"Welcome to a Fawlty Towers exclusive." "30 years after the doors finally shut on the world-famous Torquay hotel, we're checking in once more to reveal the ten best bits, as chosen by the show's star and creator, John Cleese, now sunning himself in Southern California." "If someone stood me against the wall and said they were going to shoot me if I didn't say what was my absolutely favourite moment," "I would actually say..." "Uh-uh, not yet!" "You're a naughty boy, Fawlty!" "Along the way, as John picks Basil's Best Bits, we'll be revisiting the shows episode by episode, to find out why Fawlty Towers has stood the test of time." "Fawlty Towers survives because it's brilliantly made, brilliantly written, immaculately performed, precision comedy." "If this was back in the States, I wouldn't board my dog here." "Fussy, is he?" "Poodle?" "It was beautifully written and beautifully directed and John, Connie and Andrew are wonderful people to work with." "You're only single once." "Twice can be arranged." "We'll also be talking to cast and crew about their favourite moments." "If you asked anybody, and it certainly is one of mine, is The Germans." "I'll do the funny walk." "I don't think you can beat that moment, "Would you care for a rat?"" "Would you care for rat, or...?" "Not rat, filigree Siberian hamster." "Of course it's a rat!" "You have rats in Spain, don't you?" "Or did Franco have them all shot?" "My favourite line of all, "I am a doctor and I want my sausages."" "I don't know why I think it's so funny." "Look, I'm a doctor." "I'm a doctor and I want my sausages." "I tell you, is finish." "It's extraordinary that people still say it." "I mean, everybody loves sausages." "Maybe it's that simple." "And a cavalcade of very special celebrity fans celebrates the bits they love the best." "Go away." "'I do like the Lord Melbury one' because it exposes Basil for what he is." "I think it is him waking up in hospital and looking at the nurse and going..." "My God, you're ugly, aren't you?" ""Don't mention ze war!"" "Serving a trifle for a duck." "He puts his hands in and separates this whole cake out." "Favourite moment has to be... giving the car a damn good thrashing." "So, without further ado, let's begin at the very beginning." "Written by and starring husband and wife John Cleese and Connie Booth, the first ever episode of Fawlty Towers arrived on our screens on 1975 and opened with Basil battling an unhung picture and a hotel full of riff-raff." "Have you seen the people in room six?" "They've never even sat on chairs before, they're commoners." "The day isn't going well for our hapless hotel manager, but then a certain Lord Melbury checks in." "Yes?" "A single room..." "Your name please, could I have your name?" "PHONE RINGS Melbury." "One second please." "Hello?" "Ah yes, Mr O'Reilly, it's perfectly simple." "When I asked you to build me a wall," "I was rather hoping that instead of just dumping the bricks in a pile, you might have found time to cement them together, you know..." "Fawlty is talking to the builder and then he notices that the guest who's signing in has only signed his surname." "Would you put both your names, please?" "Will you give me a date?" " I only use one." "You don't have a first name?" "No, I am Lord Melbury, so I simply sign Melbury." "Go away." "I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting, Your Lordship..." "I do apologise, so please accept my forgiveness." "Now, is there something, something, anything that I can do for you?" "Anything?" "That's excruciatingly well done." "Basil trying to be nice to people, being impressed by people." "Well, I have filled this in." "Please, don't bother with that." "Now a special room, a single?" "A double?" "A suite?" "It was almost too embarrassing to watch Basil's snobbery." "He always is falling over people who have a Sir or a Lord or a... in front of their names." "Very funny how much that means to him." "Just a single." "Absolutely, how very wise if I may say so, Your Honour." "Yes, with a bath." "Oh, naturally, naturally." "Naturellement." "HE LAUGHS HEARTILY" "It's this bizarre snobbery, that is so perverted and it's very British and he's so dazzling at it." "I shall be staying for one or two nights..." "Oh, please, please." "HE RINGS BELL Manuel." "'That's one of my favourite episodes." "'Just says, "This is this bloke'" ""you're going to be seeing quite a lot of and this is what he's like,"" "and it was just caught in a second." "Our next moment from the first episode is when Polly the maid reveals that Basil's lord and master isn't all he's cracked up to be." "He showed me identification." "They're watching Melbury, he's a confidence trickster." "I see." "What do you mean, you see?" "Let's have a look at these valuables." "What are you doing?" "I forbid you to open that safe." "Sybil, I forbid you to take that case out." "Sybil, do not open that case, I forbid it." "I have forbidden this." "I think one of my favourite bits is the moment that Basil discovers the bricks in Lord Melbury's briefcase." "'John just looks at the bricks, 'and then he picks one up, and that gets a laugh.'" "Takes the other one, and he smells it or something, which is such a strange thing to do and then he bangs them together." "And then in the end, he just makes a noise." "HE GRUNTS" "'Like "Take it away".'" "That's beautiful, it takes it out of standard sitcom area." "'It's a cruel moment and it's so funny and yet it's so poignant.'" "You feel so sorry for John." "It's a wonderful moment." "Cue the first recorded explosion of Basil's simmering rage," "Well, how are you, Lord Melbury?" "How are you, then?" "All right, mate?" "How's me old mucker?" "People get really, really angry when they're cross with themselves, and it's one of those simple truths that Basil of course exhibits all the time." "When he realises that Lord Melbury is not what he seemed to be, he gets very, very cross because he has been humiliated." "He, Basil, has been humiliated." "Any valuables to deposit, Sir Richard?" "Any bricks or...?" "Oh, no!" "I do apologise." "You bastard!" "And I remember watching this with my parents." "He just shouts "Bastard!"" "really loudly." "Twice, I think." "Hello, Lord Melbury." "Bastard!" "It was one of those, "How will my parents react?" moments." "Do please excuse me one moment." "'I suppose the bit where he's kicking Lord Melbury...'" "That's a typical John moment, I think, when John's showing through Basil Fawlty." "Just one." "Sorry, Mr Fawlty." "Just one." "Please!" "This is another feature of the Fawlty Towers episodes, there comes a moment when Basil just cracks." "That's why he gets so cross, he's cracking up." "That's what happens when people just lose control." "Coming up, more great moments from series one and we find out what moment John Cleese has selected as the first of Basil's Best Bits." "Go away." "Welcome back to this Fawlty Towers exclusive." "John Cleese had refused a Radio Times front cover to promote the first episode because he wanted people to discover it for themselves." "Less than two million did." "But that changed as the series slowly grew a strong audience," "Friday nights on BBC Two." "We used to laugh quite a lot." "Yes, but not at the same time, Basil." "Coming up, the creative genius behind the show, John Cleese, will be revealing the first of his very favourite moments, so keep your eye out for Basil's Best Bits." "Argh!" "In the second episode to be screened, the Fawltys take a trip to Paignton, leaving the staff in charge." "Manuel Towers, how are you?" "Is nice today." "Good." "Goodbye." "Whilst Basil and Sybil are gone, some Irish builders arrive with predictably catastrophic results." "Polly's been put in charge of overseeing some building alterations but she falls asleep and during the period she's having a brief nap, and my God, that woman is so overworked, the hapless builder bricks over the entrance into the dining room." "Polly, what have you done with my hotel?" "Polly, what have you done to my hotel?" "What?" "Look!" "Oh, it's nice, I like it there." "Ouch!" "What have you done with my dining room door?" "Where is it?" "Basil treats women so badly, not just by his general incompetence but he actually is prepared to fight them, physically fight them." "Well, I mean, is that acceptable?" "I just think he's a... misanthrope generally." "I mean men, women, what have you, there's so much rage in him." "Oh, of course, there I was thinking it was your fault because you'd been left in charge or Manuel's fault for not waking you, and all the time it was my fault!" "Oh, it's so obvious now, I've seen the light!" "Well, I must be punished then, mustn't I?" "You're a naughty boy, Fawlty." "Don't do it..." "What am I going to do?" "!" "She's going to be back at lunchtime." "Now, wait." "I'm a dead man." "Do you realise?" "Easy..." "You're dead too, we're all dead!" "Don't panic." "What else is there to do?" "!" "HE MOANS MANICALLY" "Shhh." "We've got to call O'Reilly." "He made this mess, he can come in and clear it up." "Oh, just pull yourself together!" "Come on!" "I think when he threatens to hit Polly is one of my favourite moments because it's so unexpected." "He's taking it out on anything or anybody except himself." "Again!" "But then he realised, no, it's worked, slap me again!" "And then he's telling her off for not hitting him hard enough." "Harder!" "Right, I'll call O'Reilly." "Such a wonderful complexity of stuff going on there." "Matters get worse for Basil when Sybil returns to find her hotel rearranged." "I'm sick to death of you." "You never learn, do you?" "You never, ever learn." "'I'm in the bar having a quiet drink,' and I come in and I'm waiting to be complimented, I suppose, by this dishy lady on the beautiful work I'd done, and she suddenly turns nasty." "He's shoddy, he doesn't care, he's a liar and incompetent, he's lazy, he's a half-witted thick Irish joke." "Oh, hello O'Reilly, funny, we were just talking about you and then we got on to another Irish builder we used to know." "Oh, God, he was awful!" "I was talking about you, Mr O'Reilly." "Were you, dear?" "I thought you were talking..." "David Kelly played the Irish cowboy builder and he played it with a mixture of cowardice and hopelessness and drunkenness, which was quite appropriate." "I like a woman with spirit, I do, I do." "You think I'm joking, don't you?" "Oh, don't smile." "Why are you smiling, Mr O'Reilly?" "Well, to be perfectly honest, Mrs Fawlty, I like a woman with spirit." "Oh, do you?" "Is that what you like?" "I do, I do." "Oh, good." "I liked bashing him over the head." "What did I bash him with?" "Now Sybil, that's enough." "She beat us up with an umbrella." "Come on, then, give us a smile." "Nice to be able to let go and have a bash, literally!" "Now collect your things and get out." "Argh!" "When she clouted me, and John, we really felt it." "I shouldn't bring it up because poor Pru, she wouldn't have intended to do so, but she did really clobber us and it was worth suffering for the art." "In the third episode, an amorous French lady is visiting Devon in search of antiques." "Ah, Mr Fawlty, you're so charming." "Well, one does one's best." "And meanwhile, a party of excitable wedding guests checks in and Basil becomes increasingly agitated, seeing sexual intent everywhere." "SHE SHRIEKS AND LAUGHS" "Are we ready?" "I think we are, yes." "Well, may I have your name please?" "Yes, it's Bruce." "Mr and Mrs Bruce." "That's right." "Is it a double bed?" "I beg your pardon?" "Has our room got a double bed?" "A double bed?" "Yes." "We've only got one double bed, do you want that?" "Oh, very much indeed, yes." "Well, I'll have to put you in number 12 then." "All right." "'Basil is horrified, of course,' because this young couple arrive and he suddenly realizes they are not married." "They are part of this new, modern, promiscuous society which should not be tolerated at all." "And therefore he has no way that he is going to put them in a double room." "I think there's a letter for me." "What?" "There's a letter for me there." "No there isn't." "Yes." "Jean Wilson." "Jean Wilson, is this you?" "Mmm-hmm." "Now what's going on here?" "Well, I can't give you a double room then." "Oh, look..." "It's against the law." "What law?" "The law of England, nothing to do with me." "Nothing at all." "I can give you two singles if you like." "Right in front of him, this promiscuous behaviour, it's not correct, it's not proper." "The best thing in the episode about sex, which demonstrates how Basil still sees filth and depravity in everything around him is that this guy comes to reception and asks if any chemists are open." "Do you know if there's a chemist still open?" "I beg your pardon?" "Do you know if there's a chemist still open?" "I suppose you think this is funny, do you?" "Funny?" "Ha, ha, ha." "No, no I really want to know." "Do you?" "I don't." "So far as I know, the chemists are shut." "You'll have to wait till tomorrow." "Sorry." "Well, in those days, chemists had only one meaning and that was, you are going to have sex tonight, and that's why you want to go to a chemist." "I don't suppose you've got a..." "Now look!" "Just don't push your luck." "I have a breaking point, you know." "I only want some batteries." "I don't believe it." "What?" "Batteries, eh?" "You know something?" "You disgust me." "I know what people like you get up to and I think it's disgusting." "What are you talking about?" "It's for my electric razor." "I want to shave." "Oh, yes?" "I haven't shaved today." "Look, see?" "Electric razor, huh?" "Right." "Well, that's what I was referring to." "It is of course disgusting that you haven't shaved, but understandable." "Sometimes I don't shave either, that's disgusting too so I'll have a razor sent up." "Thank you so much." "Goodnight." "And it's in the wedding party that we find the first of Basil's Best Bits, the favourite moments personally chosen by John Cleese himself." "Once Connie and I had observed what Pru was doing with Sybil, we took great pleasure in writing just little bits of dialogue where she could go on being Sybil." "Basil would be in the background, of course, becoming exasperated and I'm very fond of this very quiet little scene." "SYBIL LAUGHS" "Sybil wasn't based on anyone." "That was something that we discovered as we went along." "You write a character, after a time you say a line and somehow, you can't explain it, it feels right." "You say another line, that doesn't feel right." "PHONE RINGS" "Hello?" "Audrey, any news?" "Oh, dear, he hasn't." "Oh, I know." "He doesn't deserve you, Audrey, he really doesn't." "Exactly." "I know you have." "I know, I know." "Oh, I know." "Are you going to go on like that all night?" "What was that, Audrey?" "Oh, I know." "I know." "Why's she telling you, then?" "I understand, dear, I really do." "I can't stand it any more." "I'll go and clear the roof or something." "DOORBELL RINGS Ah, there's the front door bell, somebody's back late." "Yes, yes." "I expect they forgot to get their pass key." "I know." "Somebody better go and let them in." "Yes." "I'll go then, shall I?" "Mmm." "Yes, I agree, right, I'll go then." "You know who that is, don't you?" "That's your pair." "The Kama Sutra set." ""Good evening, welcome to Basil Fawlty Knocking Shops Ltd"." "No, dear, it's only Basil." "Our next celebrated scene from this episode comes after John's first favourite and it's when Basil finds himself the focus of a flirtatious French guest." "French, hmm, so what does that mean, French?" "My goodness me, that means all sorts of wickedness." "That means a lady of ill virtue, almost certainly." "She's that rapacious, predatory..." "French woman that brings out all of the English neuroses about sex." "I shall sleep au naturelle tonight." "Good idea." "Right." "Only it's not so much fun on your own." "Oh, well, one can always pretend." "Oh, twinge from the old leg." "Better go and lie down." "Goodnight." "Goodnight!" "Damn shrapnel." "When Mrs Peignoir could seemingly be offering him some sort of sexual lifeline, he doesn't really know what to do." "He's flattered by it and he's certainly," "I think, enthusiastic about the idea, but the moment it looks like possibly becoming a reality, he's shaken to the core." "I think you've forgotten something." "Did I?" "Damn, well, there you go." "Your recorder." "Oh, thank you." "I think she was very funny in it and I mean, she's very good, she dredged up that fantastic French accent." "You left it in my room so you could come and get it, didn't you?" "The accent that I had, I sometimes think sounds slightly Hungarian, but there you are, I'm quite critical of my work." "IN FRENCH ACCENT:" "But of course, it's very like that, "You're a very naughty man, Mr Fawlty."" "I'm not having you knocking on my door in the middle of the night." "LAUGHS AWKWARDLY" "I should cocoa!" "You naughty man!" "Goodnight." "Goodnight." "'The tension's building because Mrs Peignoir's flirting with him." "'Sybil arrives and knocks on the door and Basil panics,' and thinks it's Mrs Peignoir who's come back for him, and he tells her to go away." "Let me in, Basil." "You'll meet somebody else sooner or later." "Basil!" "Try to control yourself." "Where do you think you are?" "Paris?" "Then he clocks it, that it's Sybil, and this transition, how were we going to make that moment work?" "Go away!" "My wife will hear us!" "This is your wife." "Oh, what a terrible dream." ""Oh, what a terrible dream."" "And that was brilliant because it was so Basil." "We've seen three episodes, yet John's chosen just one favourite moment which, by my calculation, means there are nine more to go." "What?" "So what else will he pick?" "I think he'll pick the moment when he's in the kitchen and he's in effect beating himself up." "What do you Mr and Mrs Hamilton would think?" "I think the moose, probably, the talking moose." "How are you, sir?" "I don't know." "I don't know what John will pick." "That'll be interesting." "Come on then, give us a smile!" "Welcome back to this Fawlty Towers exclusive." "Creators John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote their high farce sitcom to include a unique parade of British talent who'd check into the hotel each week to play against the regular cast." "Cheers." "Up yours, Basil." "The next episode is a classic example, with the great Bernard Cribbins starring as an overly officious guest, who just happens to check in on a day when Basil and Sybil are on high alert for hotel inspectors." "Is it possible for me to reserve the BBC Two Channel for the duration of this televisual feast?" "Why don't you talk properly?" "Basil is convinced that he's an undercover inspector and is enraged to find out that he's just a humble purveyor of spoons." "Spoons, eh?" "I'm sorry?" "Sp...oons." "It's this little misunderstanding which gives us our second" "Basil's Best Bit, as carefully chosen by John Cleese." "Another very favourite moment of mine is a scene between me and Connie and Bernard Cribbins." "Bernard's always been a huge, huge favourite of mine, and going way back, I have always loved his performance," "I was so happy that he was able to be in the Hotel Inspectors episode." "In this I'm just about to be rude to him and then Polly, as usual, covers for me