Remake Fawlty Towers and Dark Side of the Moon? Only a lunatic would attempt either – Aidan Smith

It’s awards season but I’m confident I’ve got an exclusive on the Baftas and Brits 12 months from now. There will be no prizes for the revival of Fawlty Towers. And as for The Dark Side of the Moon 2.0, well, pigs will fly before that gets anywhere near a gong.

Stop, don't do it! John Cleese confirms he's reviving Fawlty Towers (Picture: Getty Images)

Yes, alright, I know Pink Floyd successfully enabled hogs to become airborne but that was when the band were good and indeed were a band. It’s the crackpot scheme of Roger Waters and him alone to re-record their most famous work, just as it’s the crackpot scheme of John Cleese and him alone to offer up the sequel that nobody wanted.

Fawlty Towers was, and is, the greatest television comedy of all time. “After the NHS, arguably Britain’s greatest achievement since the Second World War.” I forget who said that but wholeheartedly agree. Maybe Oxford-AstraZeneca nudges the hotel from hell into third place now but there’s a common theme here of health and well-being. Which of us doesn’t laugh – the best medicine – when Basil wakes up in hospital after being felled by a stuffed moose?

I’ve watched that scene a hundred times and I’ll watch it a hundred more. Only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers – two series – were ever made. Maybe right after the final instalment we craved more but it was other, lesser shows which went on and on, the dead moose in their case being well and truly flogged. Now, stopping at two is regarded as a sign of class, something Basil earnestly tried to provide on the English Riviera, only to be thwarted by drunk chefs, lousy builders, louche men sporting medallions and his wife Sybil’s lust for the cheap, pulpy thrills of Harold Robbins.

With not a single line wasted, Fawlty Towers was perfection, as was The Dark Side of the Moon. Rock properly grew up with this album, released 50 years ago next Wednesday. “It had a wonderful sense of intelligence, and sensitivity,” declared the band’s label boss in America, Bhaskar Menon. “And it conveyed an adult kind of disenchantment, but also a concern about the state of the world.”

Song lyrics before Dark Side were, well, moon-June. Glam was suddenly silly and bluesy boogies were confirmed as even more boring than they’d been previously. All of this seemed to belong to a very flat Earth and as a teenanger desperate to appear older than I was, the cosmic wanderings of the big-theme Floyd were intoxicating.

And intense. We listened to this album, my pals and I, sitting cross-legged on the floor and stroking beards we couldn’t yet grow, with the groovy gatefold cover laid out in front of us, and after the third or fourth play right the way through, every song in sequence, would huzzah with put-on deeper registers: “Now girls will like us!”

How many times did we saunter across the school quad, prism sleeve under our arms? Too many, but not nearly enough. Ah, but we weren’t too old, or young-pretending-older, that we didn’t also goosestep from lesson to lesson in mimicry of Basil, Fawlty Towers coming just two years after Dark Side.

Both sitcom and album are sacred texts of 1970s popular culture and it’s sacrilegious to tamper with them. So why do it? I reach across my shelves for two fine books telling their stories, The Dark Side of the Moon by John Harris and Graham McCann’s Fawlty Towers. In the former, Waters says: “With that record, Pink Floyd had fulfilled its dream. We’d kind of done it.” In the latter, Cleese remembers a conversation with his then-wife Connie Booth, Polly in the show and his co-writer: “We’ve done that, haven’t we? So there was no desire to do it again, ever, for any reason.”

Except now both are doing that very thing. And risking the tarnishing of classics. Honestly, I’m seething. Other, lesser shows and other, lesser bands re-form, re-heat, regurgitate. I’d always hoped that, where Basil tried and failed with “Gourmet Night”, Fawlty Towers and Dark Side would remain above the riff-raff. Now, Basil-style exasperated ranting – “I mean, what is the point?!” – is unavoidable.

I mean, are Cleese and Waters quite mad? Maybe I shouldn’t mention madness – I mentioned it once and I think I got away with it – but it is a theme of the masterworks. “The lunatic is on the grass,” sing the Floyd, lamenting their tragic ex-member Syd Barrett. InFawlty Towers, the lunatic thrashes his car with a tree branch when it won’t start.

Waters has sometimes pondered his own mental state while Cleese, according to Monty Python cohort Terry Jones, created Fawlty as a monster alter ego: “It gave him an outlet.” And actually, the pair would seem to have much in common. These are tall men who loomed over their art – an “ageing, brilliantined stick-insect”, Sybil dubbed Basil.

Currently, they moan about the state of the planet and regimes and institutions they don’t like. They’re in a race to collect the most wives, each having already been married four times, which may have something to do with the remakes and a need for fresh funds. News of them came only days apart with Booth left in the dark by Cleese and Waters not bothering to tell the remaining members of the Floyd because they’re just rubbish and, anyway, Dark Side is his to tinker with.

And to despoil. God, I hope not. But this grim situation could only be made worse by them swapping roles – Waters getting behind the reception desk of “Warty Towels” and Cleese strapping on a bass guitar to plaintively warble: “And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too, I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.”