Don’t Mention the Anniversary

For decades at the end of the last millennium our family gatherings would be marked by repeat viewings of Fawlty Towers episodes taped on deteriorating VHS. We didn’t always agree on chocolate or cheese, politics or culture, sport or religion, but we all gathered on the sofa for a TV trip to Torquay and its irascible hotel owner. And, reliably, we were all reduced to the same tears by a random playing of any of the 12 episodes.

Inspired by a strangely unpleasant hotel owner that John Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth encountered on a Monty Python shoot in Torquay, Fawlty Towers comprises manic, farcical episodes from the life of a shambolic hotel in an unfashionable seaside town. Everyone is grist to the crazy mill: its owners, its staff, its guests, and its tradesmen — including — in one memorable episode — Mr. O’Reilly the Irish builder. (“I like a woman with spirit,” he mistakenly avows to the proprietor’s dragonish wife, “Oh you do, do you?” she honeys back with menace.)

This year we celebrate the Golden Jubilee of its launch in September 1975. It ran for two seasons in 1975 and 1976, each season comprising only a measly six shows. Cleese had a dry run at the premise as a writer for the sitcom Doctor at Large where in “No Ill Feeling” the doctor himself, Michael Upton (Barry Evans) stays at a hotel while he waits for his permanent rooms to be finished. But there was still some honing to do.

Despite Cleese already being incredibly famous as a Python the BBC rejected the first submission of a script from Cleese and Booth. So they went back to the drawing board and — funded by Cleese doing TV adverts — wrote word perfect lampoons of British snobbery as well as scope for the most outrageous slapstick.

The owner of the unfashionable resort hotel, Basil Fawlty, played by Cleese, is a man teetering on the precipice of social collapse. He’s a “brilliantined stick insect” (in one memorable insult from his wife) crawling out of the rubble of the British Empire’s snobbery, racism, and entitlement. He wants class. He gets chaos. He barely tolerates his guests who bring nothing but horror. He and his staff barely suppress their mutual contempt.

His wife Sybil (Prunella Scales) brings withering sarcasm, delivered like a rapier dipped in gin. She is competent where he is incompetent, calm where he is panicked, and utterly terrifying where he evinces only ridiculous bluster. Booth plays straight man as the put-upon house maid and artist-manqué, Polly. The late great Jewish character actor Andrew Sachs played Manuel, the Spanish waiter whose hilarious physical comedy and incompetence is partly a result of gratuitous abuse from Fawlty but, in a bigoted pre-EU 1970s Britain, can be excused (and of course the show lampoons the excuse too) by explaining that “he comes from Barcelona.”

The show plays with stereotypes and has been criticised for that, but with the exception of Polly, really, everyone major character is ridiculous and the less powerful the show draws them, the more loveable it makes them. Fawlty is the victim of a million cartoon pratfalls for which we have no sympathy, but every clip he delivers to the back of Manuel’s head feels like a slap to the viewer.

Some people memorise songs, or poems, for a long time I could recite the whole show dialogue for at least the Germans episode (“Don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!”) or the Mrs. Richards episode — “Communications Problems” (“I don’t know what you expect to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon perhaps, or herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains.’ ‘I expect to see the sea.’ ‘You can see the sea, it’s over there between the land and the sky.’)

And I wasn’t alone, anyone in the family could refer to a whole scene with a crucial phrase, like talmudic scholars referring to an ancient verse. “I wish you were a mouse,” for example ,could refer to any form of ungratefulness or anything to do with bathing, referring to Mrs. Richards complaining about the size of her bathtub — “Call that a bath, it’s not big enough to drown a mouse.” says Mrs Richards (Joan Sanderson) “I wish you were a mouse” mutters Fawlty.

Fifty years on, Fawlty Towers is back in the spotlight, and not just as a museum piece. A new West End play adapted by Cleese himself has extended its run and is being broadcast in the UK this September via U&Gold. It’s a re-staging of three classic episodes (“The Hotel Inspectors,” “The Germans,” and “Communication Problems”) with a surprisingly deft modern cast. Cleese also has a tie-in book, Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All – My Favourite Moments, coming this fall, and a new documentary from his “Packs It In” tour heading to theaters in November. Basil Fawlty is making a comeback — or perhaps more accurately, he’s refusing to go quietly.

What made it funny in 1975 makes it funny in 2025: the precision of the farce, the velocity of misunderstanding, and the physical comedy of a giraffe-man trying to keep order as the universe insists on slapstick entropy. Fawlty Towers works because the writing is mean but not cruel, absurd but grounded. The final scripts are clockwork machines of setup and payoff. Every misplaced nail, every misheard phrase, every dodgy health inspector builds toward a satisfying final collapse of order.

Its legacy is immeasurable. Without Fawlty Towers, there is no The Office, no Friday Night Dinner, no Curb. Fawlty is the grandfather of Larry David, Martin Goodman, David Brent, and a myriad of characters who try to enforce a warped, idiosyncratic logic on a fundamentally illogical world. And yet, for all its imitators, nothing has quite matched the original’s balance of verbal dexterity and physical anarchy.

The show remains a perennial on “Best TV of All Time” lists. In 2000, the British Film Institute named it the greatest British TV program ever. In syndication, it still draws viewers who weren’t born when it first aired. And if someone asks why you’re rewatching it again for the umpteenth time, just mutter, “Don’t mention the war.” They’ll understand.