‘Rubs the wrong way’
In the late 90s, almost 20 years after the mere 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers aired, it was still regularly beamed into my now comically tiny TV in South Devon (not far from its setting). Cheeky, shocking and a little outdated even then-but how does another 25 years affect its relevance?
Written by comedic powerhouse John Cleese and Connie Booth, and aired in 1973, the premise was based on a real-life character. After staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, the Monty Python team met Donald Sinclair-“the rudest man I have come across in my life,” says Cleese. In true-to-form Devon fashion, the hotel was demolished in 2015 and a care home named after the actor who played the original Manuel (Andrew Sachs) was constructed in its place (Sachs Lodge). This collaboration with his then-wife Booth followed on from the roaring success of And Now for Something Completely Different, producing a flush of episodes that undeniably moulded the landscape of TV and comedy forever.
When asked in the brochure “why now?” for a revival (well, last year), the resounding answer is: why not? Liz Ascroft’s set and costumes have resurrected the English Riviera of the series so impeccably-even down to the frosted azure blue of Sybil’s eyelids. However, is it too much like a TV set? It’s all rather long and flat, with only one bedroom crammed above. The famous swinging dining room doors are squashed in one corner, meaning your sight-lines are interrupted by tables, losing a lot of the really good farcical comedy.
Cleese overlooks the evening from the balcony like a feudal lord surveying a veritable who’s who of who was-the surviving Chuckle Brother and other semi-recognisable faces from the 70s and 80s comedy circuit. But we are gala-ing to celebrate a new troupe of actors, and in this case, they throw all they can at the revival. Danny Bayne is a spirited shadow of Cleese as Basil Fawlty, and Mia Austen is similarly true to the original-hilarious as the acid-dripping wife, Sybil. We have Paul Nicholas as the sputtering, gun-brandishing Major, and Helen Lederer as the maddening Mrs Richards. Joanne Clifton does well stepping into Booth’s pointed kitten heels as Polly, and Hemi Yeroham gives life to Manuel-although that brings its own issues.
My brother, father and I chuckled ourselves silly at various episodes, while my mother looked on rather sadly in the corner (perhaps being from Torquay herself). The shifting sands of the 90s were clearly tugging at her deeply feminist heart-and now, fittingly, they are now tugging at mine.
Fawlty Towers is a piece of culture painfully of its time. The dark, rather cruel humour of the 70s rubs some (my partner and I) the wrong way nowadays. The hopeless psychologically abusive and hateful marriage, the rigid gender and ageist stereotypes, and the endless harking back to the war-I mean, it’s Britain at its worst. The character of Manuel, so incapacitatingly foreign (he’s from Barcelona) as to become almost inhuman, is shuffle-inducing through a contemporary lens, and the alternation between physical abuse and pet-like pats on the head doled out by Fawlty does little to help.
I assumed, and was interested in, how they would remake this series for a modern audience. After all there is biting comedy, zipping wordsmanship and fantastic surrealism at times. But instead last night was a necromancy of a long-dead series, a cautionary tale of the past, not a levelling statement on the continuity of human experience. If you still rewatch the show, you will love it -it’s been given flesh, after all. But if you, like me, question the past’s relationship to our current, worrying present, you might find yourself beak-deep in your interval wine, muttering darkly about Brexit and Judith Butler. Cleese famously calls those who question his creative choices “literal-minded”, but theorise that those who criticise simply don’t understand is infantile. I suspect we have a different idea of the “glorious” 70s of his heyday-and it’s need to be exhumed so faithfully.
See for yourself, click HERE for tickets…