absolutely brilliantly." "I love the bit of acting that goes on about not necessarily having to look at someone when you're talking to them." "And that follows for about 30 seconds afterwards and I think it's the best bit of comedy acting in Fawlty Towers." "I've changed my mind, I do not want the cheese salad," "I wish to cancel it." "I'm not used to being spoken to like that, and I've no wish to continue my luncheon." "I do apologise if what I said seemed a trifle brusque." "Brusque?" "It was rude, Mr Fawlty, rude!" "Well, I'm deeply sorry if it came over like that." "Nothing could have been further from my mind." "You told me to shut up." "No, no, he told me to shut up." "He what?" "He said it to me!" " I know I was looking at you, but I was talking to Polly, wasn't I, Polly?" "Oh, yes." "Did you notice that I was looking at you but talking to her?" "What?" "He was looking at you but talking to me, wasn't he?" "Wasn't I?" "What?" "So you weren't being rude, were you?" "Absolutely not, you see?" "Me?" "Yes." "But if you say shut up to somebody, that's the one you want to shut up isn't it!" "Well not necessarily." " I'm sorry, were you talking to me?" "Yes." " I beg your pardon." "You see how easily these misunderstandings occur?" "Yes, I do." " So one cheese salad, Polly." "Certainly, Mr Hutchinson." "If there's anything else, please don't hesitate to ask." "The climax to the same scene, where Basil finally loses his rag with the salesman, provides our next moment." "Oh, yes." "Ah!" "You get the confrontation of Bernie Cribbins and Basil Fawlty, which is the irresistible force meeting the unmoveable object." "He was a bit a pain as Basil was, basically, and the little clash was inevitable." "I'm sorry, I do not want the omelette." "It's nice." "I don't want it, I've sent it back once." "Yes, give it to me." "Yes, I fail to see how this can happen." "I've torn it up, you'll never see it again." "'There's this manic moment when everything explodes' and he clamps his hands over my face." "I disappeared under his armpit at one point, I think, and then of course you've got to knock me out and... certainly I had to ask him to slow up a bit on the karate chop." "He's a big lad and he was knocking lumps off me." "All I wanted was a cheese salad." "It wasn't as though I'd ordered an elephant's ear on a bun!" "I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous." "I'm glad we sorted..." "For a man who's supposed to be running a hotel... your behaviour, your behaviour is totally..." "Is there anything else that I can get you?" "I can't breathe." "Argh!" "Cheese salad?" "I can't breathe!" "It's all right, he's only choking!" "Don't worry." "A bit of cheese went the wrong way." "Never mind, he's fainted." "Manuel!" "Poor chap." "Bit of cheese." "Yes, please." "It was the interplay between the two of them, that's what I loved, the sheer timing and the speed of it." "There's not a line wasted, but the way they bounced off each other was superb." "I wouldn't call it physical comedy, I'd call it pure violence." "Would you like to go in there and discuss it?" "No, I'd prefer to come in here and discuss it." "Oh, fine." "I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess..." "'Physical comedy is one of the most satisfying things to do, I think, 'if you get it right and I thought we did it very well, actually.'" "John's a very good recipient of a knee in the crotch, I will say that, although I had to lift my knee very high." "He's very tall." "Ohhh!" "I'm not a violent man, Mr Fawlty." "Yes, you are!" "No, I'm not." "The reaction of the audience on the night, when he finally got the pay-off with the custard pie, woof." "Ah, please, senor, Mr Fawlty want to say adios." "He wants to what?" "Ah, ah, oh!" "You think he's going to get it in the face and smack in the crotch." "That was the one." "Oh!" "I can still feel it." "Papers arrived, Fawlty?" "Then John takes the bag and puts it there and squeezed it." "I never thought he squeezed it enough," "I wanted to see it spurting out again, but that didn't happen." "Gourmet Night at Fawlty Towers was the first episode to get over three million viewers." "I should never have let you write that advert." "Fancy putting "No riff raff"!" "But, predictably, all does not go to plan, when a combination of drunken chefs, stalled cars and rejected condiments conspire against him." "The thing about Basil Fawlty is that he doesn't care whether the person he's having a fight with is elderly, dead, a hotel inspector or a tiny child, he just doesn't care." "Is there something we can get you instead, sonny?" "I'd like some bread and salad cream." "To eat?" "Well, there's the bread and there's the mayonnaise." "I said salad cream, stupid." "It's not unreasonable to ask for salad cream, but as it happens, the level of pretension that Fawlty is operating at that point is that he's moved beyond salad cream into the superior stuff of mayonnaise." "May I ask why you don't have salad cream?" "I mean, most..." "Well, the chef usually buys it only on special occasions, you know, gourmet nights and so on, but when he's got a bottle, oh, he's a genius with it." "He can unscrew the cap like Robert Carrier, it's a treat to watch, and then...right on the plate." "He thinks of this boy as common for wanting salad cream." "I'll tell him to get some salad cream." "You never know when Henry Kissinger's going to drop in." "Oh, sorry, sorry about that." "We always had salad cream, I think." "I was slightly offended by that episode." "Basil hopes to restore some decorum later in the evening, welcoming his more distinguished guests for his inaugural gourmet night." "My favourite moment on the gourmet night, when they're all meeting before they go in to the meal, he's got the names wrong and he can't deal with it, and he's just digging himself deeper and deeper into this pit." "There is one man who turns up and he's Twitchen." "'The problem is there's another person who'd come before 'who does have a twitch.' Ah, good." "Colonel." "Colonel and Mrs Hall?" "May I introduce Mr and Mrs..." "Have you met?" "No, no, we haven't." "Have you?" "No." "Oh, good." "Well, what would you like to drink then?" "He realises at that second he can't say what he's about to say." "If he had, Colonel Hall would have been introduced to Mr Twitchens, all would have been well." "No, no, we still don't know the name." "Oh, Fawlty, Basil Fawlty." "Yes..." "No, no!" "Theirs." "Oh, theirs." "I'm so sorry, I thought you meant yours..." "HE CACKLES" "Warm, isn't it?" "I could do with a drink too, so another sherry?" "Aren't you going to introduce us?" "Didn't I?" "No." "Oh, sorry." "This is Mr and Mrs..." "HE MUMBLES" "What?" "Mr and Mrs..." "Ah!" "John's falls throughout Fawlty Towers are absolutely wonderful." "He goes down like a tree that's been felled, and it's his way of getting out of having to deal with a situation." "It's absolutely hysterical." "Instead of just saying, "I've got to leave the room," he just collapses." "With his Gourmet Night falling apart," "Basil tries to salvage the evening by driving to a local restaurant for supplies after his own chef is too drunk to cook." "All the ingredients for a classic comedy moment, adding up to a delicious portion of TV history." "Come on." "Come on!" "It's probably everyone's favourite moment, but it has to be Basil beating the car up." "Cars can be a nuisance." "Start, you vicious bastard, come on!" "Oh, my God!" "I'm warning you, if you don't start..." "I don't think it can mean as much to young people now." "I mean, cars now all work." "20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, cars didn't work, and you had one chance in 50 or 30, or whatever it was, that that morning, the bloody thing won't start." "Right, that's it!" "I've had enough!" "You've tried it on just once too often!" "Right..." "That really made me laugh a lot." "It was the way he disappeared and they held the shot for quite a long time, just long enough, really, to think, "Where the Dickens has he gone?"" "Well, don't say I haven't warned you!" "I've laid it on the line to you time and time again!" "Right, well, this is it!" "I'm going to give you a damn good thrashing!" "I figured, like everybody else, I'm sure, that he was running home, and instead he comes back on screen." "And he was obviously snapping off a branch to whack it with." "And it's just a sort of pathetic attempt to sort of deal with technology, by hitting it with a tree!" "How do you top a moment like that?" "Well, like this, according to John Cleese, as he picks the third of his personal favourites." "I guess that the next little scene is my personal favourite from the point of view of J Cleese, brackets, actor, and it's a moment of great hope for all of us, when Basil discovers that what he's got under the lid is not duck," "but he thinks there might be some duck there anyway." "So Uncle Ted comes in with his crate of Brown Ale and..." "SHE CACKLES ...and mother says, "Oh, Ted, look who's here," and he says..." "SHE CACKLES AGAIN" "OK, Polly." "OK." "Got the sauces?" "Got them." "Right." "When someone has a moment of utter disaster coming up, and the more puffed up they are before it, the further they have to fall, and it's terribly simple, it's almost mechanics, but it always works." "Ah!" "Ladies and gentlemen...so sorry to have kept you waiting." "You take the top off, realise, and then put it down again, as though that might somehow change things." "Well, who's for trifle?" "What?" "Trifle for you, Mrs Hall?" "What about the duck, Fawlty?" "Duck's off, sorry." "I love the optimism, the fact there's just a chance that we might... the fact that there might just be a duck hidden in this horrible pink blancmange, if only they looked carefully." "That's all it is, it's the..." "it's the hope." "I can speak English..." "After the break, more of Basil's Best Bits, as mein host welcomes some very special European guests." "Oh, German!" "I'm sorry, I thought there was something wrong with you!" "Welcome back to Basil's Best Bits, as John Cleese picks his favourite Fawlty Towers moments." "It's hard to believe that less than 3.5 million people tuned in to watch the next episode when it went out." "It's up." "It's down again." "An incalculable number of fans across the globe have since revelled in this little piece of TV history." "The episode opens with Sybil finding herself in hospital for an ingrowing toenail operation." "BASIL:" "Oh, yes, how is the old toenail?" "Still growing in, hmm?" "Still burrowing its way down to the bone?" "Still macheteing its way through the nerve, eh?" "Basil is left to get on with the serious business of running the hotel." "On the agenda, testing the fire drill, welcoming a party of Germans and hanging a certain decorative hunting trophy." "How are you, sir?" "You see, I speak English well." "I learn it from a book." "I liked the scene with the moose, it's a nice sort..." "It's a clumsy prop." "But it was a lovely idea for the Major to think he's really got the DTs now." "How are you, sir?" "I can speak English." "The Major can't see Manuel but he can see the moose, so he thinks the moose is talking to him, and it's just...a fantastically funny scene." "MANUEL:" "It's a beautiful day today." "Is it?" "Oh, all right." "Yes, yes, I suppose it is." "Yes." "I can speak English." "I learn it from a book." "Did you?" "Did you really?" "It shouldn't work." "It's too silly." "But the great thing about Fawlty Towers is they know that this is an impossible scene but they think if they act it really well, the audience will so want to believe it, that they will enjoy it," "and, of course, that's the confidence of the show." "Andy should get a medal for what he went through in Fawlty Towers." "He was attacked, set on fire, abused and everything." "Andrew Sachs?" "No, no, never damaged him at all, never, never." "No." "Health and safety looked after him very well." "Ah!" "Oh, no, no, no, no, please." "No, no, no, no." "Ah!" "It is quite an alarming sight, Manuel in the kitchen catching fire." "You think, "Well, so much for realism, but, you know, this is getting a bit, you know..." "This is over the top." "Manuel is on fire!"" "Fuego!" "Ah!" "HE SHRIEKS" "Properly rehearsed, it shouldn't hurt at all, and normally it didn't." "There were one or two exceptions." "Fire!" "Fire!" "Fire!" "No, no!" "Yes!" "Si!" "Si!" "No, look, will you get back in there?" "When I appear outside the kitchen with my jacket smoking, that smoke was created with the use of two chemicals on each other, and they create the smoke." "ALARM RINGS Mr Fawlty, it's fire!" "Did you hear what I said?" "No, but it's fire!" "Is no fire." "Is only drill!" "It was getting very warm, and I thought, "This can't be right," but I carried on." "Then it got a bit too hot, and I said, "I've got to stop, sorry." "Can we just take my jacket off?"" "Took the jacket off and it was red raw, acid burns I had on my shoulder." "You save me." "And that hurt." "So if you ever see that episode, be sympathetic to my pain." "After a knock on the head and a quick trip to the hospital," "Basil deals with a party of European tourists." "Cue one of the most famous scenes in sitcom history." "Entschuldigen Sie bitte, können Sie Deutsch sprechen?" "I'm sorry, could you say that again?" "Do you speak German?" "Oh, German!" "I'm sorry, I thought there was something wrong with you!" "There's a lot of times in Fawlty Towers where John Cleese, through Basil Fawlty, will push it further than most people would go." "Basil hit on the head can go even further than that." "Here's the plan." "I'll stand there and ask them if they want something to drink before the war." "Before their lunch!" "Before their lunch." "Don't mention the war!" "He's trying so hard to be the gracious host, but his hatred of Germany and his hatred of the Hun is so ingrained in him that he can't." "You can see in his mind, he's thinking," ""I must not talk about the war,"" "but it's almost as if the more he tells himself he mustn't do it, the more he does, and it has got some great jokes in it." "I am the owner of Fawlty Towers, and may I welcome your war..." "Your war, you all, you all, you all, and hope that your stay will be a happy one." "Now, would you like to eat first or would you like a drink before the war?" "Meaning that trespassers will be tied up with piano wire." "Sorry!" "Sorry!" "It manages to do something that's very, very hard to do, because it's politically incorrect to mention anything about the war, and so it's a kind of Tourette thing, whatever you shouldn't say comes out." "Listen, don't mention the war." "I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it." "So, it's all forgotten now and let's hear no more about it, so that's two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads." "There's no halfways about it, this is very heavy, very, very heavy rudeness of an enormous kind, and inescapable, that's the thing." "Sorry, I got confused 'cause everyone keeps mentioning the war." "That's what's so wonderful about Basil Fawlty, he's barely under control." "He's constantly trying to tramp it down." "Would you stop talking about the war?" "Me?" "You started it." "We did not start it." "Yes, you did, you invaded Poland." "I guess The Germans is a pretty good example of the sort of script which probably wouldn't be anything like as funny if it weren't performed by John Cleese, and that's certainly true of the goose-stepping moment." "Here, watch." "Who's this then?" "SCREAMS IN GERMAN" "I'll do the funny walk!" "SHOUTS IN GERMAN" "That's the moment where he's wonderful, because he's free and lots of people, mentally, that's where they want to be, they want to just say things." "Stop it!" "I'm trying to cheer her up, you stupid Kraut!" "Cut through all the cleverness of the scenario and depth of the character, it's John Cleese doing a funny walk, and it doesn't get better than that." "We may think that was one of the funniest scenes ever, but John Cleese begs to differ." "In fact, he's picked something totally different as his fourth best bit." "Most alarming." "Everyone will think of Basil's silly walking or goose-stepping around, and that's not what I've chosen because I know that's funny, but it's just physical humour, which is not hard to write." "It may be good to perform, but not hard to write." "So I'm going to choose what is the best bit for me of that episode, which comes before the Germans come on the scene, and it's called the fire drill." "ALARM RINGS" "Well, what's she put that on..." "Oh, I might have guessed." "Sorry, Major, only the burglar alarm, sorry." "What?" "Sorry, Miss Tibbs." "What?" "That was the burglar alarm, fire drill's not for a couple of minutes." "Excuse me." "Burglars, Fawlty?" "No, my wife left the..." "Excuse me?" "Yes?" "That wasn't the fire bell." "That was the..." "I thought there was a drill." "Yes, at 12 o'clock, but not yet." "But it is 12 o'clock." "Not quite." "Thank you." "Excuse me." "Yes?" "Well, I make it 12 o'clock." "I'm afraid that wasn't..." "What time do you make it major?" " Burglars about, I think." "It doesn't matter what time he makes it, it hasn't started." "What?" " It hasn't started yet." "But that was the bell, wasn't it?" "No." "I do love ensemble acting, when a whole lot of funny people are there, because the quality of the humour changes depending on the person who's actually speaking, where the focus is, and it gives a richness to it." "That was the burglar alarm." "See?" "The burglar alarm?" "Yes!" "Are there burglars?" "Evidently." "No, look, it's perfectly simple!" "We have the fire drill when I ring the fire bell!" "That wasn't the fire bell, right?" "!" "How were we supposed to know that?" "It doesn't sound like the fire bell!" "It did." "It didn't!" "It did!" "No, it didn't!" "The fire bell is a different..." "It's a semitone higher!" "What I loved about that particular scene was Basil's attempt to use logic to explain the situation that had arisen, which, you know, there are a lot of coincidences in it, and his utter failure to get across to people." "Then you run into this problem about fire drills, when they announce that they will be at a certain time." "Anyway, the fire drill doesn't start till 12 o'clock!" "It is 12 o'clock!" " Well, it is now, but that's because we've been standing about arguing about it." "Look!" "How on earth can you expect us to tell which bell is which?" "Oh." "We haven't heard them yet, have we?" "You want to hear them?" "Right, suits me." "Here's the burglar alarm:" "Ought we to catch them first?" "There aren't any!" "Then why does the alarm keep going?" "All right, got that?" "Right." "What's happening now?" "ALARM STOPS Now, here is the fire bell." "ALARM RINGS It's a completely different sound, listen." "Well, where are you all going?" "!" "Well, there is a drill, isn't there?" "No, no, no, no, no, no, this is so that you can hear the bell so you know in a moment when I ring the bell!" "What are you doing?" "!" "Will you come back?" "!" "I just love the chaos that ensues, and there's a logical tightness to it that pleases me." "Now..." "PHONE RINGS" "We're having it!" "And John has some more surprises in store after the break." "After a hiatus of nearly four years," "Fawlty Towers returned for a second series in 1979." "Despite divorcing