Fawlty Towers Read online

  Although the studio set may well have been preserved for possible future use, original items of furniture — probably not BBC property in the first place, but hired — could not perhaps be located after an interval of five years, and were replaced by pieces as apparently identical as possible. And the set decorator did a very good job. It takes an attentive eye to see that such a conspicuous piece as the grandfather clock isn’t the same one in all episodes, and the eye of a true fanatic to discern that the little wooden bench between the kitchen door and the dining room has been changed as well.

  On the other hand, the lavish flower arrangements are notably variable. It is at first hard to imagine that any one in the hotbed of the Towers would care that much for flowers, but their abundance, in as many beautiful vases, is testimony that such a person really exists. Is it Polly? In terms of decoration, Sybil is decidedly more interested in her hair, and Basil couldn’t care less, probably prefering the ease of maintenance of plastic flowers. So, unless we were to suspect Terry or Manuel of having a secret passion for sumptous flower arrangements, they must be of Polly’s doing.

  Speaking of sumptuousness, there should be a word here about the quantity of colourful ties featured throughout the series. The Major is a case in point, always dressed in elegant suits and becoming ties. Basil is mostly seen in a suit and tie, sometimes just in cardigan and cravat though. His most winning confection, however, is the check jacket with green chest panels, which he dons for what turns out to be an after all not so enjoyable weekend of golf with Sybil — “ It’s called style dear. You would never understand” (The Builders). Otherwise, Basil’s style of dress is remarkably conservative — colours range from brown to grey, and there may occasionally be a dark green cardigan as well. Apart from the check jacket, there is never an attempt at extravagance on his part.

  Sybil’s wardrobe and hairstyles, on the other hand, would indeed merit a chapter to themselves. In this context we shall have to limit ourselves to a general description. The most immediately striking visible feature of Sybil is, as any spectator can easily verify, her remarkable predilection for bouffant wigs and knotted scarves sometimes even enhanced with Nottingham lace. Early on in A Touch of Class she sets the tone by throwing a violet jacket over her white blouse with its generously flowing flouncy bow, only to subsequently leave the hotel wearing a leopard-skin coat. It is noteworthy that she (exception made for the opening of The Wedding Party) never wears a dress but always a combination of skirt and blouse. If she wears a jacket, it is generally of the same colour and design as that of the skirt. The colours of her dress (except in the above-mentioned A Touch of Class) range from deep blue, violet and purple to piggy-pink — ardent admirers of Queen Elizabeth’s impeccable taste and flare for stylish colour combinations might already have noticed that Sybil’s clothes sometimes actually aspire to royal splendour. And what a match it makes with her tremendous syllabub-like dyed hair! As the series progresses, Sybil’s wigs have a general tendency to get fluffier and fluffier, and Basil’s reference to a rat’s maze does not seem entirely unjustified. What does she keep in there? The secret is well guarded. It is quite possible that not even Basil has ever seen her hair in its natural state — perhaps she’s bald?

  Polly’s clothes range from the modestly elegant to the transparently sexy. In the first episode she has been assigned a purely domestic role and her dress is consequently unsensational. Notwithstanding the necessity of attuning Polly’s clothing to the general ambiance of the establishment (“Polly, I’m afraid we have abandoned the idea of the topless afternoon teas”), it was nevertheless a wise decision to allow her to dress up a bit more in later episodes. In The Wedding Party the discussion concerning Polly’s appearing at the wedding reception in her own ‘Jean-Wilson-creation’ adds a coquettish and frivolously feminine touch to a world otherwise dominated by Sybil’s somewhat ‘kitschy’ eccentricities and Basil’s completely unenchanting, not to say sombre, dress code.

  The Ladies, with their roots in a previous century, are characteristically to be seen in dark Edwardian dresses and veiled hats adorned with necklaces, pearls and miscellaneous jewellery. Manuel has, in marked contrast to his difficulties in learning the English language, adopted a distinctive British style of dress, and prefers to walk around in woolly cardigans when not on duty. Terry, of course, wears his chef’s jacket practically all the time.

  The only clothes that can really be termed casual (Sybil’s golf outfit — yellow trousers, yellow shirt, blue jacket and white cape — and the dress of certain obvious proletarians excepted) are Mr. Johnson’s leather trousers and strikingly yellow shirt, the latter open all the way down to the waist. The great majority of male hotel guests, however, is correctly dressed in suits and, more often than not, exuberant ties. Alan’s bright jacket and open shirt in The Wedding Party are exceptions to the rule, partly explainable by his relative youth, partly by the heat of a summer evening so conducive to amorous escapades and aphrodisiac stimulants, all of which has prompted Mrs. Peignoir to slip into something more comfortable — the same Mrs. Peignoir who later tries her luck again with Basil, by appearing in a dress proudly announcing the colours of the French drapeau.

