Fawlty Towers Read online

  Both Basil and Hutchison are peculiarly immune to any kind of criticism — the scenario and script here give Basil the chance to demonstrate the depth of his indifference toward guests whose social status has failed to impress him, or who have proved incapable of responding to any of his needs. During Basil’s honeymoon-period with Hutchison, Mr. Walt is badly treated by Basil, who has become virtually deaf and blind to everybody else except the agent from the hotel guide.8 In a series of cruel misunderstandings, Basil is finally brought to confess, although he of course doesn’t actually put it into words, that the hotel they run is all about appearances. Basil (now mistaking Walt for the hotel inspector): “Oh please, it’s taken us twelve years to build this place up. If you put this in the book we’re finished.” As soon as it becomes clear to Basil that Mr. Walt sells outboard motors, his revenge on Hutchison is utterly studied and humiliating.

  Although the short and sturdy Mr. Hutchison presents all his pedantic observations as Napolic decrees, and although he himself, like his military model, ultimately goes down, he is in all his dedicated seriousness and will to ameliorate the services, a character with whom I personally can easily identify. I do not know how many times I have found myself in Hutchison’s position: demanding beverages to be replaced because they were not cold, or simply not good enough, sending back hot dishes because they were cold, questioning the preparation at various stages (“food handling routines suspect!”), commenting upon the ingredients (“might I suggest that in future you avail yourself of sufficient quantities of the fresh article”- I love that one!), commenting on what the chef should and shouldn’t do, making a fuss about the disproportion between stingy portions, small drinks and high prices. If provoked by inadequate services, I am prepared to go straight into the kitchen and make sure things are finally made the way I want them. In short, I am at times Hutchison. It would even occur to me to wipe the earpiece of the telephone because it really was greasy. And I do have a wide experience of hotels, bars and restaurants, then in my professional activities I’m in constant contact with them (study Hutchison’s half-shut and ominously gleaming eye here).

  What makes Hutchison so exceptional is his unusual persistence. Confronted with Basil, most people, even I, would sooner or later —and sooner rather than later —give up. Hutchison doesn’t. “I want it (the diagram of the optimum route to the Post Office from Queen’s Square) all the same!”

  By virtue of his unusual stubbornness, Hutchison is Basil’s equal, actually the only character throughout the entire series who is. He is also, to our knowledge, the only guest ever to be manhandled by Basil, and the only guest who in return physically attacks him. One understands that the complicity between them is of a rare and intimate kind. It takes one to know one ...

  But if Hutchison is Basil’s equal, the latter really meets his match in Mrs. Richards (Communication Problems). In this episode we have the fresh pleasure of finding Basils reactions rather understandable, not to say ‘normal’. The reason why Basil here seems reduced to normal human proportions is simply that he is up against the Mike Tyson of heavyweight hotel guests. It is easy to understand Basil’s problem in relation to Mrs. Richards, considering that nobody else, and that includes Sybil, finds a way to communicate with her. The dialogue between Basil and Mrs. Richards in her hotel room (Manuel in attendance) is one of the many Fawlty Towers highlights.

  Mrs. Richards: When I pay for a view I expect something more interesting than that.

  Basil: That is Torquay, madam.

  Mrs. Richards: Well, it’s not good enough.

  Basil: Well, may I ask what you were hoping to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically ...

  This time we would rather have liked to witness success for Basil. Even though we know that every episode is a tragedy giving rise to tremendous, superhuman suffering on Basil’s part, we still think this one might after all end on a happy note. But of course it doesn’t. In the last round Mrs. Richards knocks Basil out. He had staked every penny on the most momentous gamble of his life, namely on himself. But the only piece of pure luck that has blessed Basil’s long and dolorous path over the last fifteen years, is snuffed out like a candle in the wind. He simply can’t win. And Manuel will solemnly keep the secret until the end of his days — “I know nothing!”