during the break, writing team John Cleese and Connie Booth delivered an even bigger hit, with viewing figures consistently reaching ten million and beyond." "Hot dog." "Coming up, the man behind the show's success, John Cleese, will be remembering his personal favourite moments, so keep your eye out for more of Basil's Best Bits." "Is this a piece of your brain?" "It's business as usual at the start of the second series, with Basil trying to prevent Sybil finding out that he's had a bet on a horse, whilst a deaf and extremely fussy old lady checks into the hotel." "LADY:" "I specifically asked for a sea view in my written confirmation, so please make sure I have it." "MANUEL:" "Que?" "Soon, the grumpy Mrs Richards causes havoc at Fawlty Towers." "Some of the best moments, it becomes clear, is when Basil meets somebody as aggressive as him, when he's got a really worthy opponent, not somebody he can browbeat." "When I book a room with a bath, I expect to get a bath." "You've got a bath." "I'm not paying £7.20 per night, plus VAT, for a room without a bath." "There is your bath." "You call that a bath?" "It's not big enough to drown a mouse." "It's disgraceful." "I wish you were a mouse." "For once, we're on Basil's side she's a horrible old trout, and we really enjoy his sarcasm, and no-one does sarcasm like John Cleese." "I asked for a room with a view." "Deaf, mad and blind." "This is the view, as far as I can remember, madam." "Yes, yes, this is it." "When I pay for a view," "I expect something more interesting than that." "That is Torquay, madam." "It's not good enough." "Of course, this triggers the great speech by Fawlty." "This is almost, monologue-wise, this is "to be or not to be"." "Well, may I ask what you were expecting to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window?" "Sydney Opera House, perhaps?" "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?" "Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically..." "Don't be silly." "I expect to be able to see the sea." "You can see the sea." "It's over there, between the land and the sky." "I need a telescope to see that." "Well, may I suggest you consider moving to a hotel closer to the sea?" "Or preferably in it." "Things get worse for Basil when" "Sybil nearly finds out that he's won money on a horse." "Cue some quick thinking by the staff." "Polly is really a sympathetic character because she is the voice of sanity, the still calm around which the madness happens, and yet she does try to get Basil out of holes!" "The money in the office?" "You were counting it." "Did someone hand it in?" "Oh, no." "No, it's mine." "Yours?" "I won it." "Sybil then asks Polly what the name of the horse was and Polly doesn't know because she's not put the bet on, so there's then the scene where Basil has to kind of mime the name of the horse to Polly" "while Sybil isn't looking, and gets it completely..." "It's like a big game of charades really." "The name?" "Oh..." "I've gone blank." "Birdbrain." "No, no, no, that came in third." "CONNIE BOOTH:" "Polly almost loses it, because she's not getting it, she wants to rescue Basil, and she's reaching for something, so we see her as slightly tentative, and she may lose it." "Fishwife." "What?" "No." "No, not..." "Small..." "Fly." "Fly!" "You know Sybil sort of knows that Fawlty's there and he's doing it, and for some reason Sybil doesn't turn round, she doesn't want to confront the fact that her husband is lying, so she's going to actually drive this game of mime to its conclusion." "Flying Tart." "No!" "No, no, it got off to a flying start, and its name...was Dragonfly." "Thank you, Polly." "We have a sure-fire winner for you now." "Yes it's the fifth of Basil's Ten Best Bits, the moments picked by John Cleese as his personal favourites." "It's funny because people are fond of Basil, who really is in fact of course an absolutely horrible creature." "If you had to spend five minutes sitting next to Basil at dinner, you would hate him, but he makes us laugh, so we forgive him, and here he is at his most hateful, taking advantage of a woman with hearing problems." "Mrs Richards, how very nice to see you!" "Are you enjoying your stay?" "!" "There's no need to shout." "I have my hearing aid on." "Oh." "Mrs Richards, I've explained to my husband..." "I've just been up to my room." "£85 has been taken from my bag, which I had hidden under the mattress." "Oh, yes?" "It's a disgrace." "I haven't been here a day." "What sort of staff do you employ?" "Mrs Richards..." "If you knew anything about running a hotel, this sort of thing wouldn't happen." "Well, what have you got to say?" "HE MIMES SPEECH" "What?" "HE CONTINUES TO MIME" "(Basil!" ")" "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." "I haven't got it turned up enough." "Basil!" "I SAID..." "Oh, oh, my head, my head." "Has it come away?" "People love that scene, and it is extraordinarily savage to take advantage of someone's handicap in that way." "Did you bang your head?" "Yes, yes." "But you can do it because Mrs Richards comes over as so unpleasant and so bossy and unsympathetic, it's OK, but you have to establish that first, then it's all right to have a go at her." "My money's been taken." "Yes, yes, I know, try not to speak." "Is this a piece of your brain?" "Is this a piece of your brain?" "Right, OK, great gag." "So we're doing this in rehearsals and I noticed that he didn't do that gag." "He didn't pick it out." "They'd decided not to do it, and I said to him afterwards, I said, "Why did you lose that?"" "and he said, "Well, we didn't like it very much."" "I said, "You're mad, you've got to do it,"" "and he actually put it back." "It's my one contribution to rescuing the script." "At the end of the episode, a mix-up with some money gives Basil another taste of victory." "But can it last?" "When he thinks he's won, when he thinks, once, for once, the fates are kind to Basil Fawlty, the glee, it's so profound." "I'm £10 up on the deal. £10 up?" "Yes, yes, it's 95." "Even if I give her ten, I'm still ten up." "Polly, for the first time in my life, I'm ahead, I'm winning!" "HE LAUGHS GLEEFULLY" "Could it be that, as ludicrous as these situations are, just once in a while Basil makes a couple of quid on the side?" "No, of course not." "What's that?" "This is mine." "What's that, Basil?" "HE YELPS" "It's mine." "What?" "It's the money I won on the horse." "Oh, that's right, dear, Polly asked me to put it in the safe for her." "So that's all sorted out." "This is your money, Polly." "This is your beautiful vase mrs." "Richards.." "Fawlty, you did give me that money." "You won it on that horse." "Ah!" "Ah!" "SMASHING" "That cost £75." "I remember doing the maths on this and I think he's still ten quid up." "Not that I was an obsessive schoolboy or anything, but I think I worked out that he was actually still up, not as much as he was, but ten quid, that's a lot, nearly £1,000 in today's money." "Basil's a lot happier in the next episode, when he finds out that a couple checking in are doctors." "You're two doctors?" "Yes." "Well, how did you become two doctors?" "Hmm?" "I mean, did you take the exam twice?" "When one of them turns out to be a psychiatrist," "Basil becomes paranoid." "The question, "How often do you manage it?"" "in the world of British comedy and indeed possibly in Britain in general it will always be understood as to be the word "it"" "always refers to sex." "That's just a convention of British life." "So somehow the fact that they were talking about being in Torquay for a weekend and where do you go for your holiday, holiday sex, it worked out very nicely." "If you would just sign that." "Thank you so much." "Yes." "We were just speculating how people in your profession arrange their holidays, how often you can get away." "Hmm?" "How often do you manage it?" "Beg your pardon?" "How often can you and your wife manage it?" "We're talking about, "Do you get away often for holidays?""" "then he thinks we're talking about sex and, you know, the vision of the two of them having sex is quite a nerve-racking idea." "About average, since you ask." "Average?" "Well, you tell me." "Well, a couple of times a year?" "What?" "I think probably they do do it, from time to time, and they don't discuss it too much." "Well, we knew it must be difficult." "My wife didn't see how you could manage it at all, you know." "Well, as you've asked, two or three times a week, actually." "A week?" "Yes, pretty normal, isn't it?" "We're quite normal down here in Torquay, you know." "The best gag in the psychiatrist episode is where the busty woman arrives and she's really fit, wearing a tight green T-shirt." "Here we are, this is your room." "I hope it's to your liking." "View of the English Riviera down there behind the trees." "This is your bathroom, here we are." "Oh, light's not working." "I'll just fix it." "John Cleese has to fix the bulb in the bathroom and the light switch" "wants to do her stretches on that particular wall." "Is there a restaurant near here?" "There's an awfully good little Welsh place," "Leek House, about five minutes walk." "You'd have to go straight away." "Oh, that'll do fine." "Just turn left out of the gate and straight on, and it's on your right." "And he always has to explain." ""You don't understand, this is not what it seems."" "I didn't know she was there, I was trying the switch." "It's pathetic, Basil." "Look, Sybil, I was reaching round for the switch." "Don't bother." "The lights weren't working in the bathroom, so I went in, checked the fitting, which was loose." "I've read about it Basil, the male menopause it's called." "Oh, and one word of advice, if you're going to grope a girl, have the gallantry to stay in the room with her while you're doing it, hmm?" "Later in the episode, a suspicious Basil becomes obsessed with finding the girl that a leather-trousered Lothario has sneaked into his bedroom." "You are aware of our rule about visitors, are you?" "Hmm?" "No visitors in guests' rooms after ten o'clock." "Oh." "Of the opposite...sex." "No, I wasn't." "Ah." "But I am now." "So you'll send up the champagne, will you?" "What?" "'There's this long haired bloke' wearing a yellow chamois leather shirt, and tight brown leather trousers and a medallion, which I'm ashamed to say all belonged to me." "Very well, one bottle of champagne for one." "Thank you." "And one glass." "That's all I'll need, unless you'd care to join me?" "No, thank you, not while I'm on the job." "That's when I enjoy it the most." "Mr Johnson is obviously sexually successful and he knows he's hidden a girl in his room." "He then becomes completely paranoid because he can't find this girl." "This wall, we had some complaints from downstairs, so I'm just giving it a check." "OK, yes, I think that's fine." "No, no, we're all right." "Fine, well, sorry to disturb you." "Goodnight." "Goodnight." "Goodnight." "Night." "He doesn't care at all about the privacy of his guests." "That's the amazing thing about Basil Fawlty, that as a hotelier, the guests are an irritation, basically, and he goes in and out of all their rooms, tapping, he's tapping on doors." "Can I help you?" "The bathroom." "Yes, second on the left." "And it's just wonderful because it's so Basil, it's so pernickety and detailed and so completely pointless and senseless as well." "I just came in to check the walls." "Do you mind?" "Sorry." "And one of the wonderful moments that the public remember is when he climbs up a ladder to look through the window of what he thinks is a couple doing naughty things, which they didn't do in those days." "Mr Cleese didn't choose any of these." "His next best bit is this subtle scene from the same episode." "Another favourite moment of mine is in the episode that Connie and I wrote about the psychiatrist being in the hotel and this very, very sexy girl, because of course Basil has all the disapproval 'of any sexual activity" "'that anyone who's not getting enough sex always shares.'" "Very nice." "In this particular episode," "Basil gets caught in really quite innocent circumstances as he goes to apologise to the very attractive Australian girl for something that happened earlier." "Excuse me, I do apologise but I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to..." "KNOCK ON DOOR" "Come in." "Sorry to bother you, I thought I'd better apologise for my husband's behaviour." "No, please, really, Mrs Fawlty." "He's going through rather a disturbed time at the moment." "No please look, I don't quite understand." "He does seem a bit worked up about something but I'm sure there's an innocent explanation." "'I love the shot of the finger round the door.'" "You don't really see it at the beginning." "It's just that that's the elephant in the room as far as the audience is concerned." "Are they going to notice it?" "Are they not going to notice it?" "Because he could have got away with it, you know." "If Sybil had gone out, she'd gone back in the bathroom, he could have been out of there." "You know, it was just was the finger going to be seen?" "Basil." "Hello, dear, just checking the doors." "All right, what's going on?" "I was in the bathroom." "Yes, she was, dear, so I popped in to have a look at these hinges, the ones we've been..." "Do you really imagine even in your wildest dreams that a girl like this could possibly be interested in an ageing brilliantine stick insect like you?" "A girl like who, dear?" "This one, Basil, the one you've been chasing ever since she arrived." "When he was younger, I think he was probably a little bit of a lad and then I think the relationship with Sybil probably after a reasonable start, went a bit south." "And I suspect there hasn't been too much carnal knowledge involved in that relationship for some time and I think at that point people get very embarrassed about it, because not only do you have Basil's natural embarrassment as lower middle class English, but of course" "he can't show a sexual interest in anyone." "because he's terified of the way Sybil will react." "What are you doing in there?" "You know the trouble we've been having with these hinges." "All right, I came in to apologise for the incident just now, when I thought she was the girl in Johnson's room, you remember when I put my hand on the..." "Any kind of sexuality is out of bounds, which is why he's so punitive towards anyone else who looks as though they might be having an enjoyable time." "Six down, four more of Basil's Best Bits to go." "Join us after the break." "Basil, there's a kipper sticking out of your jumper." "Now a huge success with viewers and critics alike, John and Connie added a brand-new face to the regular cast for the second series - cheeky chef Terry, played by Brian Hall." "Terry, this kitchen is filthy." "Filthy Towers, eh?" "Tonight, for the first time," "John Cleese is sharing his all-time favourite Fawlty moments." "We've discovered six so far, the rest are soon to be revealed." "Oink, oink." "In the third episode, an irascible American checks in late and demands a meal." "What the hell's wrong with this country?" "You can't get a drink after three, you can't eat after nine, is the war still on?" "But Terry the chef refuses to work after nine o'clock, leaving Basil to take on kitchen duties himself." "Anybody who's been to America knows that there they have a service culture, that the notion is if you have a job, you do that job to the best of your ability." "It's widely acknowledged that is not the same culture that we have in this country." "Are you telling me that you can't stay open a few minutes longer so that we can eat properly?" "Well, we can do you sandwiches." "Ham?" "Cheese?" "We want something hot." "Toasted sandwiches?" "You're joking!" "He says he wants some food, he pays Basil money, you know, "Get me some food", then he asks for something not terribly complicated." "Could you make me a Waldorf salad?" "Oh, a...?" "Waldorf salad." "Well, I think we're just out of Waldorfs." "He asks for a Waldorf salad." "Basil has absolutely no idea what a Waldorf salad is." "It's just walnuts, isn't it?" "Fantastic, it's a lovely salad." "It's apples, walnuts, grapes, mayonnaise, celery." "What the hell's going on here?" "It says hotel outside, now is this a hotel or isn't it?" "Well, within reason." "You know something, fella?" "If this was back in the States, I wouldn't board my dog here." "Fussy, is he?" "Poodle?" "Poodle?" "I'm not getting through to you, am I?" "He was a no-nonsense man and so for him to go after Basil in the way he did was... and Basil takes it, doesn't he?" "And that leads us neatly into number seven of Basil's Best Bits, as lovingly picked by John Cleese." "This particular moment occurs after the American has given Basil £20 to keep the chef on because they arrived a little late and the chef was about to leave, but Basil was unable to do a deal with Terry." "So in fact Basil has to pretend that Terry is in the kitchen, when in fact he isn't and just before he emerges, he's been hit on the head, which explains the hat." "Thank you." "Incidentally," "I've been talking to chef and we've sorted out what happened." "Apparently, he thought he'd already got..." "That's very nice, thank you." "Thank you. ...got two orders for Waldorf salad, you see, and in fact he had the ingredients but..." "No, that's fine, doesn't matter." "...he didn't realise he didn't have enough for the second one..." "Look, don't let it bother you." "Anyway, this will explain everything." "What's that?" "A letter." "A letter." "A letter from the chef." "It explains everything." "A letter from the chef?" "Yes." "He wanted to apologise personally but I didn't want him wasting your time so I thought..." "Just forget about it, will you?" "I'll read it for you." "I want my steak." "Oh, won't be a moment. "Dear Mr and Mrs Hamilton, I hope you are well." ""This is just a brief note to say that I take full responsibility for the dreadful mess-ups tonight." "If I'd only listened to Mr Fawlty, none of this fiasco would have occurred." "I'd just like to tell you that such a cock-up has never occurred in my career before and that now everything has been sorted out," "I'll be back to my very best form." "Signed, Ter..."" "He's stuck in this ridiculous position where everything's going wrong and of course he hates to take the blame himself, so he has to blame a person who isn't even there and I think that is a very," "very, very funny moment, when he's shouting at the pretend Terry and playing Terry's voice as well." "I've had just about enough of this." "Harry." "How could you forget about it?" ""I was making another Waldorf..." Making another Waldorf salad?" "What are you making another Waldorf salad for?" ""Careful, Mr Fawlty."" "What do you think Mr and Mrs Hamilton would think?" "Mr Hamilton, may I introduce Terry, who..." "Where did he go?" "Where's he gone, did you see him?" "Maybe he went to get something to eat." ""Where did he go?"" "That's what I love about Basil." "His excuses are terrible." "They're not going to fool anyone, but at least they're quick." "Come on, honey." "What is it, Harry?" "We're leaving." "Well, what's happened?" "Eventually, the American has enough and leaves, threatening to take the rest of the guests with him." "Because this complaint flares up