothy Bateson

who is basically sort of the prototype for Basil Fawlty.

It is a hotel proprietor

who treats every single request made by a guest

as an absolute affront.

Cereal? No, thanks, just...

Kipper or sausage?

Would the kipper be quick?

I beg your pardon?

Would the kipper be quicker?

Well, it'll be as quick as it can be.

It can't be quicker than that, can it?

It's quite exciting, isn't it,

to see that little moment when you go,

"Something that became absolutely an iconic sitcom series

"started with this little scene."?

I think it was a very unusual choice after Monty Python

to do essentially a farce like Fawlty Towers.

And I think that was quite a common view.

Famously, they wrote the first episode

and handed it in to the BBC commissioning executive,

who sent them back this excoriating note.

"I'm afraid I find this one as dire as the title.

"It's a sort of Prince Of Denmark of the hotel world,

"a collection of cliches and stock characters

"that I can't see being anything but a disaster."

Oh, dear, oh, dear.

That's shocking.

As terrible mistakes go,

I mean, that is right up there with turning down the Beatles,

but, I mean, thank goodness somebody saw sense at the BBC.

A series of six was eventually commissioned,

and Cleese's comedic tour de force came to life