Fawlty Towers Read online

  From a very early age, Basil found nothing so odious in life as trade unions, and we would do well to remind ourselves that his father was not only a member of such an organisation, but an important official, a spider in the web, which in Basil’s view practically turned him into a traitor of his country, perhaps even into a communist ... To complete the picture we must add the presence of a complacent, loving mother, doing embroidery, ironing shirts, cooking meals. And then there is, contrary to all expectation, Basil’s younger brother, all in all a little group which to any innocent eye would appear to be the very image of reliable, honest middle-class family peacefully striving towards social justice and weekends enjoyed having picnics on the miniscule lawn in front of their respectable semi.

  As soon as he was old enough to leave home for good, Basil’s brother, Leslie, emigrated to Australia. He used to write or call about once or twice a year to his parents but he never included Basil in their communications, and the inevitable conclusion is that something must have happened between Basil and his younger brother during their childhood or adolescent years that permanently estranged them.

  There is no lack of diverse and quite plausible grounds for how this came to happen. One very probable explanation is that Basil, in adminstering the rites of passage that every older brother has a duty to impose on his younger male siblings, overdid it. There is for instance a case in point that dates from the brothers’ teenage years. Leslie had received a beautiful model sports car on his birthday and would give demonstrations of its wonders to anyone who seemed inclined to marvel at them. Basil’s reaction was at first to show envy, but this uneasy feeling quickly turned into scheming of sinister portent. For where your average elder brother might go so far as to, by accident as it were, remove the steering-wheel, Basil opened up the roof with his mother’s sturdiest tin-opener, fastened it back down with a sardine-tin key, and presented Leslie with a neatly typed bill for the installation of a sun-roof of the very latest design.

  Also, at school, Basil was considered odd on account of his many idiosyncrasies. Basil in his turn not only despised his family, but his schoolmates as well, with the result that neither the school nor his parents made any effort to help him go to university, though this was his dream. But, alas, he hadn’t attended boarding school at Eton or elsewhere, he was an ordinary public-school student, and the school refused to help him, in spite of his talent, since the day when he in a fit of rage publicly declared that they (the headmaster, the staff and the pupils) were all unmitigated riff-raff, and not even worthy of tying his shoelaces.

  Basil of course never got the money or the grades to complete his transference from the antechamber of the Swanage Transport Union to the elect fraternity of scholars. He had always wanted to study, and considered himself apt for it. Maybe he was in a sense lucky in never having to be put to the test. On the other hand, from now on he would begin considering himself a superior man held back by the monumental ignorance and envy of his fellow men. At the same time he had to take all kinds of jobs where his superiors seldom missed a chance to make fun of his seigneurial manners and scholarly pretensions, in this way fatally fuelling his ardent desire for revenge ...

  SYBIL FAWLTY — BASIL’S WIFE

  Then came the day when Basil first met Sybil. Oh, it all seemed so right, didn’t it? There she was, in a corner of the pub with her female hairdresser colleagues (including Audrey). Basil, awfully shy as always when it came to girls, managed to spill something on Sybil’s dress, who, surprised at first, found him touching in his desperate efforts to put it right again. He bought her another drink, they started to talk and, lo and behold (as Sybil later confessed to Audrey) she at first found him both charming, easy(!), attractive and amusing ... She realised that he was impractical, but since she had read little beyond fashion, make-up and hair-style articles in the women’s weeklys, she was very impressed with Basil’s learning and admired him greatly, especially in comparison to the kind of men her friends (notably Audrey) had to put up with.

  Sybil’s laughter had always been dreadful — an odd mixture of animal bellowing and unarticulated sarcasm — but Basil didn’t notice it so much at the early stages of their acquaintance, principally because at the beginning he was always laughing just as much as she was. It was only later that they stopped laughing together, and only after they had married that Basil stopped laughing altogether. Considering Sybil’s by no means slight capacity for gossip, it would be natural to assume that during childhood and adolescence she must have had many sisters with whom she was able to exchange confidences. But whereas the assumption in Basil’s case was that he must have been an only child, Sybil — once again quite contrary to natural expectation — really was the only child of an Eastbourne dressmaker and an absconder sailor.