with the American, they then calls to mind, yes actually, there are quite a lot of things wrong with this hotel and with the proprietor in general, and they start voicing it." "Of course, if this little hotel is not to your taste, then you are free to say so, that is your privilege and I shall of course refund your money," "I know how important it is to you Americans." "But you must remember that here in Britain there are things that we value more, things that perhaps in America you've rather forgotten about but which to we British are far, far more important." "I'm not satisfied." "The... what?" "I'm not satisfied." "No, we're not satisfied." "Well, people like you never are, are you?" "What?" "What?" "One of my favourite bits is the moment where Basil sort of reaches the nadir of hotel keeping when he orders all the guests out of his hotel." "You ponce in here, expecting to be waited on hand and foot." "Well, I'm trying to run a hotel here." "Have you any idea of how much there is to do?" "Do you ever think of that?" "And it's this fact that he cannot see the connection between waiting on people hand and foot and running a hotel." "Well, I've had 15 years of pandering to the likes of you and I've had enough!" "I've had it!" "Come on, pack your bags and get out." "They're packed." "Order ten taxis, will you, I'll pay for them." "Come on, come on." "What?" "What?" "Out, everybody out, come on, upstairs, pack your bags." "Adios!" "Out!" "The stakes are raised in the next episode, when a sickly guest checks out during the night, permanently." "He's dead." "Dead?" "Who?" "Number eight." "Leeman?" "But Basil just took him his breakfast." "This presents a problem for Basil, who thinks his out-of-date kippers may have been responsible." "It's always a test of comedy how far you're prepared to go." "Well, having someone die in the hotel, bit risky?" "No, handle it easily, but having the man die and then served breakfast, that gives it, of course, a tremendous power." "But I'd le..." "What are you doing?" "What are you doing?" "I told her, I told her!" "I could get 20 years for this." "What?" "The kippers, the kippers, oh, my God." "Mr Fawlty, he's been dead for hours." "Mr. Fawlty, he's cold, he's been dead for hours, he must have died in his sleep." "The moment I love in this is this coincidence where Fawlty finds out there was nothing wrong with the kipper and says, "Oh, joy, joy", just as the doctor comes in to see the dead guest." "He's stone cold." "Yes." "Oh, joy." "Oh, thank you, God." "Oh, isn't it wonderful?" "I'm so happy." "Hooray." "May I ask who..." "Bit stuffy, isn't it?" "I'll open a window." "The doctor is there, there's a dead body there, there's a madman at the window, Basil, and it's all going on and you can't imagine anybody" "than Geoffrey, that face trying to glean exactly what is going on." "Well, who brought the breakfast?" "Who found him?" "Oh." "I brought the breakfast." "What's that?" "That's a bit of it." "A bit of what?" "A bit of the breakfast." "I think my favourite moment from the episode is the kipper sticking out here and what goes with it." "What are you looking at me like that for?" "Basil, there's a kipper sticking out of your jumper." "Ah, there is it." "I've been looking for that." "That's the other one." "Having dealt with the kippers, Basil's next challenge is to work out where to put a dead body in a fully booked hotel." "Not only do you think, "Oh, yes, that would be awful" ""for Basil, for that to happen to him", but you think, "Yes, well, that must happen a lot in hotels"." "Good morning, Manuel." "Oh, good morning." "Oh!" "You dropped this." "Oh, it's all right, leave it, no, leave it, it's heavy." "Oh, no, it's quite all right." "We can manage." "Oh, it's no bother." "No, no, leave it alone." "I know, if I just fold them like this." "Yes, go away." "Move, Manuel, move, move, move." "Carrying a dead body around is a horrible thing in his pyjamas." "And Miss Tibbs is bound to see him, you know, they're trying to cover him up with linen and stuff and, you know, there's a dead body and she's nearest to death out of all the characters, so I'd imagine it's worse for her." "I'll do it, Miss Tibbs." "No, it's all right." "Ah!" "He's dead!" "Oh, my God." "It's all right, Miss Tibbs." "Shut up, shut up!" "Oh, my God." "Slap her." "Slap her." "Slap her." "What?" "She's hysterical, slap her." "Murder!" "Slap her." "Murder!" "Slap her!" "The audience, they did gasp a little bit, didn't they?" "That's true." "Yes, yes, I guess they did, because she's so tiny, but it had to be done." "Oh, spiffing." "Absolutely spiffing." "Well done." "Two dead, 25 to go." "It's a wonderfully choreographed, increasingly desperate search for somewhere to dump this damn body." "Right, in there." "In there." "Oh, oh, my God." "Oh, sorry, sorry, coming in like that." "Sorry." "The blow-up doll and then in the kitchen and, I mean, it's wonderful, wonderful stuff." "Hello, Sybil, how are you?" "Coming up, John Cleese picks Basil's very best bit." "Any ideas what that could be?" "I don't know how to answer that." "I don't know what John would pick." "Would he choose something which shows his great technical skill, or will he choose a moment which was just carefully written by him and Connie Booth?" "I'm going to guess it's the conversation with the Major where he's in the bar with a gun." "Do you need any help, Major?" "Don't move." "I know nothing." "No, no, no, no, no." "Nothing." "Now a huge success with viewers and critics alike, the filming of the second series of Fawlty Towers was disrupted by the industrial disputes of 1979." "And fans had to wait for the last two episodes, which were delayed for a week and a whole six months respectively." "Do you mind?" "Que?" "In the first of these delayed episodes, Basil has arranged a surprise party for Sybil, but he's pretending he's forgotten what day it is." "17th April, well, well, well." "Does that stir any memories in you, Basil?" "Agincourt?" "Sybil storms off, upset, so Basil tells the party goers the ingenious excuse that she is sick in bed." "The surprise party for Sybil is another moment when it's, like, heart-wrenching, really, and you feel so awful for Basil the moment he realises that he's overstepped the mark and he's actually convinced" "Sybil that he doesn't know it's their wedding anniversary." "Mrs Fawlty, she go." "What?" "She leave, she leave, she go out." "What?" "Sybil!" "Oh, Sybil, Sybil, Sybil, no, no, no, no!" "I remembered, Sybil." "This is Fawlty going beyond despair." "He's already in despair, he's always in despair and then actually the physical act of despair, which is such a Cleese thing to act it out so dramatically but also in a very credible way, and then of course the guests arrive." "Everything all right?" "Bit of a bump, just smoothing it out." "In Fawlty Towers, there's almost always a witness." "I mean, there's no humiliation unless someone sees it." "As Sybil's friends arrive to celebrate the happy occasion," "Basil panics." "Panics and lies." "Thank you, thank you, yes." "She's not well." "Hmm?" "Sybil." "Not well?" " She's in bed." "That's not like Sybil." "And she's lost her voice." "We were their saddo friends." "I mean, really, did they have any friends?" "Really?" "Probably Sybil's character does, so we were acting dregs, they'd rustled together for this anniversary." "Where is Sybil?" "She's in bed." "Oh, dear." "Yes, she's not well, she really mustn't see anybody." "Now..." "What, not at all?" "No." "Can't we just put our heads round the corner?" "No, I'm afraid not." "She mustn't have any excitement." "Oh, Basil." "What do you mean, "Oh, Basil"?" "Well, we are her oldest friends, old man, I mean it can only do her good, and we have come over here to see you both." "Well, I'm sorry if you've been put out." "You'll have some drinks, see your old friends, have some laughs, but if that isn't good enough," "I'll refund your petrol for you." "Why?" "Why can't he say "She went out, she's not here, she's, you know, coming"?" "I mean, it's just like..." "He gets himself into these incredible situations." "Where are you going?" "I'm going to see her." "Basil, there is something very peculiar about all this." "I'm not standing here while an old friend like Sybil..." "Look, look, it's perfectly Sybil." "Simple's not well." "She's lost her throat and her voice hurt." "The doctor came and said it was a bit serious, not a lot, a bit." "He went away, she started to puff up, he's coming back later this afternoon and it's best for her to be on her own." "Now, what is so peculiar about that?" "The episode's stand-out moment, or should that be lie-down moment, is the eighth of John Cleese's personal favourite bits." "This is the scene where the guests have finally insisted on seeing Sybil, so he's got Polly in bed dressed as Sybil and in the middle of it something disastrous happens." "Sorry you're not well." "Such a shame." "So we thought we'd come and wish you happy anniversary." "Yes, happy an..." "Oh!" "What's the matter?" "Reg has fallen over." "Are you all right, Reg?" "Done my ankle." "Oh, dear." "You all right, Reg?" "Careful!" "I think it was bold to start that scene almost in darkness but I think it was because I started in radio and I know that there are certain things that are funny, certain sounds that are funny." "And for example the sound of somebody kicking a metal wastepaper basket is just funny." "CLANGING" "Ah!" "Who's that?" "Me." "It's Kitty." "Where are you, dear?" "Can't we have some light in here, Basil?" "Here we are." "OK?" "If we have the lights on, we can see the screen." "Oh, dear." "Are you all right, Kitty?" "I think so." "Oh!" "You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble, Baz." "Well, come on, come on up here." "OK, you both all right?" "Come on, come on round there, OK?" "You can see her from there." "There, everything all right, dear?" "Here she is." "Hello, Sybil." "Oh, yes, looks..." "There's something there, I can see her moving." "It's a bit dark, Basil." "Yes, well, her eyes are very sensitive." "She's got her glasses." "Yes, well, I'll just draw the curtains." "Yes, I know they are, dear." "It's all right, trust me, trust me, dear, trust me." "There we are." "Ah!" "Is that better?" "Happy anniversary." "Happy anniversary." "When I watched it again, I was astonished that at a couple of moments, Connie actually did look like Pru." "I couldn't quite believe that it was true, but there's one particular shot when she could almost pass for her and I like the sheer absurdity of Polly, who really does not want to do this," "and is just trying "Mmm, mmm", to say "No, no"." "We brought you a cake." "Oh, yes, here." "Have a little bit dear." "Oh, oh, have a little bit, yes, go on." "Mmm, mmm." "Oh, yes." "Well, 15 years, eh?" "And then that terrible moment when Basil looks down and the car comes back and the whole thing collapses." "15 years, eh?" "Aaah!" "What is it?" "What is it?" "I just remembered something downstairs." "You stay here, have a chat with Polly." "Sybil, Sybil." "Shan't be a moment." "And you've forgotten, I think, that Sybil could come back." "The final episode of Fawlty Towers features a health inspector who's less than satisfied with the service." "The only gourmets you'll find scavenging in this kitchen will be kamikaze ones." "Thought we was in trouble there for a minute." "Basil sets about rectifying the situation, but is thwarted by Manuel, who appears to have been keeping his own guest at the hotel." "It was the first scene that we ever got an insight into background of Manuel and his tastes and likes, which was rather sweet, an escape from being harangued by Basil." "# She may be the thing I can't forget" "# The pleasure or the price I got to pay" "# She may be the...#" "Manuel, I'm sorry, this is an emergency, important, si?" "The health inspector's just been, things wrong with hotel." "It was nice to see him and I like the idea of the dressing gown, very Noel Coward in a way, wasn't it?" "Now, Manuel, go up to the roof." "The roof, si." "Yes." "No, no, come, I haven't told you yet." "Manuel is there to be loved." "I mean, he is the classic little bloke who'se being put upon and doesn't even understand why most of the time." "Two dead pigeons, water tank." "What is funny?" "How they get up there?" "How they?" "They flew up there." "That's right." "Oink, oink, oink." "Stop it." "Just..." "Not pigs, pigeons." "Que?" "Pigeon, pigeon." "Like your English!" "We knew that we needed a rat, but to have a rat arrive when the inspector arrived would be too contrived, so I thought "Well, Manuel might have a pet rat that was sold to him as a hamster"." "What is that?" "Is my hamster." "Pigeon." "A hamster?" "Si, si." "No, no, no, pigeon." "Manuel, it's a rat." "Pigeon." "It's a rat." "No, no, no, is hamster." "Well, of course it's a rat." "You have rats in Spain, don't you?" "Or did Franco have them all shot?" "Is hamster." "It's a rat." "Well, I think so too." "What?" "I say to man in shop, "Is rat."" "He say "No, no, no, is a special kind of hamster, is filigree Siberian hamster, the only one in shop."" "He make special price, only five pound." "Have you ever heard of the bubonic plague, Manuel?" "It was very popular here at one time." "A lot of pedigree hamsters came over on ships from Siberia." "What you do?" "I'm sorry Manuel, this is a rat." "No, is hamster." "Is not hamster." "Hamsters are small and cuddly." "Cuddle this, you'd never play the guitar again." "Stay where you are, old chap." "Needless to say, the rat later escapes." "Don't move." "Luckily, there's a professional on hand." "Basil Fawlty realises that he's seen the Major with a gun through the corner of his eye, through his peripheral vision." "'There's something about the Major, everyone loves the Major.'" "It's like of course he's had this double barrelled shotgun in his room the whole time." "He lives at Fawlty Towers." "Don't move." "Vermin." "Obviously, he's leading this quite bizarre sheltered life now but he has seen some action and he's going to get a chance now to shoot something." "And the fact that Basil thinks it's Germans rather than vermin obviously is a wee extra layer of comedy and xenophobia to play with." "We haven't got any this week, Major." "Hmm?" "No Germans staying this week, Major." "May I..." "Going to shoot him, Fawlty." "Yes, Major..." "Hmm?" "Not legal actually any more." "Murder." "But they're animals, Fawlty." "Oh, yes, yes, still, forgive and forget, eh?" "Well, pretend we do." "Eh?" "But they spread disease, Fawlty." "He was sitting there on that table, eating the nuts, if you please." "He's really gone this time." "About that size." "That with the tail." "The resultant frantic hunt for the rat provides us with" "Basil's penultimate best bit." "I've chosen this next scene because it's not only probably my favourite episode, Basil the Rat, but it's the only scene that I can remember where Brian Hall as Terry and Polly and Manuel and Basil" "are in the same scene together without anyone else getting in the way of their brilliant acting." "And I do think it's rather well done." "Basil?" "Treaties." "Basil." "Yes?" "Here I am." "Oh." "Ah, that's for me, is it?" "Thank you." "The rat is loose and what could be worse when you have a health inspector than to have a rat running around?" "Shall I get you some more?" "There's plenty..." "He's called Basil, is he?" "Don't play dumb with me, I trusted you, you're responsible for this." ""Oh, I've got a friend who'll look after him, Mr Fawlty"." "Come on." "Come on out, come on." "Basil's here." "Have you got him?" "He's under there." "Right, I'll get him." "Cleaning behind the fridge?" "You've got a lot on your mind, we didn't want to worry you." "What do you mean?" "A public health inspector coming after a 24-hour warning and a rat loose in the hotel, is that what you mean?" "He must have escaped, Mr Fawlty, and come back." "Come back?" "They home." "Oh, I see, he's a homing rat, is he?" "Oh, yes, rats are amazing creatures, Mr Fawlty." "I read about one once." "His owner had gone down to Penzance." "I read about that." "When the chef got filleted with his own carving knife?" "No, honest." "Scout's honour." "We'll find him, Mr Fawlty." "Well, if you could, that would be lovely, before they close us down, super." "Let's have a little Basil hunt, shall we?" "Then we'll deal with the sackings later." "I'll do the cellar." "I'll do this floor." "Manuel, you check your room." "Start in the bar, it was there two minutes ago." "I'll do the kitchen." "There's just something about the interplay between us that I watch with great pleasure." "We're all doing it well and timing well off each other and the ensemble effect gives me great satisfaction." "And it's in the same setting that our fugitive furry friend takes refuge with the guests." "Manuel finds the rat under the table and he obviously gets really involved in this woman's legs and she's got the posh boyfriend." "Do you mind?" "Que?" "We'll have one Windsor soup and one pate, please." "One Windsor soup..." "Shhh!" "I was very young and I have to say I was a bit wary when the box came and the rat was let out, because they look much bigger in real life." "But because it's a rat and the legs, and people kept saying, "Were they your legs?"" "I said "Well, of course, you're not going to film somebody else's legs, are you?"" "For God's sake, I didn't have much to say, the least I could do was give my legs." "I'm so sorry, what were you saying?" "The waiter wasn't listening when I was giving him our order." "He seemed more interested in my fiancee's legs." "Yes, I don't think so." "In fact, I think there's a bread roll down there." "May I give my order?" "Oh, please, of course." "We'd like one Windsor soup and one pate and then I..." "As a young starting off actress, wasn't, you know, that aware, just thought "What a lovely job"" "and "This is going to be successful, I can't wait to see this,"" "and "There'll be more of them"." "You know, you didn't realise that, not sounding precious but, you know, you were going to be a very small part of television history, really, which is what Fawlty Towers has become." "Which brings us to the last chapter in this TV history, the moment we've all been waiting for." "The very best of Basil's Best Bits." "We asked John Cleese to revisit Fawlty Towers to choose his ten favourite moments." "We've seen him pick out nine that he looks back at with fondness and still tickle his fancy, which means that there's just one left to reveal." "And this just happens to be his favourite one of them all." "If someone stood me against the wall and said they were going to shoot me if I didn't say what was my absolutely favourite moment," "I would actually say the moment when the rat is revealed in the biscuit tin." "And if you watch what's going on at the back, you see exactly how the tin is moved around in such a way it can be presented reasonably to the health inspector right at the crucial moment." "Waiter." "One momentito." "Si?" "Some cheese and biscuits and a coffee, please." "Anything to follow?" "I've ordered some cheese and a coffee." "Certainly." "Coffee, please, Sybil." "There we are, Mr Carnegie." "Polly, would you get the biscuits, please?" "Here they are, Fawlty." "Oh." "Cheddar?" "Danish Blue?" "Edam?" "A