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Monday 1 December 2008

Fawlty Towers

Perfecting the art of rudeness

Roger Lewis

Cleese was enthralled. He was already getting bored with the surreal skit format and with having to play bereaved parrot fanciers and ministers of silly walks. The deranged hotelier would allow him to explore a character-based comic style, with lots of layers. The show was commissioned in January 1975, the BBC executives being traditionally bone-headed about what to expect. ‘Very boring . . . I cannot see anything but a disaster if we go ahead with it,’ ran an internal memo that McCann has found. Twelve million viewers would tune in and the programme has been repeated endlessly in over 60 countries.

At the very least, Fawlty Towers was homage to Cleese’s upbringing in Weston-super-Mare, where on the surface there is ‘a kind of brittle politeness and underneath a lot of seething rage’. Cleese had read Law at Cambridge, and his contemporaries reckon he’d have made an excellent barrister. ‘Those glaring eyes would have won him many cases.’ Instead he became a script-writer with Graham Chapman, whose alcoholism was an increasing bind, leading to the Pythons coming apart and falling out, ‘like the history of the Balkans — millions of alliances constantly breaking up and reforming’. Perhaps Chapman’s drunkenness was a convenient excuse — as Cleese had already been complaining about ‘having to turn up at 8 a.m. on Monday morning on Wakefield railway station dressed as a penguin’. On a promotional trip to Canada ‘he was just so unfriendly to everyone’ — and so this disillusioned, depressive creature, who often found himself suffering from psychosomatic flu-like symptoms, was going to find Fawlty Towers therapeutic, turning his haunted self-pity into the frantic behaviour and logical delirium of farce.

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