  The mother had been of somewhat lax morals in her early years, capable of accommodating, over a given period of time, more than one man in her life and bed. However, when she became pregnant with that Canadian rascal, she really wanted to marry him. But the future father, once he had enjoyed the lush warmth of her embrace, ran off like a rat through a sewer and never showed up again, although he had solemnly promised to return to make her and her child respectable and abandon his maritime vagabondage. As a child Sybil was to become painfully aware of how stigmatising it can be to be born out of wedlock, and she dreaded the destiny which had befallen her mother. Although the latter eventually assumed proper responsibility for her child and drastically reduced the number of her casual male acquaintances, she was never able to win full acceptance in society and she was, if not downright frowned upon, at least pitied for remaining unmarried for no good reason. The ladies of high, if not the highest, society were not in the least ashamed of wearing a fancy frock sewn by her hand. But the fact that they appreciated her sewing skills didn’t mean that they were ever going to treat her with more respect than mere convention required. Besides, they were jealous. Something told them that she had had more fun in her days than all of them together ever would. In fact, Sybil’s mother used to smile even when she was sad, and she had a laugh so loud and eerily penetrating that the fog-horn in the light house by the pier had to be replaced by a signal sounding like a church bell in order to prevent ship crews, approaching the narrowing strait of Dover, from mistaking her voice for a nautical signal.

  Sybil went to state school, but only for as long as she had to. She then went to the Young Ladies Academy for Hair Care, passed her examinations and got a job at a beauty parlour in Swanage. At the same time, partly in reaction to the licentiousness of her mother — an over-reaction akin to that of the children of alcoholics — partly as an expression of the need to be respected by a man and by society, Sybil decided that she was never going to accept the fate of her mother, namely, to remain unmarried and be gossiped about because of her innate frivolity.

  Sybil was very much like her mother when it came to talking and bragging about all kinds of erotic exploits, and she had good reason to fear that similarity. Once safely married, she reckoned, there was on the other hand nothing to prevent her from keeping up her mother’s good work, at least verbally. As we all know, this is exactly what she did, and with great aplomb. Meanwhile appearances must be maintained at all costs. This ambition was soon destined to turn Sybil into a petit-bourgeois player of the worst kind: the wanna-be petit bourgeois.

  It is easy to see that Sybil probably was just a tiny bit too eager to drag Basil to the altar — a few more months of caution and she might have ended up in a place and a marriage of a different kind. On the other hand, apart from Basil’s near-total incompetence in any activity connected to hotel management, he was at least a man and they had — God knows how? — yes, precisely, managed to turn a decrepit B&B into a flourishing money-making machine. That was a fact that spoke for itself and not even Sybil could deny it, but then again she regarded that achievement as practically of her own making, in spite of the difficulties.

  And what about Basil himself? Did he ever suspect George
of anything? Wasn’t it strange that Sybil always had to leave home every time he walked out on Audrey? Basil would never give it a second thought, but there were certainly evil tongues out there that could have filled him in on the rumours, il only he had cared to listen. Not that the rumours had ever been substantiated, still ...

  Sybil, the dragon, the old trouble and strife, the alpha and omega of his life, was his first woman for real. Was she also to become his last? It never dawned on either of them that a divorce probably would have been the simplest solution to their problems — they belonged to a generation that basically married according to the old-fashioned vow: ‘until death hopefully do us part’. And love is a strange and wonderful thing. It is not logical, and Sybil, no matter what, somehow admired Basil even long after they had opened a hotel together, and he was, no matter what, always afraid of her. There have been worse excuses for a marriage.