  We remember that it is in Communication Problems that Basil interprets his suffering in Gnostic terms —“What was that, that was your life”... etc. Thus, he acknowledges the existence of something beyond this world, where nevertheless he must continue to live out his life. And to live in this world — the world sub luna, as medieval cosmogony describes the lowest and most rudimentary plane of existence — has for Basil above all the meaning of being watched over by a dragon that never sleeps and consequently can only be fooled by devices so cunning that they would make the tricks of Ulysses seem mere trifles in comparison. Here, for once, Basil thought he had outsmarted the cruel, ever watchful eye of his oppressor. Here, clearly, he saw escape from tyranny in the offing. Here, at last, he believed that he could save his life and begin to hope for future moments of true joy and excitement. Alas, all the other evils were already out of Pandora’s box when hope was captured inside it. Brutally Basil is brought to face the immutable truth: there might be hope but there is no mercy.

  Never have the notions of guest, stranger, and enemy been more confusedly and fatally associated in Basil’s mind than in The Hotel Inspectors and Communication Problems. But of all Basil’s defeats at the hands of his enemies, the one inflicted by Mrs. Richards was perhaps the most severe, because it shows, not only that Sybil is against him (he’s used to coping with that), but also that the gods themselves have withdrawn all favour from him.

  There is no reason to deplore his fate excessively, however. In other instances his behaviour to hotel guests is appalling, discourteous and insulting, to say the least. The worst example of his arrogance and abuse of guests may possibly be found in Waldorf Salad. Mr. Johnstone has irritated Basil by showing himself his equal in sarcasm. (Commenting on the inedible prawns, he has suggested that they be deducted from the bill. But Basil, observing that Mrs. Johnstone has already eaten half of hers, won’t give way. Whereupon Mr. Johnstone comments: “Well, deduct half now, and if my wife brings the other half up during the night, we’ll claim the balance in the morning. And now we’d like our lamb, please.”

  That is a devastating riposte which would leave any ordinary hotelier speechless — even Basil is temporarily silenced. But in his heart hatred is stirring, awaiting the moment when vengeance will be exacted. Instead of giving the Johnstones their main courses right away, he takes the plates with him to the lobby as Sybil, busy with something else as always, has told him that there is a new guest at the reception.

  This is Mrs. Hamilton, wearing an expensive fur coat. Basil is somewhat impressed by her. Mr. Johnstone has followed him out into the lobby and asks for the plates. They are handed over to him with a “bon appetit” followed by an onomatopoeic farting sound. Just imagine being thus treated as a paying guest in a hotel — and we may safely assume that this utter rudeness is only the tip of the iceberg! It begs the question how Fawlty Towers after twelve years of insults and non-existent service on the part of its proprietor, still manages to attract any clientele at all.9

  Finally, to dot the is and cross the t’s, Basil not only loathes and abuses hotel guests, but even such guests and visitors as most other people would refer to as their friends. For example, the need to keep up appearances at all costs and never admit that he and Sybil have marital problems, turns the friends invited in The (wedding) Anniversary into potential enemies. It is actually only in this episode that we encounter any friends of the Fawltys. We even meet Audrey in her only public appearance, consoling Sybil in the car — “I guess I shouldn’t be so thin skinned about it. I’m just cursed with a sensitive nature” (preliminary confession to Polly abou
t Basil’s fatal negligence). Whereupon Basil’s practical joke quickly becomes a nightmare.10

  While Basil chases after her and Audrey in the car to disclose the joke and bring Sybil back, Roger and his wife arrive in their car. It does not occur to Basil to ask Roger to go after Sybil, although a quick explanation would almost certainly have sent his friend hotfoot after her. Basil obviously doesn’t trust Roger’s discretion and instead prefers to remain in his own deeply solitary universe, in which he is god and creator. In other words: Dispense with previous scenario; substitute completely new plot. Roger and his wife consequently find the wedding anniversary celebrating Basil on the driveway leading up to the Towers, pretending to even out a bump in the road.

