There are wonderful lines in Fawlty Towers, many from rants by Basil. To the man who dares to ask for breakfast in bed: ‘You could sleep with your mouth open so I could drop in lightly buttered pieces of kipper…’, or to the woman who doesn’t like the view: ‘What did you expect from a hotel in Torquay? Krakatoa exploding? Herds of wildebeest…?’ But for some reason the one that makes me laugh most is Geoffrey Palmer’s as he sits famished during a chaotic breakfast. Jowls quivering, with that mixture of pomposity and despair that marks inhabitants and guests of the hotel, he declares, ‘I’m a doctor, and I want my sausages!’ I don’t know why it’s so funny. You had to be there.
The show was picked over at considerable length on G.O.L.D., the comedy cable channel, in Fawlty Towers: Re-opened. This was billed as a huge exclusive, though it has never proved difficult to get John Cleese to talk about past triumphs. He was generous to Connie Booth, the wife who was his co-writer on both series and played Polly, the only sane person in the hotel. They divorced between the two series, but that didn’t reduce the painstaking quality at all. Later an American broadcaster bought the formula and remade it, but without Basil, on the grounds that he was too unsympathetic. By the same token you would remake Macbeth without Macbeth. Some people say that Fawlty Towers has dated, and it has — how could it not over 30 years? But if anything that adds to the charm. If they can revive Rookery Nook in the West End in 2009, I suspect we’ll be watching Basil 30 years from now.
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