In 1979, the TV series Fawlty Towers ended a run of 12 shows to great acclaim. The show, based around John Cleese’s hapless hotelier Basil Fawlty, is surely one of the funniest and best written of all time and when it ended, while most of us would have been happy had it gone on forever, we understood why Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth, who co-wrote the show, decided to quit at the top. In retrospect, it was a good decision because there was no fat, no padding, just a dozen shows as good as any TV comedy ever written, but now Cleese wants to bring it back. Why?
Fawlty will return alongside his long lost daughter, played by his actual daughter Camilla, running a “boutique hotel”, which will, we are assured, “explore how the dramatic and cynical Basil navigates the modern world, while running a boutique hotel.” I can only conclude one reason for this show being made: Cleese needs the money. At 83, why else would he bother?
For all we know, the scripts could be brilliant and Cleese might be able to roll back the years, silly walk and all, and make the show a success. Somehow, I doubt it.
I was still a teenager when the first season came out and it was uproariously funny. And even today, when I watch the episodes again – the original, uncensored versions, with Basil’s concussion-induced anti-German ranting and the Major, who we might today consider was suffering from dementia, even with some of his more racist utterances still included – it’s still great. While it is probably true that some of the content might not be regarded as acceptable these days – and that’s because society’s attitudes to many issues including racism have gradually evolved, not because of some mythical “cancel culture” or that old tired old trope “political correctness” – it is of its time and it is still funny. And let us not forget that the joke was, as with the bigoted Alf Garnett, almost always on Basil.
When Basil Fawlty comes back, what’s he going to say and who is he going to say it to? It is hard to imagine Fawlty having changed a great deal so we’d still get his rants and, as we said before, his silly walks. So much of Cleese’s brilliance with Fawlty was visual. Whether someone nearing his 84th birthday can match those levels of energy, who knows, but I would suggest the likely audience will be much like that who saw the show first time round. By and large, young people watch a lot less television than my generation and indeed many won’t have heard of Cleese nor Fawlty. Will this type of comedy play well with a new audience and will it make any sense, without having first seen the original seasons? Although I might be tempted to give updated version a chance, I would expect to be disappointed. A large part of the original show’s appeal was the accompanying cast, with Sybil, Manuel, the Major and sundry other characters turning it into the special programme it was.
If Cleese needs the money – and that might explain his forthcoming shows on the far right channel GB News – then I hope he earns it from the reboot. While I don’t think he has done anything remotely funny since A Fish Called Wanda, which came out in 1988, I wouldn’t want him to be languishing in some kind of poverty. Or perhaps his longing is really to feel relevant again, given how the world has moved on since the horribly dated Monty Python’s Flying Circus and indeed Fawlty Towers.
I’d like to thank John Cleese for the memories. Python, in its time, was often funny and Fawlty Towers still is. Maybe that should be enough for anyone? It would be for me. But I don’t begrudge him doing what he wants to do, whether that’s appearing on a far right TV channel or rebooting a TV show that ended in 1979. Above all, I just hope he doesn’t trash his legacy as one of our great comedy performers. His best days are behind him, as they are for most of us. As we say, it’s not PC, wokeness, cancel culture, it’s just evolution.