  With Sybil absent, Basil, unsurprisingly, treats his friends rather as he does his guests. Roger is the only one with any inkling of the spectacular fraud in the making. But his attempts to establish some intimacy with Basil by making puns (“Syb-ill”, “Bas-ill”, “Manu-well”, etc.) are uncompromisingly rejected as Basil refuses to understand. However, the underlying cause of his indifference vis-a-vis Roger is not simply callousness and egotism, but his inability to admit that he is lying, and his compulsion to cover up one lie with another, and so on till the house of cards, as if ordered by divine vengeance, comes tumbling down.

  Which brings us to the next heading.

  THE MYTHOMANIA

  The foundation of the comedy of life is the human experience that life itself is but a dream. What dream and comedy have in common is that they both draw upon the sources of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud was aware of the connection and devoted an essay to the problem, The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. His conclusion was that the joke represents a disarmed threat to the ego. An event that would arouse fear in one person is deactivated by being presented as happening to someone else. All laughter is at bottom laughter at another’s expense. It can’t be otherwise. The individual personifying the victim is the comic figure per se. Basil Fawlty, constantly exposed to all his worst fears, unable to arm himself against the unforeseeable, is condemned to live his life encapsulated in an eternal now. As such he becomes the slave of the unpredictable, and our hero.

  In saying this, I don’t mean that we spectators are in a better situation than Basil’s. The fleeting sensation of an unavoidable present is the essence of our reality too. Most of us are able to foresee certain consequences of our actions, based on experience, but in this sense Basil has no past and no future. All experience is obliterated in the face of a present threat to his person. Being unable to see any further into the future than the end of his nose, he rushes headlong into danger as if it doesn’t exist, only to invent endless excuses for not having had the courage to finally to face up to it (I think I may have acted that way myself on occasion ...).

  When, exceptionally, his own desire happens to coincide with factual circumstances, a generally accepted reality, or even with the truth, Basil uses this to gain an advantage — which means that all Basil’s statements, regardless of whether they are true or false, are ruthlessly subjective. His interactions with others are based on the premise that other beings — and even inanimate objects — are actively harmful to his own purposes. For him to live is to get away from (or with) something — in most instances the burden of other people and the tyranny of the human face. So, if a lie can for the moment save him, there is absolutely no question that he’ll use it. Lie, and deal with the outcome later — it is not proven that this will be any worse than the consequences of the truth. Given an inexhaustible imagination — and Basil has such a one — the realm of lies can be expanded indefinitely.

  Basil does not admit the existence of mechanical cause and effect. Everything is will operating on will. If the car won’t start it’s because it doesn’t want to start, and it consequently gets a well-deserved thrashing for disobeying the orders of its master (Gourmet Night). The nail that holds up the moose head doesn’t simply give way, nor do the antlers: they want to harm him. If this kind of explanation holds true for him in the case of inanimate objects, then imagine how much more ill-intended humans must be, who are palpably and deliberately ranged against him! Compare for instance his reaction to the squatting Mr. Lloyd. Surprised by his sudden appearance out of the blue, Basil for a split second sees himself haunted by the spectre of ‘Sybilline’ revenge and makes as if to hit him, “I’m so sorry — my wife made a most dreadful mistake”. Mr. Lloyd: “Yes, I think she probably did.”

  In modern anthropological terms, Basil’s typical reaction to objects is sometimes described as animistic pertaining to the primitive religious idea that everything around us possesses an individual soul which is alive and potentially harmful. A tree, a car, a screwdriver, a garden gnome, all possess the dangerous kind of power which the same anthropologists call mana, the capacity in a soul to take over another soul and make it subservient to its own will. Basil lives in constant fear of succumbing to the malefic soul of an object (being). His ceaseless lying is by way of reaction to the danger he detects all around him. No sooner has he gained a little respite than some doorpost aims a blow at his head, or a piece of paper purely by its own volition slips out of his hand.