little Danish Blue, please." "Certainly." "Edam?" "No, thank you." "Biscuits?" "What I love about it was that the props department did give us the best possible rat and I actually had it afterwards and I had it for years, I don't know where it is now." "And there was a screw going down through the rat's body to the bottom of the box and Connie was actually turning the rat's head by manoeuvring the screw like that." "Which is how it could actually look at the inspector in the way that it did." "Would you care for rat, or...?" "Just the biscuits then, please, Polly." "I think the fact that the inspector just looks at it, and some moment of suspension of belief." "Black or white?" "Hmm?" "Black or white?" "Black, please." "Was that a..." "There we are." "Here are the biscuits." "Cream crackers, digestives, Ryvita." "When they then put the lid back on and then the rat's gone, he opens it up again and he looks and the rat isn't there, and he did imagine it." "I think that's a great moment and there's no other moment quite like that, I think, in Fawlty Towers." "I'm afraid it's started to rain again." "Those are my favourite moments and now I've had a chance to watch them again," "I agree, they're not very good." "It's a bit of a disappointment, really." "Shouldn't have done the programme." "Still, in this recession, we all need money." "I hope you'll forgive me." "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" "I beg your pardon?" "Entschuldigung Sie, bitte." "Können Sie Deutsch sprechen?" "I'm sorry." "Could you say that again?" "You speak German?" "Oh, German!" "I'm sorry, I thought there was something wrong with you." "30 years since it left our TV screens, Fawlty Towers is still acknowledged as the benchmark by which all other sitcoms are measured." "'Funnily enough, the people who seem to find it hardest to enjoy are the hoteliers.'" "And they sit down thinking they're going to enjoy it and after three minutes they think, "Oh, no,"" "'cause they can see what's going to happen." "Argh!" "Sorry, sorry." "The popularity of Fawlty Towers, I think, today is a lot to do with John." "This - smack on head." "Also the ordinary situations, because they're something that our kind of time was, people can relate to these taboo subjects." "Tonight, for the very first time, John Cleese and Connie Booth, the show's writers and co-stars, are both breaking their silence to share their secrets of how this classic comedy was made including an insight into their strained marriage." "It didn't save our marriage, but I think Fawlty Towers became a kind of refuge for our demons and angels." "...the true cost of Manuel's comedy stunts..." "'I thought I was going down, I could hear the angels singing.'" "I thought, "Thank heavens it's the last shot of the show, 'cause I can't get up."" "...and how the BBC almost let this comedy crown jewel slip through their fingers." "Head something, light entertainment, "I'm afraid I thought this one" ""as dire as its title, which I can't see being anything but a disaster."" "Perhaps it's a dream!" "No, it's not a dream, we're stuck with it." "Right!" "There were just 12 half-hour episodes of Fawlty Towers screened between 1975 and 1979, yet it remains a timeless classic." "'Fawlty Towers survives because it's brilliantly made,' brilliantly written, immaculately performed precision comedy." "Do try to be agreeable this weekend, Basil." "Now, have I got everything?" "Handbag?" "Knuckle-dusters?" "Flick knife?" "It always feels to me as though there were many, many more episodes and that's because of the richness of the stories and the characters." "Come on, then, give us a smile!" "That's it!" "'It was beautifully written and beautifully directed' and John, Connie and Andrew are wonderful people to work with and I'm proud and grateful for that." "Thank you very much, yes." "DISHES SMASH" "'It's like falling on a banana skin.'" "It's funny if it's not happening to you." "If it does, it can be tragic." "You could describe Fawlty Towers as a tragedy with laughs." "If the good Lord..." "Is mentioned once more, I shall move you closer to him." "Now, please..." "I've been in some of the worst sitcoms - and will again - ever produced, and from the first moment in Fawlty Towers you thought, "Oh, this is the best."" "He's only choking!" "Don't worry, a bit of cheese went the wrong way!" "The best bit about working on Fawlty Towers was the show itself when it went out, and the reaction from everybody, and the fact that it's still being shown all over the world and they keep sending us little cheques." "I'm sitting here." "Is no lunch till 12..." "I'm still having breakfast." "Breakfast kaputt." "I'm having sausages." "Is not allowed." "Put that back." "Look, I'm a doctor, I'm a doctor and I want my sausages!" "It's nice to have that in the CV - "I did a Fawlty Towers", and I worked with Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield." "Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and John Cleese." "She's hysterical, slap her!" "Murder!" "Slap her, slap her." "Murder!" "Oh, spiffing, absolutely spiffing." "Well done." "Two dead, 25 to go." "Quick, Polly!" "Polly, quick." "John Cleese unleashed the rudest man in sitcom - the daddy of the dysfunctional, a character so tragic, so flawed, and yet so hilariously funny." "Oh, there it is!" "John has created a wonderful comic creation in Basil Fawlty." "He's just one of the classic comic characters of all time." "There's something about Basil which makes him a very good character for our times, I think, for our hyped-up, anxious sort of rush-around times." "He is the sort of symbol of mania and hysteria." "But there's more to this classic sitcom than just Basil Fawlty." "Basil?" "!" "There's his domineering, acid-tongued wife Sybil, dependable Polly, the overworked chambermaid, dotty resident guest the Major, and Manuel, simply the most famous TV waiter in history, who's from Barcelona, don't you know?" "There is too much butter on those trays." "Que?" "There is too much butter on those trays." "No." "No, no, senor." "Not "on those trays."" "No, sir, "Uno, dos, tres."" "After 30 years, the show's original producer has returned to the BBC archives to unearth the Fawlty Towers production files, and rediscover their dusty details." "Ah, here we have the programme costs." "For the first episode in 1975, it was about £20,000, just over." "John Cleese probably only got about £400 or something like that." "We were real cheapskates, terrible when you think about it." "Absolutely amazing how little things cost in those days, but it was a cheap show, as demonstrated by the flexibility of the scenery." "That's why it wobbled a bit from time to time, because we never had enough money to really structure it so it didn't wobble." "Thank you and good night!" "We've got a drawing here of the original set." "There..." "And it's instantly recognisable, even though this was made long before the sets were actually designed." "Apart from being bashed, crashed into and knocked down," "Fawlty's set also once famously flirted with flames." "Huh!" "Oh, no." "No, no, no, please." "No, no, no, no." "Huh?" "No, no..." "The fire sequence - yeah, I was hurt in that." "That smoke was created with the use of two chemicals on each other and they create the smoke and you don't feel it through the jacket." "This was the theory." "ALARM RINGS Fire, fire, fire!" "No, no!" "Yes!" "Si, si!" "Look, will you get back in there?" "Yes, yes!" "No, no!" "'I was getting very warm." "I thought, "Well, this can't be right."'" ""Can we just take my jacket off?"" "Took the jacket off and it was red raw, it had acid burns." "Is fire, is fire, is fire!" "It started hurting, so if you ever see that episode, be sympathetic to my pain." "He's always whinging on about that." "I'll let him whinge when he writes me a good part." "Coming up, we reveal the real life inspiration for Basil Fawlty..." ""You want ME to ring you at quarter to seven?" "You want breakfast as well?"" "It was exactly that reaction." "I thought, "This is odd, he's running a hotel"." "He was so gratuitously rude because, like all British hoteliers, he operated on the principle of," ""I could run this hotel properly if it wasn't for the guests."" "And hear first-hand the inside story of scriptwriting within a marriage." "I think John and I wrote together better than we lived together." "So stay tuned for the grand reopening of Torquay's notorious hotel." "This" " Basil." "This - smack on head." "30 years on from its departure, Fawlty Towers still retains its ability to make the British public roar with laughter." "Amongst its many claims to fame, it of course gave us one of the most iconic comedy characters ever created, the irrepressible Basil Fawlty." "'He's so awful, he's so impossible.'" "He's failing to achieve everything he wants, and although you disapprove of his goals, he's still failing and he's such a sad character." "Success isn't funny, failure's funny, and Basil just fails triumphantly every day at some point." "Oh, thank you, God!" "Thank you so bloody much!" "'I would describe him' as a ludicrous figure who takes things to extremes." "You know, whatever emotion he has, it's extreme." "Sybil!" "No, no, no, no, no!" "You know what it's like, I remembered, Sybil!" "HE GIBBERS" "Everything all right?" "Bit of a bump, just smoothing it out." "He's intelligent, but emotionally he just doesn't function well because he's operating on a map of the world that just doesn't work, and he doesn't realise that being reasonably open and friendly to people" "would make him a lot happier." "Have you any idea of how much there is to do?" "Do you ever think of that?" "!" "Of course not!" "You're too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking about for things to complain about, aren't you?" "!" "Well, let me tell you something, this is exactly how Nazi Germany started!" "A lot of layabouts..." "'I think there was something about his height' plus his passion, you know, his desperation," "I mean, it's all there." "I suppose I don't think anybody could do it except John." "Oh!" "Sorry, sorry." "'He played these characters that's rather good at bullying people' in a kind of authoritarian fashion, putting them down with one or two," ""Oh, shut up," or giving them a quick flick on the side of the head." "This happened in Python, and that was, of course, the relationship he created with Manuel." "'And John could do that very, very well indeed.'" "The bottle." "Er..." "Yes." "Where is it?" "Que?" "Donde es..." "Oh, I take it." "Oh." "I take it, I take it." "Come here." "You're a waste of space." "Ooh!" "'I could see elements of Basil Fawlty' in characters that John played in Python." "'I could see the same kind of thought 'that went into that kind of physical comedy 'that made Silly Walks so successful, went into Fawlty Towers.'" "John played one or two characters in Python where sort of rising anger was sort of the joke." "Kick 'em in the teeth where it hurts!" "Kill!" "Kill, kill!" "'Sitting at a table in the garden talking quite reasonably and suddenly' getting completely berserk about the world and banging the table, and John played this as only John could." "Arrgh!" "Arrgh!" "Tea's ready." "Coming, dear!" "I think the thing about Basil Fawlty is that there is a lot of John in it." "It's John's suppressed anger." "I mean, he spent, what, 30 years going to a psychiatrist because of his anger, he had so much anger in him." "I have a feeling that situations could arise when I would almost go as berserk as Basil." "Yeah, really." "Yes, there's something manic somewhere in me." "People talk to me at parties sometimes, you know, and they really do talk AT me, and I have fantasies about picking things up, you know, cheese dips and, you know, but I've never had the courage to do it." "And I can do it on stage, you know, Basil Fawlty does the..." "Why do they think that I have to be Basil Fawlty in order to write this?" "I mean, of course I have that in me, but I've got all the other characters that I play, you know?" "You have to have all these emotions available to you and then, when you become..." "When you're asked to play a part, you suppress some of them and enlarge and play much more strongly some other emotions, but that's what you do, it's like having a palette." "You choose this colour and this colour but not the others, you see what I mean?" "For a different character you choose different colours." "John encountered the inspiration for his hard-line hotelier when the Monty Python team checked into a Torquay hotel during filming in May 1971." "We were in Torquay because we were filming all the outdoor, all the exterior parts of Monty Python and staying in this hotel." "And the first evening, we decided we'd eat in." "We were all having dinner there and the owner, Mr Donald Sinclair, was sort of wandering round very grandly, not doing anything to help, of course, but being very grand, and he walked past the Python table," "where we were all eating and Terry Gilliam had done what the Americans do, which is to cut the meat like that and then they put the knife down, transfer the fork to this hand and spear the meat with the right hand," "and he stopped and I remember he just stared..." "And then he said to Gilliam, "We don't eat like that in this country."" "We were pretty astounded, because it was completely out of the blue." "We were filming the next day and I said, "Can you give us a call?" ""Can we have a call in the morning?"" "And he looked a bit, "Yes, what time?"" "and I said, "Well, about quarter to seven."" ""Quarter to seven?" "!"" "I mean, he was just like Basil." ""Quarter to seven?" "You want ME to ring you at quarter to seven?" ""You want breakfast as well?" It was the same reaction." "I thought, "This is really odd." "He's running a hotel."" "I don't think he actually liked guests, I think he suffered them, and I don't think he liked working in the hotel either." "I saw him close the bar at just after nine o'clock one night." "He said he was off to bed and it was time everybody else went to bed, too." "One day, Eric and I were waiting for the car to take us filming and Eric left his briefcase by the door, where he'd propped it up while we were just playing catch with a tennis ball," "and when he got back, he went up to the desk and Sinclair saw him coming..." ""Excuse me." "What?" "What is it now?" "!"" "He said, "I left my briefcase."" "He said, "Yes, yes", he said, "it's the other side of the wall,"" "and he pointed out of the front door to a white wall which was the far side of a swimming pool." "And he said, "It's behind the wall,"" "and Eric said, "What?"" "Eric said, "What?" He said, "What?" "!"" "He said, "It's behind the wall?" He said..." ""Yes, yes, I put it behind the wall."" "Eric said, "Well, why did you put it..." "What?" "!"" ""Why did you put it behind the wall?" He said," ""We thought it might be a bomb."" "And we..." ""A bomb?" "!"" "And Sinclair said, "Well, we've had a lot of staff problems recently."" "So he really thought someone he'd fired had come by, put a bomb in a briefcase." "I said to Mike, I thought, "Oh, we can't stay here, I really can't stand it."" "I didn't see the comic possibilities that John had seen." "John had sort of worked out with Connie the logic of a Sinclair/ Basil Fawlty position, which is basically that it is the people you are making your money from who are causing you trouble and problems and if they weren't there, life would be much easier." "There is a flaw there." "John capitalised on the indelible impression made by Mr Sinclair while writing for the hugely successful ITV series Doctor At Large." "'One of them was set in a hotel' and I remembered the original character, Donald Sinclair." "'Timothy Bates did a terrific performance.'" "The prototype for Basil Fawlty was ready." "Yes?" "Ah, good evening." "I believe you have a room." "I..." "I can't deal with this." "At the end of it, Humphrey Barclay, bless him, said to me," ""You know, there's a series in that character."" "I thought, "Typical bloody television executive, looking for series all the time."" "Thank you, Humphrey!" "But Basil was to go on the back burner for another three years, as John continued to conquer the known world as part of groundbreaking comedy collective Monty Python." "Argh!" "And now for something completely different." "Then, after five years of remarkable success," "John suddenly walked out on the Pythons." "We were all very unhappy when John left the series, though it came as no surprise." "John was always planning to leave the Pythons." "I think after the first series he was planning to leave." "He felt he'd had enough of us, I think." "None of the others understood." "I think Eric understood a bit, but I don't think they understood why I wanted to leave Python." "They thought it was great, and I was bored." "We were repeating ourselves and I thought I didn't want to do the third series." "Turning his back on subversive satire," "Cleese joined forces with his 30-year-old wife Connie Booth, a former New York waitress, to create something completely different" " a conventional sitcom." "After I'd finished Monty Python," "I'd always wanted to do something with Connie, and I was invited out by a lovely man called Jimmy Gilbert and he'd been made Head of Light Entertainment." "He said, "What do you want to do?"" "and I said I'd like to do something with Connie and he said, "All right." ""Well why don't you just go back home and talk to Connie, give me a call, tell me what you'd like to do."" "John wanted to do something based on Donald Sinclair, so he asked me if I wanted to have a go with him at writing a pilot, and we'd enjoyed the bit of writing that we'd done together." "I think the fact that we were husband and wife, that, you know, there aren't many places you can't go, and John really could make me laugh." "I think he'd always said that he would write with Connie at some point, and I think he was just relieved not to have to write with Graham, quite honestly." "Gray was very cross with me for leaving Monty Python and I'm not quite sure why, but I think that he felt great security being in a group." "Gray didn't function terribly well on his own." "Maybe he felt that Connie had supplanted him as a writer." "I know, because John's told me, that Connie was so important to the writing of those shows and, in fact, generally her contribution has been sort of rather neglected or downgraded and John always said she was, you know, very, very important." "in the way the ideas were sort of put together." "So John needed somebody else there, as I did with Terry Jones." "You need someone to bounce the comedy off and to think about the ideas, and someone who can tell you, "No, that doesn't work."" "We created it together." "I think it was the plot work, but..." "You know, John's facility with language is extraordinary, and it was just wonderful to be working with him." "Production on the pilot began on the 23rd of January 1975, and the first person to commit himself to the new show was Cleese's former Python director." "When I first read the pilot script of Fawlty Towers" "I was, in fact, banned from reading it in bed because I laughed so much, and even though we lived about half a mile from the nearest house, we were in great