  Not really part of the clothing but nevertheless a salient element of personality, is the truly impressive array of moustaches featured m the shows. Apart from Basil himself, wearing John Cleese’s own authentic upper lip decoration, Manuel has also been endowed with an amazing concentration of hair under his nostrils. The idea apparently was Andrew Sachs’s own, and he had some anxiety that Cleese would take offence. As the latter seemed to ignore this act of insidious mimicry, Sachs decided to keep the protuberance and it eventually became an inalienable part of his character, as well as of the series, in much the same way as the painted moustache of Groucho became a distinct hallmark of the Marx Brothers’ films by and large. Perhaps the most impressive gathering of moustaches is otherwise to be found in The Hotel Inspectors, where not only Manuel and Basil flamboyantly flash theirs, but where also Mr. Hutchison ‘megalomaniacally’ sports a classic Adolf H. rug and Mr. Walt on occasion takes refuge behind the thicket of his massive hedge.

  Among the more Latin inspired ‘tango flower beds,’ the Major’s elegant, perennial sub-nostrilous growth should be emphasised along with the slim hairy line belonging to Gourmet Nights cross Colonel Twitchen. On the other hand, beards in no way have a comparable status and importance inside the Towers. As a matter of fact, I can only think of one character who carries one, and that is the “orelly man” referred to as Lurphy, who, through the intermediary of Manuel, receives the dubious distinction of being named a “hideous ourang-utang” by Basil.

  7

  THE SCRIPTS

  The scripts of Fawlty Towers would of course never have made sense without their principal agent, John Cleese. It is impossible even to try to see somebody else in the role of Basil. He is pure typecasting, the blueprint of a genie who has “reacted with the cork and gone bad”. It is almost as hard to imagine what the series would have been like without Andrew Sachs or Prunella Scales. In fact, the casting from the very beginning turned out to be a miracle of good fortune. All main characters, that is, those appearing in all or almost all episodes, perform simply marvellously together. Prunella Scales as the dragon wife is so uncannily perfect that it is almost impossible to imagine her as being at all different in private life. Ballard Berkeley, as the dotty Major, is the absolute epitome of a thousand old India hands who stroll the homely boulevards of Cheltenham and Budleigh Salterton. Connie Booth, with her rare gift of being able at the same time to panic and yet remain in command of the situation, is unsurpassable as maid-of-all-work and Basil’s catcher in the rye. The two maiden Ladies unforgettably represent those thousands of dear twittery aunts who seem to form the largest segment of the populations of such blameless towns as Harrogate and Torquay itself, and Brian Hall, as Terry, the chef of the second series, though occasionally dangerously close to performing school theatre, nevertheless
impresses himself firmly upon the production by virtue of his vigour and enthusiam.

  However, since this chapter deals with the script and not with its, actual realisation, I must now propose that we distance ourselves is far as we possibly can from the vivid memory images these remarkable actors created, and regard the script as an independent entity, existing prior to its physical realisation at their hands. In other words, we shall try to take a look at how this extraordinary re-presentation of reality was first created in the abstract by its congenial spiritual parents, John Cleese and Connie Booth.

  One of the prominent traits of great drama, and by extension great entertainment, is its capability to present simultaneously its subject matter on different levels of abstraction, in this way catering not only to audiences of various ages and educational backgrounds, but also to successive generations and the specific experiences and problems pertaining to their age and era. Thus, great drama is capable of treating a subject in such a way that it both conveys the individual and general aspects of the matter at hand, thereby adapting itself to the changes of time and circumstances. Another of its salient features is that it always lets the person speaking be in the right, meaning that the author does not judge his characters, but lets their actions speak for, or against, themselves.

  I dare say that these characteristics apply to Fawlty Towers as well, and that at script level alone it contains more and deeper insights, more profound psychological and social observation, indeed more and deeper esoteric correspondences, than even its creators could have imagined and hoped for. Of course, I do not wish to imply that their conscious intentions can in any way be neglected or even overrated. And I do believe that both Connie Booth and John Cleese were at bottom intensely aware, that by transcending the personal limitations of their own relationship, they were actually furnishing themselves with a remarkably effective divorce therapy. In this way their personal drama was transfigured into something universal.

  One thing that will for ever distinguish Fawlty Towers, is that it was from the very beginning a joint venture. It is easy to assess the tremendous impact Cleeses powerful personality had on the creative process. Inversely it is only a bit too easy to overlook the absolute indispensability of Connie Booth. But a quick look at how female psychology features in the series should be enough to convince us that there is more than just average insight into how women really function behind the creation of such characters as Sybil, Polly and the Ladies. To make a person like Sybil emerge from the woodwork of standardised male prejudice and caricature clearly demanded a psychological understanding of rare subtlety and finesse. No matter how impressive Cleese’s own talent, alone he could never have created a Sybil that matched Basil so perfectly. It is rather uncanny to see how tuned in she is to all his weaknesses; she has a perfect pitch for every nuance in his mood swings. And just as much as she sees and divines his fears and wishes, she is determined not to care a tinker’s cuss about them, as she is the one feeling hurt and fundamentally ill treated — I wonder if the devil’s grandmother even knew as much about female psychology as ‘the mind’ that created Sybil! And as I said, a good part of the credit for an achievement so outstanding must rightfully go to Connie Booth.

