The series first appeared in 1975 on BBC Television in the UK. Written by, and starring John Cleese and his then wife, Connie Booth, it was an almost instant hit. (In fact, when the series was repeated it garnered the largest audience ever recorded for BBC-2).
Basil Fawlty, played by Cleese, is the hotel manager from hell; a combination of middle class snobbery, incompetence and complete and utter madness. He runs his hotel, Fawlty Towers, in the English seaside resort of Torquay (surely this series dealt a death blow to Torquay's tourist industry!). His wife, Sybil (Prunella Scales), is constantly frustrated by Basil's ineffectual management of the hotel. Basil, in turn, blames his Spanish waiter, Manuel (Andrew Sachs), who has turned the honourable art of waiting table into a combat sport. Trying to hold the whole thing together is waitress and housekeeper Polly (Connie Booth), who somehow manages to stay friends with everyone.
The stories are, in many ways, pure farce. There are lots of mistaken identities, unlikely situations, and embarrassing cover-ups. The joy of the programme is the sheer gusto with which the cast and crew attack the scripts. Barely a minute passes which don't lead to a laugh in some way. Legend has it that the scripts for Fawlty Towers were half as thick again as the scripts for any other half hour TV comedy series, because of the density of the writing and the complex directions. According to the award winning Unofficial Guide to Fawlty Towers, at http://www.btinternet.com/~c.tomlinson/f... , there are 400 shots, on average, in each programme - which works out at around 4 seconds a shot. That's pretty tough going.
Truth is Stranger than Fiction
The Unofficial Guide, which is an excellent site, reveals that the REAL Basil Fawlty exists in Torquay; his name is, apparently, Donald Sinclair, and he ran an extablishment called the Gleneagles Hotel. John Cleese and Connie Booth stayed there in the early seventies, and realised the character was pure gold. When the rest of the Monty Python team moved out to a hotel which was, well frankly, which was less weird, Cleese and Booth stayed on to observe Mr Sinclair.
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