danger of embarrassing the neighbours." "I think it was very exciting in the first series because it was this little thing we were doing in a back room." "I never thought it would get figures remotely near Python." "Still to come, we look at the method behind the madness..." "SYBIL LAUGHS" "The laugh was based on Connie's laugh, actually!" "Oh, he's a swine to have told that, but it's true, I guess." "Now, Sybil, that's enough!" "...and reveal how one of Fawlty's most brutal scenes was created." "When she clouted me and John, we really felt it!" "The year is 1975." "Harold Wilson is Prime Minister," "Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier have a Thrilla in Manila, while Arthur Ashe becomes the first black tennis player to win Wimbledon." "London is hit by snow in June, and Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female leader of a political party." "But this isn't why 1975 is a landmark year." "It's the year that Fawlty Towers makes its debut" " September the 19th, to be exact." "FAWLTY TOWERS THEME MUSIC" "I don't remember exactly why we wrote the Lord Melbury episode first." "I don't think it was to particularly establish his snobbery, but then that was there and it was kind of an obvious start." "Would you put both your names, please?" "Well, will you give me a date?" "I only use one." "You don't have a first name?" "No, I'm Lord Melbury, so I simply sign "Melbury"." "Go away." "I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting, your Lordship." "I do apologise, please do accept my forgiveness." "Now, is there something, anything, that I can do for you?" "Anything?" "'The apparent lord booking into Fawlty Towers was just classical.'" "Basil suddenly cringing and obsequious." "It was cartoony, but there was an awful reality about it as well." "With a bath?" "Oh, naturally, naturally." "Naturellement." "BASIL GUFFAWS" "'The lower middle class stuff, there was a little bit of my dad' in this because he totally bought into the English class system." "If I'd married a duke, he would have... duke's daughter, I'm sorry - Oh, duke!" "But a duke's daughter, he would have creamed his jeans, you know?" "He could have gone straight out and shot himself, died a happy man, you know?" "I've never been in such a place in my life." "You SNOBS!" "You stupid, stuck up, toffee-nosed, half-witted, upper class piles of... pus!" "In those days, if you were lower middle class, it was quite different from being middle class." "He was lower middle class, aspirational." "Millions of people like that then, at the end of the decade, put Margaret Thatcher into power, so it had a great sort of force in terms of social history, what was going on then." "He wants to belong to a professional class, but he is a hotel owner, and one of the fascinating things is the way that Sybil keeps pulling him back to earth." "Cognac for you, Doctor." "It's rather fascinating, your both being doctors." "Port for you, Doctor." "At one stage I was contemplating becoming a surgeon." "A tree surgeon!" "Thank you, Sybil." "Keeping a tight reign on her stick insect of a husband is Sybil Fawlty." "What's going on?" "Nothing, my dear." "Mrs Fawlty..." "Now, look..." "Yes, Polly?" "I don't know what she's..." "BASIL!" "When we started to write Pru, we weren't sure how the character was going to be played, and at the first read-through, after the first day, we left rehearsal, and Connie and I said, "Well, what do you feel about Pru's performance?"" "And we were both a bit worried because it wasn't what we had in mind." "I thought Sybil was going to be really difficult to cast - and so we were extremely lucky to get Pru." "Because she's complicated." "She's bright, but she's daft, she's steely, but she's frivolous, she's decent and annihilating." "And by the second day, our worries completely disappeared because we saw what she was doing and we realised it was better than what we'd had in our minds." "But the interesting thing is - and I'm not even sure that Pru knows this, and I hope she won't mind" " I was not so familiar with her work in those days." "Just before we got into writing it, we went to see a very funny woman called Bridget Turner and Connie and I said, "We should offer this to Bridget."" "And we sent the script off and Bridget wrote a very nice..." "Or just sent a message back saying she didn't feel it was right for her and so she passed on it." "So we said to John Howard Davies, "Who do you suggest?"" "He said "Well, I think you should use Pru Scales."" "Hello, dear." "What are you doing?" "I'm kissing you, dear." "Well, don't." "At 43, Prunella Scales was already a veteran of the stage and screen." "Sybil was to become her most infamous and celebrated creation." "Hello, dear." "Just going to..." "'I was sent along to see John Cleese,' who was in bed with flu, and I was shown up to his room and there he was in bed and he said, "What did you think of the scripts?"" "I said, "I think they're absolutely brilliant."" "And he said "Oh, good, good, good, any questions?" And I said," ""Yes, why did they get married?"" "He said, "Oh, God, I was afraid you'd ask that!"" "I wish you'd help a bit." "You're always...refurbishing yourself." "What?" "Oh, never mind, never mind!" "Don't shout at me, I've had a difficult morning." "Oh, dear, what happened?" "Did you get entangled in the eiderdown again?" "Not enough cream in your eclair?" "Or did you have to talk to all your friends for so long you didn't have time to perm your ears?" "I think it was my idea that perhaps she wasn't as posh as he was, and what she fell for was his sort of upperclass manner and accent." "All I said to her pretty early on was she's the sort of woman that can make love and paint her nails at the same time." "And her class was self evident - the shiny tight skirts, the pretensions at golf, the high heels, and the complete and utter control of her man." "BASIL!" "Yes, dear?" "Don't you dare, don't you dare give me any more of those pathetic lies!" "Oh, right." "The heels and the tight-fitting skirts, yes, that was based on somebody I'd known in the business as a child, you know, and it was the sort of thing she wore." "So Uncle Ted comes in with his crate of brown ale and..." "SHE LAUGHS" "The laugh was based on Connie's laugh, actually!" "Oh, he's a swine to have told that, but it's true, I guess." "I remember I had an acting teacher in New York who said," ""I really hate your laugh, Connie."" "Yeah, what can I say?" "She would exhale, then draw her..." "I hope she won't mind me saying, but she would laugh..." "Because the great thing about Connie is when she laughs, she just busts a gut, you know?" "And she would do..." "HE WHEEZES NOISILY" "SYBIL LAUGHS  WHEEZES" "So we incorporated that." "Somebody machine gunning a seal!" "HE WHEEZES NOISILY" "SYBIL LAUGHS  WHEEZES" "But as Fawlty Towers began to take shape, not everyone thought the sitcom was such a great idea." "With Python, I think we'd all been sort of aware that we were trying to raise the stakes and have animation as a link and integrate film much more and be much more experimental in the form of the way we put the programme together," "and there was nothing experimental in Fawlty Towers." "It seemed very, very traditional." "Do please excuse me one moment." "'I don't remember my friends having any kind of negative reaction, except for a couple of the Pythons.'" "I mean, Terry Jones, I remember he called me, I think, a traitor." "I was very surprised when John decided to do, you know, a straight sitcom." "I mean, it isn't straight, it's funny, it's a wonderfully funny show, but I was surprised that he decided to go down the sitcom route, really." "The funny thing was how everyone got everything wrong." "I mean, even the guy who at that time was reading scripts for Light Entertainment, he said, "I'm afraid I thought this one as dire as its title." "It's a kind of Prince of Denmark of the hotel world, a collection of cliches and stock characters which I can't see being anything but a disaster."" "Shall I read the guy's name out?" "No!" "No, he'll be retired now, let's let him off." "But it just shows, you see, people have no idea what they're doing." "Surprisingly, the first episode of Fawlty Towers was not an instant hit." "In a time when Britain only had three TV channels, a disappointingly low 3.7% of the population tuned in." "First show was aired - not very good initial reaction." "I think the Mirror or the Sunday Mirror said, "Long John short on jokes"." "What the critics thought was totally irrelevant, and it didn't hurt our feelings." "I think that's what happens, you see?" "If you do something that is new, it seems to take longer" " certainly did with Python - longer for people to get it, but when they do get it, they seem to get it more because it took a little time." "I was just finding my feet, working with John, and I think my performance was quite stilted, but what John was able to help me with, I think, was coming forward and creating ideas." "Once we'd seen them do their performances, it helped Connie and me enormously to build." "They'd started to put flesh on the bones." "One character that blossomed into the perfect sidekick for Basil was Polly, the low-paid chambermaid." "Connie was not just very funny, she was a great dramatic actresss, but at the same time she'd had no experience of working under the very demanding conditions of a sitcom where you have five days to rehearse something, which is not a lot," "and then you have one day in the studio and two hours in front of a studio audience, and that's very demanding." "Lamb?" "Casserole." "Oh, sounds good." "Does it come with a smile?" "Comes with sprouts or carrots." "Oh, a smile's extra, is it?" "You'll get one if you eat up all your sprouts." "We deliberately did not give her a major part because I didn't want her to carry something too difficult at the beginning, and if you look in the first show that she did, she's holding her performance in a little bit," "and then after that, she flowers." "I mean, she's wonderful, she's really wonderful." "Hello, Fawlty Towers." "Please put the bottle down." "What is it?" "Kurt is drunk." "BOTTLE SMASHES" "Under the table..." "No!" "'I think she's the least defined of all the characters.'" "She is a go-between, between Sybil and Basil, sort of as if they're her surrogate parents." "She's there to keep the peace." "'Polly is really a sympathetic character' because she is the voice of sanity, the still calm, around which the madness happens." "And yet she does try to get Basil out of holes, you know?" "You feel that she's got a very good heart." "She has trouble with her arm!" "That why she goes in the cupboard." "Exactly." "Are you feeling better?" "Her arm gets stuck there!" "It's always happening to her." "He's dead!" "It's her husband, she hasn't got over it." "Died 30 years ago." "She doesn't mean any ARM!" "In the cupboard!" "No more today!" "You've had enough!" "Oh, my God, look at that!" "It wasn't in itself a terribly comic character, but in a way, she was perhaps the sort of straight guy." "Oh, I see, Mr Leeman!" "Yes!" "We thought you said "the linen."" "Brilliant!" "Sorry, sorry, that's it." "He has some wonderful female characters and all very well defined, and strong women." "It's the women saving the day time and again." "I mean, it's Polly saving Basil from a predicament with Sybil and Sybil saving Basil from his customers." "It's a perfect dance." "'Basil is sexist but Fawlty Towers is certainly not sexist.'" "Oh, just pull yourself together!" "BASIL WHIMPERS" "Come on!" "I love the scene where Polly slaps me in the face because I've totally lost it, of course, out of fear for Sybil." "Again!" "Harder!" "If you actually look at Basil's motivation, apart from the snobbery, what it's really all about is not letting Sybil get in a tantrum because he just can't handle that." "He's more frightened of that than anything else." "We all make mistakes, dear." "But in the second episode, not even Polly can protect Basil from the full force of Sybil's fury." "He's no bloody good!" "Oh, Sybil, you do exaggerate." "I mean, he's not brilliant..." "Not brilliant?" "He belongs in a zoo!" "In The Builders episode, where David Kelly gets beaten with the umbrella, we'd tried all sorts of things to try and pad the umbrella out." "And to be perfectly honest, Mrs. Fawlty, I like a woman with spirit." "Oh, do you?" "Is that what you like?" "I do, I do!" "Oh, good." "Now Sybil, that's enough." "Come on, then, give us a smile!" "'Somebody on the floor said,'" ""Look, that umbrella's heavy and the ribs in the umbrella" ""may very well crack yours, so I have an idea."" "I ended up with the lads on the floor rolling foam into it." "Made the umbrella twice the weight, and so when she clouted me and John, we really felt it, you know?" "I've seen better-organised creatures running round farmyards with their heads cut off." "Collect your things and get out!" "Argh!" "As he points out, he likes a woman with spirit and, by God Sybil had spirit, you know?" "Still to come, how the world's worst waiter became a national treasure..." "And the cast recall the intense rehearsal process required to bring this carefully crafted classic to our screens." "Mr Richards is the gentleman..." "Oh, BLEEP!" "Performing the series was always difficult." "We were under enormous pressure." "If you didn't REALLY know it by Wednesday morning, that was trouble." "The first couple of episodes may have left critics cold, but by October 1975, Fawlty Towers was fast becoming compulsive viewing for comedy fans." "Manuel, let me explain." "Ah!" "Right?" "You understand?" "And it was the bumbling, bewildered but well-meaning Spaniard from Barcelona that stole the hearts of the nation - even if he did have a poor grasp of the language." "Que?" "The great joy of the series to me, and maybe to everyone, is Manuel and Andrew Sachs." "Que?" "Manuel is sensational, and Andrew played it so beautifully." "He's a wonderful character actor, but I remember he had Manuel right from the beginning in rehearsals, and I thought he was wonderful." "Everyone wants to hug Manuel and take him home, put him on the mantelpiece." "The man behind this loveable Spaniard was actually born in Berlin." "45-year-old character actor Andrew Sachs was starring in a successful West End show when he got the call that would change his life." "Manuel Towers, how are you?" "Is nice today..." "The way I see Manuel, he's a very happy man." "Even though he's being abused by everybody in the hotel," "I think he is happy because I guess he comes from a big family - 10, 11 people maybe as kids - and to be noticed there at all in Barcelona, or wherever it was, you have to get the attention on you - do something naughty and get hit." "Get a clean one." "Is clean now!" "Is dirty now." "The British family he was adopted into, that is the Fawltys, represented his father and mother in a way, and he knew he was being appreciated because they hit him a lot." "Thank you." "The relationship between Basil and Manuel could have been, again, very..." "Just cruel and unpleasant and...heavy." "I no want to work here any more." "Open the basket!" "No!" "Open the basket!" "Now, inside." "Not you!" "I quit!" "Get out!" "I on strike!" "I'm warning you!" "I stay here, is nice!" "You see this?" "You're next!" "Manuel was based simply on one idea which was that in London in the '70s, if you went to a restaurant, you were very, very lucky indeed to get what you ordered, and the reason was that the people who owned restaurants" "had discovered that by employing people who spoke no known language, they could save a lot of money." "The wine list." "Si." "The w..." "Vino." "Senor." "No, no, no, no, no, no." "No, no, no." "The list." "There, there, the list." "Look, the list, there!" "The red..." "look, there!" "There!" "Ah!" "Thank you, Manuel." "He and John played the physical comedy very well." "I mean, John used to whack him over the head or sort of push him through the doors." "I love the violence on Manuel." "I invented quite a lot of it." "I invented the spoon thing when he hits on..." "I invented quite a lot of the violence." "I like violence in comedy." "I think it's very good, it makes you laugh." "When in doubt, hit somebody." "He must have gone home battered and bruised on so many occasions and his wife must have said," ""What did he do to you tonight?"" "And he said, "Well, he hit me with a spoon."" "I grew up loving knockabout comedy, and my attitude to that was, if you do that kind of comedy, which makes me laugh because it's one of the elements of farce, you're going to get knocked down." "Get on with your meals!" "Andrew bore the brunt of it, and there were times..." "I mean, certainly," "I was trying to hit him with a saucepan once with a glancing blow..." "I'm creeping in, he comes up behind me, gets the pan and he goes like that... but instead of stopping with this critical eighth of an inch, he didn't." "He just went....." "Oomph!" "'Ugh!" "I went down and I could hear the angels singing.'" "I thought, "Thank heavens it's the last shot of the show because I can't get up."" "I claim - of course he denies it - that he straightened up as I was..." "So I really caught him, and he had a headache for two days." "And thank God it was about the last shot in the show, so he was able to go on." "Que?" "'Manuel became dreadfully famous all over the world and it was very pleasant, really, 'that it was so separate from me that I was extremely flattered' that so much interest should come to it." "...the windows." "Argh!" "Unfortunately, Basil's pent-up frustration doesn't end with his staff." "Is there anything else?" "I can't breathe!" "Where he was attacking me at the table..." "Actors always come up a bit more when the audience is in there." "You rehearse it and you are under control, sort of, and then you get a slight bit of red mist on the night, you know." "It happens, and we all accept that it happens, so I think I was slightly squashed at one point, you know, like that." "Don't worry, a bit of cheese went the wrong way!" "Never mind, he's fainted." "Manuel!" "But Basil's mistreatment of guests also stretched to the long-term residents - the senile, bumbling Major and the batty old spinsters Miss Gatsby and Miss Tibbs." "Are you sure you're all right?" "Oh, Mr Fawlty..." "Ah, good morning, ladies." "Ursula and I think you're a very naughty boy, don't we, Ursula?" "Oh, God." "Oh, really?" "Basil isn't as horrible to them as he is to the guests." "They're kind of part of his routine and they're part of the home so he can control them in a way, and they want to look after him but he won't allow them." "But he's never really cruel to them or the Major." "Nearly six o'clock, Fawlty." "Is it?" "Yes, well, when you're ready I might have a fruit juice or something." "I'll open up the moment I've done this, Major." "No immediate hurry." "Drunken old sod." "When Connie and I wrote the Major in the first episode," "I don't think we had any thought of repeating the character, but when you see something and you think, "Oh, that's good," and we think, "He could be a regular."" "How are you, sir?" "I can speak English." "He really grew on us and I loved, you know, the scene with the moose's head." "Ah, hello, Major, how are you