The tragedy of Fawlty Towers

The secret of any great sitcom is the delicate balance of sit and com. Mess the ‘sit’ bit up and you lose the ‘com’. Del Boy without Nelson Mandela House is as unthinkable as Alan Partridge without his ‘grief hole’ (aka the Linton Travel Tavern), which is why both of these characters eventually came unstuck. Sending the Grace Brothers’ employees on holiday to Costa Plonka in the 1977 Are You Being Served? feature-length comedy fell flat because, devoid of petty department store politics, the characters had no reason to exist – thus audiences felt cheated. 

Remove tightly written characters from their uncomfortable surroundings and viewers stop caring. The tension between tragedy and just-about-holding-it-together is what makes us root for a character, with tragedy being the prison from which our adorably flawed heroes can never escape. Think Steptoe’s hellish hovel in a backwater of Shepherd’s Bush or Rigsby’s lonely boarding house. The hope that one day we will free ourselves from the injustice of individual circumstance is what keeps us keeping on.  

Fawlty Towers, more than any other sitcom, relied on this vital conceit. Apart from a few grainy exterior shots, nearly all of the action takes place inside Basil Fawlty’s cramped seaside hotel, surely a metaphor for life’s unerring ability to disappoint. We don’t care that the cardboard sets wobble or that the guests are mere foils. What matters is how Basil fails to overcome the indignity of being a biggish fish in a tiny, stagnant pond. We can all relate to the self-righteous indignation that comes with thwarted ambition. Although Basil’s ultimate goal in life is never revealed, we know that it exists a million miles from provincial Torquay – possibly amongst the palm-fringed beaches of the Caribbean. 

And that is where we will find our grumpy misanthrope in the new series of Fawlty Towers. John Cleese will return as an octogenarian Basil, running a boutique hotel abroad with a daughter he never knew he had. But the news that he will be basking in the sun rather than hiding from the drizzle has come as a shock to the original show’s fans and critics alike. Across the media, we have heard the familiar cry of ‘If it ain’t broke…’ and ‘How do you improve on perfection?’, with many apoplectic about the possibility of Cleese using his alter ego as a platform to spread ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric. The 83-year-old actor has subsequently assured the perpetually outraged that the new series will be a multi-racial affair, adding slyly that his recently acquired GB News slot will become his platform of choice for all those rants against wokery.

Could the new series have worked as an updated version of the original rather than an entirely different concept? I doubt it somehow. The prim English archetypes that made the old series so charming simply don’t exist in the same way.

First time around, if an episode wasn’t revelling in the absurdity of our rigid class system it was laughing at stereotypical ‘foreigners’. Well, the old class system has shattered into a million indefinable pieces, while trying to make a young Polish waitress funny by giving her a silly accent wouldn’t even raise a titter now that so many waitresses, even in provincial towns such as Torquay, are from eastern Europe. The idea of a grand army type living in a run-down hotel seems preposterous to us now. And while hen-pecking battleaxes like Sybil still exist, these days it would surely be deemed misogynistic to portray her in anything but a flattering light.  

The only way I think a reboot might have worked is if Cleese had updated his original sitcom and turned it into a modern-day tragedy about the horrifying indignity of old age with a decrepit Basil living alone in a bleak flat in 2023 Torquay. The hotel itself would be long gone, replaced by luxury holiday homes. Each day an enfeebled Basil would suffer the indignity of having to shuffle past the denuded site of his greatest achievement on his way to an airless, pebble-dashed nursing home where a diminished Sybil is struggling with dementia. As they sit together reminiscing about the glory days we witness the sort of indefatigable love that keeps unlikely couples together into old age.

Back in the day, they nearly ended up killing each other, what with all the stress of swindling aristocrats, accident-prone waiters, feral rodents and barmy old bats demanding a sea view. But here they are, 50 years later, just another elderly couple from a more innocent age struggling to make sense of what just happened, held together by imperfect memories of an imperfect life.

As with all touching tragi-coms, though, there is always the danger of slipping into bathos or syrupy sentimentality. Much easier just to shove Basil into a pair of Hawaiian shorts and plonk him somewhere warm and fuzzy, a million miles from the irascible antihero we once knew and loved.