Fawlty Towers

Fawlty Towers was a British sitcom made by the BBC and first broadcast on BBC2 in 1975. It is set in a fictional hotel named Fawlty Towers in the Devon town of Torquay on "the English Riviera". The hotel is owned and run by the eccentric Basil Fawlty and his censorious wife Sybil, helped by the maid Polly, the Spanish porter Manuel who could barely speak English and (in the second series) the chef Terry. Permanent guests were the half-senile Major Gowen and the bewildered old ladies Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby. Very few other guests ever stayed long.

Background and inspiration

Even before this programme existed, English seaside boarding houses and their proprietors had something of a reputation for firmness and intransigence, possibly stemming from the days when soldiers were billeted in small hotels during wartime or national service. Cleese had also parodied the contrast between organisational dogma and sensitive customer service in many personnel training videotapes issued with a serious purpose by his company Video Arts. Basil Fawlty's behaviour can often be taken to represent macho management at its worst.

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Fawlty Towers was inspired by the Monty Python team's stay in the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay. Cleese and Booth stayed on at the hotel after filming for the Python show had finished. The owner, Mr. Donald Sinclair, was very rude, throwing a bus timetable at a guest who asked when the next bus to town would arrive and throwing Eric Idle's suitcase out of the window in case it contained a bomb (actually it contained a ticking alarm clock). He also criticised the American-born Terry Gilliam's table manners for being too American, and it is reasonable to assume that his treatment of Gilliam partially inspired Basil's treatment of an American visitor in the episode "Waldorf Salad".

Related Topics:
Monty Python - Torquay - Donald Sinclair - Eric Idle - Terry Gilliam

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For the outside taping, not an actual hotel was used, but the Wooburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire, instead. It has served as a nightclub named "Basil's" for a while after the series ended. A short time later, it was destroyed by fire.

Related Topics:
Country Club - Buckinghamshire - Nightclub

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Sinclair died in 1981, having emigrated to Canada in the 1970s where he was once tracked down by a British newspaper after Cleese named him in an interview. Mr Sinclair and his relatives have never been too happy about the way he has been portrayed, and his widow Betty is now campaigning to remove what she sees as a slur on her husband's reputation, but former staff and visitors have remembered actual events there that were allegedly as ludicrous as those depicted in the programmes. Also the children of Donald Sinclair confirm that it is an accurate rendition of their father.

Related Topics:
1981 - Canada

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At the beginning of each episode, the name of the hotel appears on a sign outside. As by naughty children, the name is changed each episode: Fatty Owls, Farty Towels, Flowery Twats, Watery Fowls.

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