Fawlty Towers: Series 1 (1975)

Essential Viewing

UK

Television Series

Director: John Howard Davies

Writers: Connie Booth, John Cleese

Composer: Dennis Wilson

Cast: John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs, Connie Booth, Ballard Berkeley

A bigoted, elitist hotel owner – prone to fawning over nobility and treating with disdain the common man – manages to find himself in farcical situation after farcical situation, in this hilarious, brilliantly written first series, which benefits greatly from Cleese’s wonderfully physical comic dexterity.

1. A Touch of Class
Fed up with the riff-raff that usually patronise his hotel, who he treats with utter disdain, Basil Fawlty takes out a £40 ad in a swanky magazine, looking to attract a better class of customer; so when a certain Lord Melbury checks in, he proceeds to fawn all over him, near enough ignoring the rest of his clientele – unfortunately, though, the titled gentleman is not all that he appears to be.

2. The Builders
Instead of hiring a respectable builder like Stubbs – as his wife, Sybil, had requested – to put through one door and block up another, Basil hires cowboy builder O’Reilly, with whom they’d had trouble previously, who proceeds to fill in the wrong door and put another were one was not needed, much to the unsurprised chagrin of his no-nonsense better half.

3. The Wedding Party
When an unmarried couple tries to book into a double room, Basil refuses to accommodate them, but Sybil, his more enlightened wife, does so any way, leaving his imagination to run wild; and before long he is seeing carnal desire everywhere, and comes to believe that the hotel is filled with sex maniacs, causing him to make a fool of himself when he asks them all, including his waitress Polly, to leave.

4. The Hotel Inspectors
After hearing a rumour that there are three hotel inspectors in town, Basil comes to believe that a particularly demanding guest is one of said assessors, and begins to fawn all over him; but when his true occupation comes to light, his sycophantic deference soon turns to irrational rage.

5. Gourmet Night
The inaugural not-for-riff-raff Fawlty Towers gourmet evening runs anything but smoothly, when their new Greek chef, the best that they've ever had, gets steaming drunk after a romantic rebuff from Manuel, leaving him unable to cater the event, and forcing Basil to quickly change the menu and look to their old chef André, now running a successful restaurant and who had recommended the soused Kurt in the first place, to come to the rescue – now, if only he’d paid a professional to fix his car.

6. The Germans
With Sybil in hospital to undergo an operation on an ingrowing toenail, Basil is left at the hotel with instructions to hang a moose’s head in the lobby and to perform a fire drill – a set of tasks that inevitably proves to be beyond him; and before long, concussed after a blow to the head, he finds himself unable to serve lunch to a party of German guests without making constant references to the war. Iain.Stott