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Monday 1 December 2008

Fawlty Towers

Perfecting the art of rudeness

Roger Lewis

On top of everything else, his marriage was unravelling. Nevertheless, he co-wrote the series with his wife, Connie Booth, who played Polly, the pretty waitress. Booth was in charge of Sybil’s dialogue — ‘What are you doing?’ she snaps. ‘I’m kissing you, dear,’ he sheepishly replies. ‘Well, don’t.’ Cleese concentrated on Basil’s inadequacies, finding ways to make the character paradoxically sympathetic. Six weeks were devoted to each script, shaping and editing. Exteriors were shot at a country club at Bourne End, near High Wycombe (which burned down in 1991). Cleese was ‘extremely rigorous at rehearsal’, recalls Prunella Scales, who was made to go over movements and the handling of props repeatedly. Andrew Sachs was banged on the head with a saucepan for real and received no sympathy. He burned his arms when a jacket caught fire and received £700 compensation. Manuel, incidentally, with his comic linguistic mangling, was inspired by a Torquay waiter who pronounced ‘architect’ as ‘heart attack’.

Only 12 half-hour episodes were made, six in 1975 and a further six in 1979. The show was recorded on a cheap, wobbly set in front of a small audience, with 400 different camera shots. Highlights that are now indelibly part of our popular culture include Sybil gassing down the phone to her friend Audrey (‘I know, I know’) and Basil goose-stepping, not mentioning the war and administering a good thrashing to an Austin 1100. My own favourite scene is Bernard Cribbins hoping to earmark BBC2 for his veritable ‘televisual feast’ — a documentary on Squawking Bird, the leader of the Blackfoot Indians in the late 18th century.

McCann is able to tell us that the sitcom has been adapted in America as Chateau Snavely, starring Harvey Korman, and in Germany it is known as Zoom Letzten Kliff, where Basil and Sybil have become Viktor and Helga. The real Gleneagles was officially reopened by Prunella Scales last year after a £1.5 million refurbishment. Other trivia to cherish: Ballard Berkeley, who played the dotty Major, once shared a flat with Cary Grant; originally Basil was going to be played by Denholm Elliott; the Aeolian Quartet was instructed to play the theme music ‘badly’; and Donald Sinclair died in 1981 from a heart attack and stroke when some workmen he’d upset painted his patio furniture and car gunmetal grey during the night. ‘They were not happy with painting the car,’ said Betty. ‘They had to paint the windscreen as well.’ As for Cleese himself, he sold his Video Arts training films company for £50 million and scarcely has any incentive to revive his great masterpiece. If you’re that rich, who needs a funny-bone?

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