Monty Python's John Cleese left the troupe after the show's second season feeling that, having stretched the bounds of sketch comedy to their limit and beyond, the show had run its course. He left to pursue other projects, one of which was to change the face of situation comedy. In 1975 he gave the world Fawlty Towers, arguably the greatest sit-com ever produced.
Fawlty Towers centered upon Basil Fawlty, the monumentally abusive, perpetually thwarted hotellier, a man with impossibly grand dreams and a dangerously short fuse. You couldn't imagine a character less suited to innkeeping - and yet Basil was based on an all-too-real fellow that Cleese and the Python crew encountered while doing location work. With this as his inspiration, Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth created Fawlty Towers, a hotel populated not only by the abusive Basil but also his harpy wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), the nearly competent maid Polly (played by Booth herself), the utterly incompetent Manuel (Andrew Sachs) and a stable of eccentric permanent residents including Major Gower (Ballard Berkeley) and the batty old maids Miss Tibbs (Gilly Flowers) and Miss Gatsby (Renee Roberts). Added to this volatile mix was a stream of guests, some unwilling victims of Fawlty hospitality and others just as difficult and twisted as Basil himself.
Fawlty Towers combined top-notch verbal sparring, painstakingly crafted storylines and a healthy dose of old fashioned slapstick into a comic masterpiece. The slapstick, designed by the genius behind Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks, sometimes got out of hand. Poor Andrew Sachs suffered as much as his character Manuel when he not only received severe burns while filming the classic episode The Germans, but also ended up with a concussion as a result of Cleese/Basil thwaking him/Manuel a little to enthusiastically with a frying pan in the episode The Wedding Party.
The first series included such inspired episodes as The Builder, in which Basil hires an incompetent, but affordable, contractor with disastrous results; Gourmet Night, where Manuel gets some unwelcome amorous attention from the new chef and Basil gives his car "a damn good thrashing"; and (my personal favorite) The Germans, which includes one of the all-time great comic scenes in which a concussion-addled Basil serves a group of unsuspecting German tourists.
The second season saw Cleese and Booth separate while still writing and appearing in the show together. Classic episodes - though really they’re all classic - include The Kipper and the Corpse, wherein a guest checks out early, and permanently, leaving Basil convinced he’s been poisoned by an expired bit of fish and Basil the Rat, in which the health inspector comes calling while
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