This month marks 50 years since Fawlty Towers first appeared on British television (it first aired on Australian screens two years later, in 1977). Just 12 episodes, broadcast in two short series between 1975 and 1979, but its afterlife has been astonishing. The reruns never stop. There’s an updated version in the West End. The catchphrases still bounce around pubs and forums: “Don’t mention the war!” “You’ll have to excuse him, he’s from Barcelona.” Fawlty Towers is the show that refuses to die and be hidden in the hotel kitchen.
Prunella Scales and John Cleese as Sybil and Basil Fawlty in the classic British comedy Fawlty Towers.
Why? Not just because it is funny – though it is, sometimes painfully so. Not even because John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty is one of the great British comic grotesques, up there with Falstaff. The real secret is that Fawlty Towers represents something essential about the best British humour: it is cruel, and it is surreal.
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The cruelty is obvious. Basil is a snob, a bully, a fraud and a hen-pecked coward – and we are warmly invited to laugh at him for this. But we also laugh at his terrible behaviour to others. Poor Manuel, the diminutive waiter from Spain, is treated with relentless contempt – smacked with spoons, commonly throttled, reduced to terrified squeaks as Basil wrestles him in the lobby. Cue hilarity.
Britain has always delighted in cruel comedy. From Hogarth’s satirical engravings to Dickens’ gallery of grotesques, from toffs laughing at the loons in Bedlam to the savage lampoons of Private Eye, cruelty is central. We don’t really do wholesome sitcoms where everyone learns a lesson and hugs it out at the end. We prefer to watch someone fail, to squirm, to expose themselves as pompous, ludicrous, cringeworthy.
Think of Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, or Norman Wisdom, or anything with Alan Partridge. All of them are fruits on the same family tree as Fawlty. Note how the American version of The Office made David Brent much warmer, even likeable. Americans found our version too brutal and unkind.
There is something liberating in this cruelty. When Basil Fawlty thrashes his unreliable car with a leafy branch, this is comedy as catharsis: yes, we mock the crazy man, but perhaps we mock ourselves. It’s a subtle reminder that all humanity is faintly laughable.
Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), Manuel (Andrew Sachs), Sybil Fawlty (Prunella Scales) and Polly (Connie Booth).
Yet cruelty is only half the story. The other half is surrealism. Fawlty Towers isn’t just punchy, it is dreamlike, absurd, teetering on the edge of the plausible. Its plots are like nightmares: the corpse hidden all over the place, the German tourists watching Basil launch into a goose-step.
This surreal streak is likewise deeply British. We are the nation of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Monty Python. We enjoy the dream logic of things spiralling into chaos.
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In 2020, an episode of Fawlty Towers was briefly withdrawn from a streaming service because of a racist colonel’s racist slur. The decision was swiftly reversed, but the fact it happened at all tells you something. Modern sensibilities struggle with danger – they don’t like cruelty, and they distrust surrealism. They want comedy to be safe, uplifting, sensible. Yet, that makes for bland, inoffensive comedy.
Where does Britain’s cruel and surreal streak come from? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the weather that drives us mad. Maybe it’s the eccentricity of an island. Maybe it’s the way we’ve barely ever been conquered that makes us confident playing with darker themes. Whatever the answer, the humour that arises from this – dark, savage, absurd – has been one of our greatest cultural exports. And we can still do it. Probably our most successful comedy of the moment is Clarkson’s Farm (a huge global hit). This is because it is prepared to put the boot in – it’s not all saccharine laughs. And it captures the human lunacy from the unintelligible locals to the incomprehensible bureaucracy.
At 50, Fawlty Towers can still do what Clarkson’s Farm does now. Basil Fawlty is still a madman, Manuel is still mistreated, the plots are still magnificently and ornately bizarre.
So happy birthday, Basil. May you keep bullying your guests, insulting your staff, and collapsing with impotent fury. Fifty years on, you still prove the point: the best British humour is cruel and it is surreal. And thank God for that.
The Telegraph
Fawlty Towers is now streaming on 9Now, which is owned by the publisher of this masthead, and BritBox.
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