All About "Fawlty Towers"

Fawlty Towers is widely regarded as one of the very best British sitcoms. The twelve episodes were perfectly written and brilliantly performed by an exceptional cast thus making every episode a hilarious comic masterpiece. The programme is a magic formula of fantastic writing, brilliant acting, perfect comic timing and flamboyant characterisation. Fawlty Towers is a must-see comedy masterpiece!

The action in this sitcom centres around Fawlty Towers, a Torquay hotel run by (quite possibly) the worst manager in England. Every negative word in existence could be used to describe Basil Fawlty; he is inept, intolerant, insensitive, paranoid, moronic, stressed, psychopathic and above all rude. Despite his shortcomings, as viewers we don't dislike Basil thanks to the fact he has to live with his wife Sybil, a woman who certainly knows how to shout and is incapable of doing any proper work. It's down to the pretty waitress Polly to help Basil get out of his many embarrassing situations, stop him from abusing the guests and keep him from hitting the Spanish waiter Manuel.

John Cleese and Connie Booth were a brilliant writing team and this is reflected in all twelve funny and clever episode plots. Their fast paced scripts ensured life at Fawlty Towers was never dull and never running smoothly. Basil was the biggest spanner in the works; he manages to lie to, cheat, abuse, grope and offend just about everyone that visits his hotel including the Germans, Americans and the Irish.

The story behind the creation of Fawlty Towers is almost as famous as the series itself. John Cleese (Basil) was inspired to write the first series after he and the rest of the Monty Python team stayed at a hotel in Torquay called the Gleneagles (which is actually mentioned in one of the episodes) whilst filming their Flying Circus TV series. The “wonderfully rude” hotel owner Donald Sinclair endeared himself to the Pythons by berating Terry Gilliam for eating his meals in a "too American" way, throwing Eric Idle's briefcase over a wall because of "a bomb scare" and chucking a bus timetable at another guest after he dared to ask the time of the next bus into town. Michael Palin noted "He seemed to view us as a colossal inconvenience right from the start".

Whilst the other Pythons took shelter in a rival hotel Cleese stayed on and made notes of all this crazy behaviour. When he took a temporary break from the Python programme he, along with his then wife Connie Booth (who played Polly), set to work turning their experience into a TV script. Two years later Fawlty Towers opened for business and introduced the world to the worst hotelier in history.