Fawlty Towers is a show I was introduced to by my dad back in 2001. Even back then the show was 26 years old, having originally come out with six episodes in 1975. These six episodes were then followed by another six in 1979 and that’s the entire story of Fawlty Towers. Two seasons with a total of only 12 episodes. There were plans for a third season, but it never came to fruition.
The show was written by two of its main characters, John Cleese of Monty Python fame who plays Basil Fawlty, the owner of the titular hotel. The other writer was his then-wife Connie Booth, who plays Polly the chambermaid, perhaps the only normal character in the show. 
The other two main characters are Basil’s wife Sybil and a hapless waiter from Barcelona called Manuel.
The show revolves around Basil trying to run and make his hotel popular, as he sees it as his ticket to belonging to a higher social class. However, working against him is his rude, snobbish, cynical and misanthropic personality. Most episodes find Basil getting his comeuppance due to a strange and unusual set of coincidences that he frantically tries to resolve, usually involving his wife who is always trying to get him to behave.
One of my favourite moments in the show involves the hotel needing some construction work. Sybil insists that Basil gets a proper builder to do it, unlike the last time when he hired a cowboy builder to build a garden wall. A builder that Sybil refers to as a “cut-price cock-up artist”, while Basil tells him they’ve been waiting for the wall about as long as Hadrian.
Of course Basil hires the cowboy builder again to save some money and spends most of the episode trying to hide it from his wife, including when he returns to the hotel a few hours before her to find the job has been done totally wrong and the builder removed the door to the restaurant. Basil gets the builder back and tells him he better fix it before Sybil returns or they’re both dead, talking about her ability to “kill a man at 10 paces with one blow of her tongue”.
The character of Basil was actually inspired by a real hotel owner, the owner of a Torquay hotel called the Gleneagles Hotel, where the Monty Python gang stayed and was described by John Cleese as being “the rudest man I’ve ever come across in my life”. It comes as no surprise then that 
Cleese describes Basil as “an absolutely awful human being”. Not that the show entirely paints him as a villain, as a lot of the time he is a victim of circumstance. A good example of this is when his chef gets drunk and cannot cook dinner for the guests, and Basil must try and put together something remotely edible for them.
Given the small amount of episodes, it’s not a show you can watch all the time, as it makes for the shortest of marathons and it’ll be a while after you watch it before you forget enough to watch it again without knowing what’s coming. That being said, though, I still watch the entire show once or twice a year.
To me, it stands among other brilliant British TV Comedies such as Blackadder and Black Books, two other shows that I may end up using for this segment as they too hold a memorable place in my childhood. I’m not alone in my love for Fawlty Towers, either, as in 2000 the British Film Institute ranked it as the best British television series of all time.
The show is forty years old this year and, while it’s true that it has not aged very well in some ways, I struggle to see how you would get a TV show like it today. It features a main character that spends most of the time insulting every other human who manages to cross his line of sight, so yes, most of the humour definitely holds up. Seeing Basil get what he deserves at the end of each episode is quite fulfilling and seeing Cleese freak out in so many situations is brilliant.
This is a show that was a big part of what I remember watching when I was younger, and a show that I will continue to rewatch for years to come.