  In terms of pure reason, Basil ‘knows’ that it probably isn’t the paper that wants to go, but his own hand that involuntarily releases it. But in his ruthless subjectivity he cannot see any reason why he should have wanted to let go of the paper, so the paper itself must in the last instance be held responsible for its own wilful action. Basil suspects that a unanimous malevolence towards himself has been conferred upon all objects in his vicinity by some dark power, and he is often to be found furiously shaking his fist at a being above. Sometimes, as in The Germans, this demoniac figure takes on the temporal aspect of Harold Wilson, under whose leadership strikes and industrial chaos abounded in 1960s Britain — “Bloody Wilson!” In Communication Problems he for once believes that the supreme being is on his side and tries to kiss him in the air in an act of incredulous gratitude.

  Thus, to lie every now and then is no more than a rather muted response to inimical fate. And this is the main reason why Basil always considers his lies as harmless as they are few. (To us and to his intimates, however, they add up to a very substantial number indeed.) Even though Basil’s habitual lying originates in his fear and disgust of having to defend actions he knows beforehand will be criticised by Sybil, it does not always hide the truth from her, or at least not just from her. Sometimes, as in Basil the Rat, The Kipper and the Corpse and Waldorl Salad, Sybil herself is more or less part of his current scam.

  But let us now flesh out the story and reveal the anatomy of the formidable lies meant to deceive Sybil, and Sybil alone. In The Builders, Sybil, seized by a vague suspicion that everything is not quite as it should be on the building front, enters the lobby where O’Reilly’s (and consequently Basil’s) men have obviously got everything wrong. Basil, realising that he won’t be able to prevent Sybil from seeing the debacle, pretends to contemplate the scene of destruction.

  Basil: There! Look at that! That’s Stubbs for you. Mind you, I warned you! But still — a reputable builder like that! Choh! Tch, tch, tch.

  Sybil: Stubbs?

  Basil: Wicked. Tch.

  Sybil: Where’s O’Reilly, Basil?

  Basil: (to himself) Criminal! (to Sybil) Hmmm?

  Sybil: Where’s O’Reilly?

  Basil: O’Reilly?

  Sybil: Yes, O’Reilly.

  Basil: Sybil, you never cease to amaze me. Just because of this, you automatically assume that it has to be O’Reilly. You just assume that I have been lying all along! I mean, why O’Reilly?

  Sybil: Because his van is outside.

  Now, suppose you are in Basil's place. The past can’t be changed — you have in fact hired O’Reilly — and you have deliberately deceived Sybil by hiring a builder she loathes from the bottom of her heart. What would you do? Tell her, “I’m so sorry. I made a mistake?” Hardly possible — there have been just
too many mistakes.

  Would you accuse Polly or Manuel of causing the mishap? A moot point, since O’Reilly wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.

  Would you accept a beating-up, then watch how Sybil deals with O’Reilly, knowing that he only has to endure this humiliation once in his life. In the next second he will be out of it — whereas you ...

  What is preferable? The end effect will be the same. The question is not if but when the demon-wife will go on the rampage, fell another lie and there’s still the ghost of a chance that you may get away with it, if only Sybil’s mounting suspicion can be allayed.

  For a brief moment, Basil is inclined to believe in the possibility of such a miracle. He decides to gamble.

  Basil: Well, he’s here now! Of course he’s here now! He’s come to clear up the mess that your Stubbs has made. That’s why (in a passion) HIS VAN’S OUTSIDE! (and throwing down his last card) On a Sunday! That’s what I call service.

  Sybil: I agree.

  Basil: You do?

  His surprise is no less than ours. But he’s soon brought back down on earth.

  Sybil: Yes. But if Stubbs has made this mess then I think he should come and clear it up.

  Basil keeps his war-wounded leg in reserve for combat to the death, knowing that Sybil for some reason always gets worried when she sees him ostensibly in pain (this, and “George has left Audrey again” always buy him a fraction of time to think).

  Basil: Well, yes — but there’s no point now that O’Reilly’s here, dear. We want it done straight away.

  Sybil: (with devastating logic) There’s no point in paying money to Mr. O’Reilly when Mr. Stubbs would have to do it for free. I’ll call him now.