Perfecting the art of rudeness

Everyone will have met Basil and Sybil Fawlty in real life — the would-be genteel types who, in running a provincial hotel, have condemned themselves to quite the wrong vocation, who are convinced their clientele are riff-raff and by whom the most modest request is interpreted as an unforgivable imposition. I encountered a classic couple only the other day — the virago muttering behind the desk, pen poised, and her lanky, put-upon husband sighing to me as he emerged from the cellar and lifted (quite violently) the grille at the bar, ‘Has the Gestapo given you the wine list?’ Such people loathe the idea of service — like those antique dealers and gallery owners who’ll kill you if they get mistaken for shopkeepers.

It’s a particularly British conundrum, which has to do with our old friend class and its comic counterpart, embarrassment or loss of face. In drama it would derive from Malvolio, the steward who affronts Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek by overstepping the mark (‘Go, sir, rub your chain with crumbs,’ they tell him snobbishly); and other recent status-seeking, thwarted romantics, whom we encounter before they give up and become bitter and mean-spirited, would include Sellers’s Fred Kite, Tony Hancock, Harold Steptoe, Captain Mainwaring, Alan Partridge, Ricky Gervais’s creations — and, of course, Basil Fawlty, with (as Graham McCann puts it) his ‘clenched fists, clenched hair and clenched heart’.