today?" "Oh, I-I-I'm fine, thank you." "You also got a different quality from John, I think, with the Major, because you felt he liked the Major." "I rather fell in love with Ballard Berkeley." "I just thought he was the finest kind of English gentleman, of a slightly bygone era." "There was a sweetness to him, and a kindness that was very, very touching." "As a former matinee idol and much loved television actor," "Ballard Berkeley brought over 40 years' experience to the part." "What a lot of people don't realise is how old dad was when he started doing Fawlty Towers." "I mean, he was, you know, he was nearly..." "Well, late 70s, I suppose, when he finished it and people forget, you know, that he had a career of 60 years before that." "We were never nervous about Dad being the Major because it was so much him - a great character for him to play because it was so like him except he wasn't dippy like that." "No, no." "He was just affable and charming and got away with lots of stuff." "And gentle." "Dad's always thought of as a sort of military man, so when it comes to his war service, I think most people really think he must have been in the Army, but of course, as we know," "he was in the police and he got a beat just off Piccadilly, in Vine Street." "Yes, West End Central, wasn't it?" "It was ideal." "He loved the West End - the theatre and his friends were there." "I must have been keen on her, because I took her to see India!" "India?" "At the Oval." "He was a mad cricket fan and I remember once" "I was rehearsing a scene with Sybil and we were doing the dialogue and I glanced over and there was Ballard..." "Meaning the third Australian wicket was down." "Couldn't even wait till the end of the scene!" "My daughter still almost inevitably will introduce herself and say, "My grandfather..." because she loves talking about him, and because she gets such a good reaction as well." "As well as stars of the silver screen, the hotel environment also offered the perfect setting for some Britain's best loved actors, to check in as guest stars." "You knew that you were being invited to be on something very special and so it was a great privilege, and one felt blooming lucky." "John and Connie wrote a script that is unbelievably fine." "They're gifted, truly gifted writers." "Now, look." "It's finish." "Give those to me." "Come on, come on." "'I think what John and Connie wrote was very tight and very complete, far more than most shows.'" "There wasn't a lot of room for improvement." "These sitcom veterans were enticed onto the show by the gag-packed scripts that are now regarded as a masterclass in sitcom writing." "Oh, sorry!" "Sorry, coming in like that." "Connie and I used to spend six weeks figuring out each script and something like two and a half weeks before we wrote a line of dialogue." "John had a small study and a very big desk." "The desk faced the wall." "He just started to play." "I used to type onto an old-fashioned typewriter, but we just sat there and talked to each other and, you know, might write a word down or say," ""What was that thing that happened?"" "You know, you remember the scene where the lovely Australian girl has got the tarry handprint on her boob?" "Well, we'd had that idea and we were writing, weeks later," "Connie said, "What was that idea we had about..." ""That would work here." And I said, "Yes, yes"." "What's that on your hand, Basil?" "What?" "Oh, that's some stuff in the cupboard, dear." "Something I knocked over." "John is highly instinctive and I think he knew that he wanted to be monitored in some way, and that's why he wanted me on board." "Basil..." "Hello, dear, just checking the doors." "I think that the women were very, very well written in Fawlty Towers, and that was basically Connie, 'cause I remember suggesting a line early on and Connie saying, "A woman would never say that line."" "I'd say, "What, really?" "Wouldn't she?" "Well, why?" "," you know?" "So it was a tremendous learning process, and although at the beginning I was writing most of Basil and Manuel and she was writing Sybil and Polly, towards the end we were much more crossing over, and she was writing much more of Basil." "Come on, give it to me." "But this fast-paced farce presented huge problems when it came to production." "'Fawlty Towers differed from' a lot of the sitcoms that were current at that time by virtue of the volume of the script." "The average sitcom script was somewhere between 60 and 70 pages." "These scripts ran 120, 130 pages." "Most of the episodes were too long, so Connie and John had to go off and rewrite them, and in fact I think they're still too long, longer than the normal." "I mean, it's not 29 minutes 30 seconds, it's 35 minutes, all that sort of thing." "In fact, none of the 12 Fawlty Towers episodes ran to their allotted 30 minute time slot, a feat unheard of in modern sitcom making." "I always believe that you cannot do comedy fast enough and I always optimistically hoped that it would run to time." "It never did." "Performing of the series was always difficult." "We were under enormous pressure with the rehearsal, and because it was a farce and the timing was so important and it was physically a very demanding show." "I think it was tough on everybody." "Mr Thurston is the gentleman I'm dealing with at the moment." "WHAT?" "!" "Mr Richards is the gentleman..." "Oh BLEEP!" "It was the first sitcom I ever did where you rehearsed all day and you got the thing right." "John's huge involvement and desire for perfection and to get it absolutely right..." "And it's there in the end product." "We got Monday off." "On Tuesday morning we met and read and locked it." "If you didn't REALLY know it by Wednesday morning, that was trouble." "Yes, it was disciplined." "It had to be." "We had to get through a lot of script." "Not in my case because, actually, if you analyse my part, it's not big." "That's a rat!" "No, no, no, is hamster." "It's a rat, of course it's a rat!" "You have rats in Spain, don't you, or did Franco have them all shot?" "Is pigeon." "It's a rat!" "It's not a pigeon, it's a hamster." "It was a feat of learning and I used to go back and lie down." "I had a library, and I used to lie on the floor," "I would record all the other lines onto a tape recorder, and I'd lie flat on the floor and I would have it by my ear and I would be doing my lines in the lines that I'd recorded." "It was the only way to get it done." "I couldn't do it now." "I could do one show, but I couldn't be there at 10 o'clock in the morning just starting the second one, because the pressure was relentless." "And people said to me, "Did you enjoy it?"" "and I used to say to them, "I didn't have time."" "Although most of the filming was confined to the BBC studios, the team did venture out on the odd occasion, with one of the show's most memorable scenes shot on location in a sleepy suburban street in Harrow." "Start, you vicious bastard." "Come on!" "ENGINE COUGHS" "Oh, my God!" "I'm warning you, if you don't start..." "When we were working on The Gourmet Night and the car breaks down, and John was improvising because we hadn't got into the dialogue, he..." "He started losing it with the car and swearing at it." "That's it!" "I've had enough!" "You've tried it on just once too often!" "I said, "Now he's got to hit the car, he's got to attack it."" "I'm going give you a damn good thrashing!" "Everyone says that beating the car is so funny, but when we were out filming, we had the car but I had to find the branch." "Part of my duties was ordering up props." "I'd asked for a selection of branches, and before we turned over, before we rehearsed anything, really," "John had a trial period with branches." "The first branch that I tried to hit it with was too rigid." "It was just like a rod and it just wasn't funny, wasn't remotely funny." "It wasn't just less funny, it wasn't funny." "Then I went and got a sort of wispy willowy bit and started to swat the car with it, and that wasn't funny, and it was only when I got the third piece and felt that, and went back and then it was funny," "but I didn't know until I had physically done it, and then I thought, "That feels right."" "Coming up, Basil improves foreign relations..." "It's a kind of Tourette thing, you know, whatever you shouldn't say comes out." "I'll just get your hors d'oeuvres." "Hors d'oeuvres, which must be obeyed at all times without question!" "...and the writers' relationship breaks down." "There was a huge gap between the two series because Connie and I, as far as I remember, got divorced." "Brilliant." "Oh!" "Brilliant!" "Ugh!" "Right." "Despite impeccable storylines that would become etched into the nation's consciousness," "Fawlty Towers was more of a slow burner than an instant hit." "But by the end of its first series, the sitcom had almost doubled its viewing figures, with nearly 3.5 million viewers tuning in to watch the final episode, entitled simply The Germans." "The veal chop is done with rosemary - that's funny, I thought she'd gone to Canada - and is delicious and nutritious." "In fact it's veally good." "Veally good?" "The whole German episode is quite brilliant." "It's a kind of Tourette thing, you know, whatever you shouldn't say comes out," "But that is also helped by the size of Fawlty." "All in the market together, old differences forgotten and no need at all to mention the war." "Sorry, sorry!" "He can't help it." "He is a fairly prejudiced English snob, and no matter how he tries to cover it up, as he must try to do in administering this place, he can't." "I'll just get your hors d'oeuvres." "Hors d'oeuvres which must be obeyed at all times without question!" "Sorry, sorry." "'Basil is vile to the Germans' who emerge as extremely courteous." "They're not portrayed as humourless and aggressive or anything." "That was a very interesting episode because it was just deliberately writing Basil as being, you know, utterly vile to these nice people." "Will you stop talking about the war?" "Me?" "You started it." "We did not start it." "Yes, you did." "You invaded Poland." "When this huge, tall man starts to goose-step and then puts his finger up like that, you know," "I mean, there's no halfways about it" " this is very heavy, very, very heavy rudeness." "When he said, "I'll do the walk", swung his leg out and goose-stepped out, people were screaming." "It was just an incredible moment." "Watch." "Who's this, then?" "HE SHOUTS IN PRETEND GERMAN" "I'll do the funny walk." "'I've always had a mixed personal reaction to the Germans episode because people go on about it so much, and I sometimes wonder, a little bit like Alf Garnett and the problem that Johnny Speight used to have," "whether people are laughing out of animosity towards the Germans, when the whole point of that from the very, very beginning was to make fun of people still hanging on to those antediluvian attitudes." "And it bothers me." "And what I notice about the Germans is how they love it." "Stop it!" "I'm trying to cheer her up, you stupid kraut!" "The Germans episode obviously upset us very much." "Otherwise it would be only half as much fun, wouldn't it?" "No, but to be serious, it was taken very well by the broad majority of the German audiences." "One of the best parts of my life, I was standing in the Atlantic Hotel in, in..." "In Hamburg, and suddenly as I was chatting to the concierge, a big, jolly German businessman sort of, "Hey John!"" "and shouted across the lobby, and I turned round, and he said, "Don't mention ze war, huh?"" "And the entire lobby roars with laughter." "I thought that was a wonderful moment." "I thought that was great, now we can get on with it." "You have absolutely no sense of humour, do you?" "This is not funny!" "Who won the bloody war, anyway?" "Fawlty Towers is very much a period piece in terms of relations with Irish people, foreigners of any kind." "There is plenty, absolutely plenty, of xenophobia and racism in Fawlty Towers but because it's a character thing." "It's who Basil Fawlty is - we're laughing more at his prejudice than we are anything else." "Ah, Mr Fawlty, you're so charming." "Well, one does one's best." "Written more than 30 years ago, it's easy to spot more than a spattering of racial stereotyping." "Despite doing little to improve foreign relations," "Fawlty became a hit around the world." "'It's always been a mystery to me why certain shows work abroad.'" "My only answer is" " I think it may apply to Python too - that I think we may have hit what they call archetypes." "There were certain... types of people represented by the characters, that people from different cultures could recognise." "DUBBED IN SPANISH" "Shown in more than 60 countries, it is one of Britain's most successful" "TV exports, even turning up in the most unlikely of places." "'At one point, a German company' wanted to do a version where they dub it into German." "'This German company understood that I come from Germany, it's my first language,' and would I come over and play Manuel in German with a Spanish accent?" "Mrs Fawlty, Mrs Fawlty." "Mr Fawlty." "Was ist?" "MANUEL SHOUTS IN GERMAN" "I would have a line like "I love you Mr Fawlty, I love you Mr Fawlty", but the German version would be" ""Oh, Herr Fawlty, Ich liebe Dich, Ich liebe Dich"." "Attempts have also been made to re-make this bastion of British comedy." "IN URDU" "When people have tried to remake it, it's never worked, considerably to my disappointment." "I mean, when the Germans re-did it, they did it superbly." "Chef?" "Kann ich jetzt endlich ein Gin-Tonic und ein Whiskey-Sour bekommen?" "'The network just thought it was too expensive, I think.'" "There is only this unique character of Basil Fawlty, and the one and only John Cleese and maybe one came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work as well with another personality, another hotel in another setting." "'It was extraordinary when the Americans tried to remake Fawlty Towers." "It surprised me that they never asked me for any advice or help or comments." "And it wasn't any good." "Whispering Pines presents to you Pacific Ocean Duck." "Argh!" "What is this?" "Some kind of joke?" "Yes." "Ha, ha, ha." "The really bizarre one was when I met someone at a weekend house party and they said, "Oh, we have the rights for Fawlty Towers and we're going to remake it."" "I was delighted, I said "Great, I hope we can make it work this time."" "I said, "But there's one or two problems." "Are Americans familiar with these little family hotels?"" ""Oh, yes, it's not a problem", they said." "I said, "Are you going to make any changes?"" "They said, "We're just making one change, really." "We're going to write Basil out"." "And I remember thinking, "Did he say that?"" "And Bea Arthur did it." "It was called "Amanda's", and they took the funny lines, and gave them all to Bea Arthur, when all the motivation for the funny lines no longer existed." "As proved, there can only be one Basil Fawlty." "The first series ended in spectacular style in the autumn of 1975..." "However did they win?" "...by bagging two awards for best sitcom and best comedy performance by Cleese." "But of all the people who helped me this year, I should most of all like to thank me, without whom, quite honestly," "I could never have hoped to win this fairly great honour." "So thank you me, thank you very much indeed." "Although I can't be with you, I have arranged for the award to be collected, so if we could close the door now because it's getting a little cold." "Thank you so much." "A second series was swiftly commissioned, but the writing went on hold as John rejoined his Python pals for a sell-out tour and to shoot their latest film, Life Of Brian." "It would take a staggering four years for Fawlty to return." "There was a huge gap between the two series and also Connie and I, as far as I remember, got divorced." "The work went on in spite of us and in spite of what was going on." "It didn't save our marriage, but I think" "Fawlty Towers became a kind of refuge for our demons and angels and that that, maybe, was why we were able to go on to write the second series." "We had been having our doubts about the marriage in '74 and we finally split up in '76." "And it was one of those relationships where there was an enormous amount of love and affection, and still is, but we just found it difficult to live together, so I moved out, moved back in, moved out, moved back in." "And having finally moved out the middle of '76, I think we started writing the next series about a year later, because there was no ill will." "For us it was a release because somehow I think, too, in the relationship of Sybil and Basil, we were able to get out our frustrations with each other through those characters." "It was quite civil and we got down to the work." "I remember we'd get stuck, we'd take walks sometimes and not talk, and there were other times when John would take off like a racehorse in the work and just go." "He was on his own track." "Oh, here, use this one." "John and Connie had split and we had no idea." "John would arrive and then Connie would arrive later and you just thought "Well, she's come in a different cab," or something." "We had no idea, they kept it so, not particularly secret, but we just carried on as we carried on." "I certainly don't remember it being a problem of any kind." "They worked together beautifully and, you know, it was a happy unit." "Manager, manager!" "Yes?" "Testing, testing." "There." "I've never met such insolence in my life." "I come down here to get lavatory paper and she starts asking me the most insulting, personal things I've ever heard in my life!" "I thought you wanted writing paper." "I'm talking to you, Watt." "What?" "Connie and I didn't enjoy the second series as much as the first, because we felt this pressure to be as good." "I did feel, yes, under pressure, but not to the degree on the second series," "I think that John did, with his history." "He had more at stake, and I could trust him to do the worrying, which I did." "But it took off in a way that I don't think either of us had ever expected it would." "It wasn't like the first series when you're sort of playing and discovering and having fun." "It was kind of delivering the goods - and that wasn't as much fun." "Coming up, problems mount on the second series as a punch-up in BBC corridors puts production under threat." "They said, "Well, we can't record tomorrow, we're on strike."" "And we reveal how those infamous Fawlty signposts were created." "Possibly the most shocking thing was actually the anagrams at the beginning." "Was it not Flowery BLEEP one week?" "This is Fawlty Towers, the hotel that guests hate to stay at, but viewers can't stay away from." "When I pay for a view, I expect something more interesting than that." "But that is Torquay, madam." "Well, it's not good enough." "May I ask what you were expecting to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window?" "Sydney Opera House, perhaps?" "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?" "The dreadful Torquay hotel is instantly recognisable by its infamous black and white exterior." "Although fans may be surprised to learn that this legendary landmark was actually based in leafy Buckinghamshire." "This is the actual hotel, exactly