  The amount of sheer everyday realism in Fawlty Towers — as opposed to the general craziness, not to say absurdity of an average Monty Python production — likewise helps convince us that there must have been a serious attempt on the part of the writers to offer the spectators a mirror in which they could easily see and recognise themselves. The outrageousness of Basil — in all likelihood a irresistible temptation for Cleese — was in a most ingenious way tempered and so to speak framed by the ‘sound sense of normality’ innate in Connie Booth herself. Invariably she turned the script into a solid receptacle for the highly volatile essence it contained: the flamboyant insanity of Cleese’s genius. She restrained him and simultaneously made the whole thing credible as a salient example of everyday hell. This curse of normality, this horror of a perfectly commonplace dull existence facing imminent madness, has paradoxically proved to be the very life elixir of the Towers. Not the least thanks to her graceful touch of placidity, Booth contributed a much-needed counterpoint to the high points in the script and the paroxysms in characterisation. Although the importance of her personality and work will always be in the nature of moonlight compared to the exploding star itself, it will, once the detonation has had time to abate, shine through and illuminate the background of the edifice. Her role was not to be the strings and the bow, but she provided the sound box, without which the great soloist would have remained muted and subdued, no matter how hard he tried to make himself seen and heard.

  This said, I maintain that Cleese and Booth here united to form an entity which is more than just the sum total of their personalities and talents. Notwithstanding that their conscious aim certainly was to create comedy pure and simple, what they saw, even could see of its serious implications, was just the tip of the iceberg. By circumnavigating and investigating it at close range we have moved, and continue to move, toward a deeper understanding of this titanic threat to marital happiness. Through painstaking personal experience, we are in fact about to confirm that the wealth of psychological and philosophical material flowing from their horn of plenty is not just to be labelled comedy and entertainment: it is a frightening vision of reality. Let me immediately add that I find truly mysterious their ability to transcend the realm of solid boredom inherent in any failing relationship and climb the ladder leading to the sublime. But even in moments when their humour soars in lofty abstractions, there is always a link to a terrestrial substrate, e.g. a solid layer of everyday reality in which the beanstalk is firmly planted. This is all as it should be, because it is at the precise point where heaven and earth meet, that the human comedy is ignited and begins to sparkle.

  Comedy in general can be divided into two main categories: the physical and the intellectual. Silent film comedy was almost entirely built upon the down-to-earth attitude of the former, which in western Europe probably originated in the medieval jester, developed into the harlequin or the silently weeping pierrot, eventually to become the mimetic clown of the circus arena. Actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy were all clowns, obliged to turn their jokes into visual gags. With the advent of spoken film dialogue, humour became verbal too, using dialogue in which we find puns and word-games of all kinds.22

  The Marx Brothers were among the first successfully to combine in their films vaudeville and slapstick on the one hand and on the other intellectual jokes that were often directly derived from the treasury of jewish wit and situation comedy. Jewish humour is actually rather hard to define — as in fact is humour in general. But whatever it is, it has been omnipresent in film and television comedy since the early days of Chaplin up to present-day work of Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld. And we, the audience, never tire of it. Its most typical feature is the paradox: “I could never join a club that would accept me as a member” (Groucho Marx); “For that kind of money, I could have started working yesterday” (Chico Marx); “Don’t denigrate masturbation — it’s at least making love to someone you really like” (Woody Allen); A: “But you can’t fire me; I hardly even work here.” B: “That makes it even more difficult.” (Seinfeld).

  Humour takes someone by surprise, but instead of making him afraid, makes him laugh. A joke that can be anticipated by the audience ceases in most instances to be a joke. This is a fairly general rule, because, even when it is part of a joke’s design to create anticipation, we still wonder in which direction it proposes to take us. Tommy Cooper in particular, who died on stage in ‘the act of his life’, relied primarily on anticipation and its potential of suspense.

  It’s impossible to define what makes one thing funny and another not funny at all — luckily. So why do I try? Because you are the worshipper and I am your companion, and in this chapter we are dealing with the subtleties of Holy Writ. So if the Fawltys are the twin towers
of the cathedral, then the text is the bible, and as such in need of theological exegesis. And, as is the case with the Christian church, the edifice of modern humour has a Jewish foundation.

  That the authors of Fawlty Towers were influenced by the Marx Brothers is evident, and at one point tacitly acknowledged, “I’m not doing it. You want to be in a Marx Brothers film, that’s your problem. I’m not interested” (The Anniversary). Like the Marx Brothers’ work, Fawlty Towers contains a lot of crazy humour and complementary physical action — action requiring perfect body-control and a fine sense of timing. Again, as with the Marx Brothers, the series features some highly intellectual humour —in fact, to understand all its implications is really to gain a sense of spiritual and verbal superiority over one's fellow men ... The main characteristic of this intellectual kind of humour is a multi-faceted play on words (which is the reason that any dubbed version of Fawlty Towers must be an absurdity).