  What was finally the truth of their childlessness; was Sybil unable to get pregnant, or was Basil unable to impregnate her, or was it he or she who didn’t want any offspring, or was it simply the combination of the two of them which excluded even the possibility of discussing this option? We shall never know, but we can always speculate.

  2

  THE NEUROSES

  “There is enough material there for an entire conference.”

  FOR MOST people in this world, an encounter with a real-life Basil would be like meeting a veritable freak of nature, the hotel itself representing the entrance of and reception at Jurassic Park. But just as paleontologists have long since accepted that not only man, but God too must have had some singular nightmares during the course of natural history, the psychologist cannot but detect an unusual variety of potential mental disturbances in Basil Fawlty. The man is a virtual compendium of neuroses. In many ways he can be studied as the embodiment of an entire nation’s collective idiosyncrasies, hereditary eccentricities and fatal aberrations. A close study of this rich soul in all its extravagant divergences from the ‘acceptable’ should therefore give rise to conclusions, not only about Basil, but also about people around him, that are at once insightful, profound, paradoxical and intriguing. Let us therefore begin by specifying the general nature of these disturbances as we discover them, and classifying them under some appropriate headings.3

  The Class Phobia — Basil’s irremediable hatred and fear of the hoi polloi, and his flirtations with what he sees as high society (see especially the episodes A Touch of Class and Gourmet Night).

  The Sexual Phobia — Basil’s crusade against all forms of sexual desire not once and for all rentlered harmless by marriage.

  The Racial Phobia — A complex problem indeed, exemplified in the exasperated fury that the very sight of Manuel induces in Basil, and in his inability to assimilate the fact that Sybil’s ingrowing toenail is to be treated by a ‘surprisingly’ civilised doctor from the West Indies ...

  The Xenophobia — Closely related to the above, though not entirely identical to it. Etymologically speaking, the word xenophobia is derived from the Greek xenos, signifying both guest and stranger. Hence Basil’s fear, not only of strangers, but also, and in particular, of guests.

  The Mythomania — Basil’s inability to resort to the truth when trying to extricate himself from a difficult situation, usually of his own making. A notable exception to the rule occurs in The Psychiatrist, when Basil actually tries to tell the truth, only to find that Sybil refuses point-blank to believe him. The prime reason for Basil’s problems in this episode is of a sexual nature. “He can’t tell me anything about myself that I don’t know already.” In other words, the lucid interval in his obsession to speak the ‘untruth and nothing but the untruth’ is largely counterbalanced by his intense uneasiness concerning anything having to do with sex ... Basil’s compulsion to lie whenever possible, however, merits an investigation separate from that dealing with his lies of self-preservation.

  The Money Obsession — A vast field of contradictions. On one hand there is his penny-pinching (see for instance The Builders, or his complaint when having to open another bottle of Corton, “Right, but it’ll cost me”, in The Hotel Inspectors) and on the other hand his apparent munificence, his manifest indifference to money whenever he suspects nobility might be in the offing (A Touch of Class).

  The Gambling Compulsion — Basil breaks out from to time to time, his obsession threatening ruin. For this reason he’s always held under the most stringent surveillance by Sybil. Closely related to:

  The Sybilophobia — (also called by Basil, but only in moments when he is sure he’s alone, Sybilis). In other words: Basil’s morbid terror of his wife.

  THE CLASS PHOBIA

  Britain is the cradle of modern democracy. It is also, simultaneously, the home of Europe’s most powerful and self-sufficient aristocracy and that of the absolute worst of the European mob. Now, imagine the fear which the latter demographic elements must necessarily inspire in someone who runs a typical cheaper hotel, while trying to attract a better clientele in order to exorcise what he sees as the stigma of his own social background.