halfway between my house and the BBC." "I went to see it quite by chance." "It was a country club, but it was absolutely perfect because it's up this steep slope." "I was worried about its whiteness." "It didn't look quite like Torquay, but yet it had a kind of seaside feel about it." "Wooburn Grange Country Club is alas no more, burning to the ground in 1991." "Possibly the most shocking thing was actually the anagrams at the beginning." "Was it not Flowery BLEEP one week?" "The motivation for that was the newspaper boy who was always being smacked by Basil, and when he left the hotel, he always rearranged the lettering." "In fact, it was Iain McLean, the assistant floor manager, who was the only person who could do it." "We were on location at the hotel, having lunch, and John said," ""You do crosswords - work out some anagrams of Fawlty Towers."" "So I set to work and I found only one that is a true anagram - there may be others, I haven't gone back to it " "And I said, "But you can't use it because it's a little vulgar."" "And..." "John Howard Davis and John Cleese said, "I think we'll fit that in somewhere."" "Despite its smutty signposts," "Fawlty was now regarded as the jewel in the BBC's comedy crown." "And on 19th February 1979, four years after the first series ended," "Basil was back with a record-breaking audience of almost 13 million viewers." "PHONE RINGS Hello, Fawlty Towers." "I was worried about the second series because by that time," "I'd gone onto an administrative job." "Bye, Mrs Fawlty." "Goodbye, Mr Perkins." "A satisfied customer - we should have him stuffed." "I asked Bob Spiers to do the second series and it worked quite well." "I don't think you could see the joins." "It was in some ways more polished, but..." "I'm only saying this because I directed the first series, and I thought the first series by and large was funnier." "John would probably disagree." "The second series was different - we knew the first series was very good, and people remembered it, as they often do, as better than it was." "So even if it was there, people remembered as being there, so we realised that the new shows had got to be there." "And by and large I think the second series' programmes" "ARE better than the first." "With this new series came a new face, a cheerful Cockney chef called Terry, played by Brian Hall." "Mr Fawlty, take it easy." "Now look, get one thing clear, all right?" "You don't tell me to take it easy." "Well, I..." "I don't pay you to tell me to take it easy, I pay you to take it ea..." "No I pay you to tell you to take it easy..." "I think that Connie and I felt that after six episodes, somehow we needed a new element on the staff." "Mr Leeman dead." "Well, that would explain a lot." "No, Mr Fawlty." "Really, Poll just said so." "What are you on about?" "I just took him his kippers!" "Oh, my God!" "He was cocky and sturdier than Manuel, wasn't he?" "And a little bit slippery." "Brian was an absolute sweetie." "He said, "You gave me the key to this character," and I said "Did I?"" "And he said, "Don't you remember?" "I came up and I asked you at the very beginning of the first episode," ""What's the key to Terry?"" "And you said, "The police are after him."" "And once he had that, he knew how to play it and he just fitted in so beautifully." "That's our new chef just left, just popped out for a quick prayer, I expect." "Ha-ha!" "As well as fresh faces, the second series gave a greater insight into its characters." "Excuse me, I do apologise but I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to..." "Especially Basil and his very stuffed-shirt approach to sex." "Very nice." "Oh, thank you." "Your thing." "I mean your charm, your charm, in the middle." "Yes, I know." "Basil has a tremendous problem with sex because he's not getting it." "You see, I don't think Basil and Sybil have actually had it for, oh, quite a considerable time." "And the dead giveaway, to me, is that they are in twin beds." "I suppose the oddest thing about them is the bedroom." "I mean, even Morecambe and Wise slept in the same bed." "The primary emotion is that the poor fellow is unloved, and he feels unloved and therefore he is constantly in a state of irritation." "You are aware of our rule about visitors, are you?" "Hmm?" "No visitors in guests' rooms after 10 o'clock." "Oh." "Of the opposite...sex." "No, I wasn't." "Ah!" "But I am now." "So you'll send up the champagne, will you?" "What?" "You're drinking it on your own, are you?" "I guess I'll have to." "Very well." "One bottle of champagne - for one." "Thank you." "And one glass." "That's all I need, unless you care to join me?" "Not when I'm on the job." "That's when I enjoy it the most." "Basil has a bee in his bonnet with Mr Johnson, because Mr Johnson is obviously sexually successful and Basil is jealous." "Basil is jealous and wants to bring him down." "This, er...bit of crumpet's your old mummy, is she?" "Oh, this is rich." "Oh, old Mother Johnson popped up for a quickie, did she?" "May I meet her?" "Certainly." "Mother Johnson!" "Mother Johnson!" "Come out, come out wherever you are." "How do you do?" "Are you enjoying your stay?" "I thought The Psychiatrists episode was wonderful." "And you, Doctor?" "Are you..." "I'm a psychiatrist." "Very nice, too." "Well, cheers." "We were both in group therapy at that time, family, marital group therapy and whether, again, indirectly, the whole idea of having a psychiatrist in that episode, and what it would do to Basil and all the sexual difficulties, that was just very funny." "There was the extraordinary encounter with the psychiatrist, where he thinks he's asking about how often he has sex." "Now, the sort of sophisticated angle there is that Basil Fawlty is actually obsessed by sex, which he would be, because he can't actually manage it in real life." "We were just speculating how people in your profession arrange their holidays." "How often you can get away." "Hmm?" "How often do you manage it?" "Beg your pardon?" "How often can you and your wife manage it?" "If you don't mind my asking." " Not at all." "Not at all." "About average, since you ask." "Average?" " Mm-hm." "What would be "average"?" "Well, you tell me." "Well, a couple of times a year." "What?" "Once a year?" "Well, we knew it must be difficult." "My wife didn't see how you could manage it at all, you know." "Well, as you've asked, two or three times a week, actually!" "A week?" "Yes, pretty normal, isn't it?" "We're quite normal here in Torquay." "The vision of the two of them having sex is quite a nerve-wracking idea." "The state of Sybil and Basil's marriage was explored further in The Anniversary, although viewers would have to wait a little longer than expected to see this slice of insanity." "Is everything all right, dear?" "You seem just a little bit..." "It was going very well and the most extraordinary thing happened." "There was a strike at the BBC because a rigger punched a BBC executive, and immediately it was all out." "And we said, "What's happening?", and they said, "We can't record tomorrow, we're on strike."" "The rigger was duly dismissed, and this being strike ridden 1979 the BBC union swiftly took industrial action." "Production staff downed tools and walked out for seven days." "They came back, they said," ""It's been settled, we'll be recording again next week."" "The character eventually played by Ken Campbell was being played by a lovely actor called Julian Holloway." "But Julian Holloway said," ""I can't do it next week, I've got another job, I can't get out of it."" "We said, "Well, we have to recast,"" "so we brought Ken Campbell in, who was wonderful." "Yes, I'll just get a brush." "A Basil Brush." "That wonderful character of Ken Campbell, you know." "He's needling Basil." "And the way it builds, everyone's so concerned about Sybil, they've got to see Sybil and oh, it's excruciating, the way it mounts, the nuts and the wine - oh, it just..." "I think it's wonderful." "I don't know if you've seen the moulding..." "Oh!" "It's all right, it's all right, don't worry, I'll clean it up." "What time's the main feature?" "The nice thing was, we had two weeks to rehearse it." "You see, Ken was able to come in." "The rest of us knew the part." "And it was the one time that we really began to get relaxed because we'd done the lines enough times to really relax and I think it has some of the best performing we ever did in that particular show." "Happy anniversary." "Happy anniversary." "Oh, you poor dear." "How are you feeling, dear?" "Ahhh!" "It's a shame." "The Anniversary is my least favourite episode, because I'm in it, and I can't bear looking at anything that I'm in." "But also, I can see I was nervous, because it is quite nerve-racking being a guest on something, especially something as great as that." "She won't mind me seeing." "Oh, she would, I think she would." "Oh, but it's her anniversary." "She's up there all on her own!" "Ahhh!" "Ah!" "Old leg, bit of gyp, oh!" "There's an extraordinarily sad moment when you see Sybil's vulnerability." "I came back for my clubs, Basil, I'm not staying." "Oh, aren't you?" "OK." "What?" " I'm sure you know best, dear." "You don't even want me to, do you?" "Um..." "Oh, what's that?" "I think the scene I look back on with great fondness is when they've had a fight and she's sort of trying to make it up, and you realise that actually she is emotionally quite dependent on him." "I'm going now, Basil." "I think it's best, don't you?" "Alright dear." "She's trying to establish connection with Basil, but Basil is in the thralls of extreme embarrassment and only has one thought in mind, which is to get her out of the hotel before all the guests discover that she's not upstairs in bed at all," "and that must be someone else." "Bye, Basil." "Cheerio, dear." "'I certainly sometimes found myself thinking,'" ""What is this woman doing with this man?" "Why did she stick it out?"" "Obviously there is a deep-rooted affection that they have for each other." "I mean, he knows his place, you know, he needs a woman like that - they work so well together." "I'm sure there's many marriages like that." "Do you remember when we were first manacled together, we used to laugh quite a lot." "Yes, but not at the same time, Basil." "It sounds terrible, probably, but I think" "I have to say that Basil and Sybil's marriage is like most marriages that I have observed in my 70 years." "We all make mistakes, dear." "They work together, they can never escape from each other." "You never, ever learn!" "How on earth did the two of us ever get together?" "Black magic, my mother says." "Well, she'd know, wouldn't she?" "The second series was due to come to the end of its illustrious run on 2nd April, 1979." "Great fun." "But another strike threw production into jeopardy once more." "From tonight, the recording of drama and light entertainment will have to be suspended." "As a result, some comedy shows have had to be cancelled, including the final episode of Fawlty Towers which will now never be made." "Thankfully, this over-zealous reporter got it wrong." "The final episode was made, but it would take a full six months before Basil the Rat went to air." "Coming up, problems of a furry kind cause havoc on set." "Do you mind?" "Que?" "Why this iconic sitcom stopped after just two series." "They offered John everything to do another series and he said, "No"." "And we go in search of the legendary lost episode." "It took up just six hours of TV time, 12 perfect half-hour episodes." "And even though it's been 30 years since it left our screens, this multi-award-winning sitcom is still regarded as the finest comedy ever written." "PHONE RINGS" "Not you." "Could I get my hat?" "Your hat?" "Yes." "It's just there." "Yes, I'll have it sent on." "It's fitting that the best was saved till last." "Although, owing to more strikes at the BBC, it would be a full six months before the final episode, Basil The Rat, aired." "Basil!" "'We had a sort of recap rehearsal,' went into the studio on the Saturday, which we never, ever did, and because we had the rat, it was the only scene that was ever pre-recorded," "just in case there was somebody in the audience, or the crew, who had a real phobia about it." "Don't move." "I was told on the first day that I would be going into a studio and it would be a real rat that I'd be working with." "I thought, "Oh, that's going to be interesting"." "So that's one pate and one Windsor..." "SQUEAKS:" "Soup!" "Pssst." "John would go to great lengths to make sure that all members of the crew, and particularly the cast, were comfortable." "And John just got himself in her eyeline and basically mugged at her to take her mind off the fact that there was a small furry rodent running around her feet." "I mean, how many people get John Cleese to themselves for a whole evening and just listening to funny stories?" "So it was a fantastic deterrent to the fear of the rat." "What ARE you doing?" "What?" "He had his hand in my bag." "What?" "No, I..." "You know something?" "You're getting my dander up, you grotty little man." "You're asking for a bunch of fives!" "Bomb scare!" "What?" "!" "There's been a bomb scare." "A bomb scare?" "Yes." "Yes, that's why he was in your bag." "He didn't want to alarm you." "Yes, may I?" "Well, I..." "Thank you." "We had a call, you see." "Shouldn't you get everybody out?" "That's why we were looking under your table..." "Argh!" "The rat popping up in the biscuit box is one of my favourite bits." "I know it doesn't look like a real rat, and that's part of its charm." "Biscuits?" "Would you care for a rat, or...?" "When we recorded the last episode, we knew it was the end." "And it was very sad, really." "And a lot of people were saying," ""Oh, don't worry, we'll be back in four years, we'll do series three in four years, it'll be fine."" "Fawlty Towers shut its doors for the last time on Thursday 25th October, 1979." "Its creators picked up another 2 BAFTA's for best sitcom and best comedy performance by Cleese, and Basil duly handed over the comedy baton to his successors." "Now, listen, I am not going to do it this week." "You must have something - what about edited Motocross highlights or..." "Horse Of The Year Show, or inter- counties basket weaving or something?" "Well, how about a cheap, tatty revue?" "All right, if that suits you." "Cheap tatty revue then." "Stand by and..." "Cue!" "They offered John everything to do another series and he said," ""No." "We had two series of six and if you do a third series" ""and it's not as good as the other two, you then devalue the currency of the first two."" "Although only a dozen shows were ever aired, rumours persist of legendary lost episode lurking in a dusty BBC building somewhere." "I have it at home and, for a small fee, can be persuaded to send it to you by mail order." "No, no." "Lovely idea." "A 13th episode." "Unless it was made by an entirely different team, there is no 13th episode." "No, we wrote 6 in the first series and 6 in the second, then Connie and I looked at each other and we thought we'd done it." "We didn't want that pressure to be as good again." "We would have failed." "People would have said it was very funny but it wasn't as good as the first two series, so what was the point?" "I said, "Would you ever think of writing some more?"" "He said "Yes, I suppose I could."" "I said, key question, "Would you do it without Connie?"" "He said "No." "No."" "And I think her contribution was much bigger than people believe." "I think it was absolutely right, true, that we, covering the taboo subjects, we'd done it and it felt like there were three sort of situations within each half hour, so it felt like a lot more than 12 episodes I think." "I don't think by then John and I could have gone on working together." "I think..." "We thought we'd done it." "30 years after this hopeless hotel closed up for good, Fawlty Towers retains an affectionate place in the hearts of the British nation." "And in 2008, fans were treated to a reunion of Basil and Manuel, as they made a rare royal outing." "CHEERING" "Well, I'm fond of Andrew, and somebody suggested it would be good, in view of what had happened with Jonathan Ross and the other guy." "The audience would like to see us together or something, and it worked very well emotionally." "What is the 11th letter of the English alphabet?" "Que?" "LAUGHTER" "John rang me up, said would I come on, just do a brief entry as Manuel." "I can't very well say no to John, because he's so much bigger than me." "Now run for it, you stupid..." "I thought the outflowing of love that evening was so wonderful, and you could tell it with him as well." "And I said to him afterwards, I said, "That was the old John, wasn't it?"" "He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You should be back here, mate."" "He always feels that Michael Palin's become a national institution and he would have done if he'd stayed." "Not that he's jealous of Michael, they're still great friends." "Tantalising though it was to have Basil back, what the public craves is for Fawlty Towers to open its doors once more for another series." "I was constantly being asked by the public," ""Are there going to be any more?" That's the favourite question of the fans," ""Is John going to write some more?"" "My only sadness is that they didn't go on to write another, at least another 12, then we could have had 24 to watch and watch and watch." "The only idea that Connie and I ever had for an extension of Basil was that Manuel has left and set up an establishment in Spain, and Sybil and Basil decide that they're going to go and visit him." "Which I think would be fun." "And I thought that what would happen was," "Basil has the usual appalling experience at Heathrow or some other terminal, where a hijacker tries to hijack the flight, and Basil becomes so furious that he actually overcomes the hijacker, becomes a hero." "HE LAUGHS" "'I've been 52, 53 years on stage and yet Fawlty Towers,' that full nine minutes in one episode of The Builders, makes me recognised anywhere in the world." "A number of episodes in Fawlty Towers, I think, were pretty close to perfection in comedy and I've never, ever got that myself." "That's why I said, "I'll never get that, I'll give up."" "I was delighted to have been part of Fawlty Towers." "It was a lovely job." "I think I did my very best with it, and it was a bloody good episode." "I just think it was absolutely the best of its kind and the best of its time." "You know, it stands out from practically everything else going on at the time." "Knowing that you're going to go to work and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh, even though you'd seen the joke many times before, and to say, "Oh, I'm going to work today, I shall be drained" ""of stomach muscles by midday," that's a terrific feeling." "Well, what Connie and I tried to do in comedy is make people laugh as much as possible." "That's what I love." "I love the intensity, because that brings the biggest laugh." "I suppose it felt kind of like a freak event in our lives." "Yes, I'm incredibly proud to have been associated with it." "But I think the main quality it had, it was so bloody good." "Out!" "Everybody out!" "Go on upstairs, pack your bags, adios, out!"