  Basil Fawlty is acutely and painfully aware of this dilemma, that he has in a sense manufactured for himself, and he tries, by any means open to him, to remain separate from the plebs. At the same time, a considerable part of him is still deeply imbued with references to the primitive side of modern life, to the practices of which he is no stranger. As a matter of fact, he was a good footballer in his youth and loved to watch the Saturday matches, just as he enjoyed going to the races, spending money he could ill afford lining the pockets of the bookies.

  He never went straight home after these mild debaucheries. He stayed drinking at his local till time was called and the rougher elements fell out of the door to carry on their discussion on the pavement outside.

  Still, though he loved the ambience of the pub, Basil was barely tolerant of his fellow-drinkers’ vulgarity. He had no difficulty in convincing himself that this phase of his life was no more than an interlude, at once pleasurable and a touch degrading, to be forgotten and repudiated if he ever got to university, where he planned to devote his energies to scholarship, cricket and rowing.

  But as we already know, his dreams of entry to university, with all its glittering prizes, eluded him. Instead, on that fateful evening, he met Sybil, who never bothered about her background and wisely refrained from wanting to seem finer or nobler than she was.

  Her protests against Basil’s gambling on horses and the pools reached their apogee when he notoriously began ‘borrowing’ from her — “just for a few hours dear”, as he explained — only to find that the horse he put all her money on was an also-ran. One day she gave him an ultimatum: “It’s either me or that horse.” Basil chose the horse.

  Sad to relate, it didn’t win, so he now found himself in the humiliating position of having to prostrate himself before Sybil, of begging her forgiveness. She did forgive him, eventually, but only after relieving him once and for all of the cash-box key. It was the end of an era; he was never to get that key back. From that moment onwards, Sybil was mistress of the money; it was one of Basil’s most painful defeats.

  One day a certain Lord Melbury appears at hotel reception. Basil, who has suffered a surfeit of what he considers ‘low-class’ guests, sees in the newcomer yet another person of humble antecedents and therefore a suitable target for his particular brand of sarcasm.

  When he finally realises that the new guest is in fact a real lord, his arrogance at once turns into the most embarrassing servility. And when his lordship, after having inveigled Basil into cashing a cheque, offers to have his collection of coins valued at a dinner party by that renowned numismatist, the Duke of Buckleigh, Basil’s beside himself with self-importance, snobbery and dreams of wealth.

  Although Lord Melbury makes little or no effort to conceal his kleptomania, ostentatiously pushing a hotel napkin up his sleeve in mid-conversation with Basil, for instance, the latter is still so much under the spell of th
e noble lord that he is influenced only by his own wishful thinking.

  At first dumbfounded at the size of the sum demanded by Lord Melbury to cover his weekend expenses (£200 really was a lot of money in 1975 — compare for instance the price for a room with bath, £7.20, plus VAT, as quoted to Mrs. Richards in Communication Problems, 1979), Basil convinces himself how infinitely far removed from ordinary pecuniary concerns a lord must be, and breaks out into the sort of over-the-top reaction which establishes the crazy tone so typical of each of the ensuing eleven episodes.

  However, the denouement of this first episode clearly indicates that Basil’s veneration for members of the aristocracy in fact covers a deep and abiding resentment. For when he realises that he has been comprehensively conned, he loses all self-control in the presence of the newly arrived couple, Sir Richard and Lady Morris (incidentally the most hideous woman ever to set foot in Fawlty Towers). Basil does manage to recover the £200 from Lord Melbury, but, his rage unassuaged, is unable to hold back his contempt for Sir Richard and his lady, who hurry to their car and vanish.

  Basil’s relationship with elites of any kind is, to say the least, ambivalent, and is even more complicated by his tendency to confound nobility with education — a truly philistine misapprehension. In The Psychiatrist, Basil muses on Darwinian theory by contrasting the Neanderthal Mr. Johnson with the two doctors Abbott. He confides to Sybil: “Yes, nice to have that kind of person staying, isn’t it? Professional class, educated, civilised.” (He looks at Johnson): “We’ve got both ends of the evolutionary scale this week.”