Here’s why Fawlty Towers is still the best comedy of all time – Aidan Smith

We are supposed to laugh at, not with, the Basil Fawlty character in Fawlty Towers, writes Aidan Smith.

A scene from the controversial Fawlty Towers' episode, The Germans

The other day footage appeared on social media of a raging inferno. Oh no, we were meant to think, what’s been set on fire now? The caption read: “A sad end to the legendary building that was used for the exterior shots for Fawlty Towers.”

Actually, Wooburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire went up in flames back in 1991. The clip was a joke, and a pretty good one – John Cleese would have approved. But some will have believed the venue had been torched as the Black Lives Matter protests spread far and wide. A few might have cheered.

Too far and too wide, as it happens. Campaigners have been frustrated by the focus of the debate shifting to statues. Boris Johnson is accused of indulging in the distraction wars, throwing a literal and metaphorical blanket round the edifice of his hero, Winston Churchill, rather than properly confronting the issue – two-for-the-price-of-one cunning as it deflects attention from Covid as well.

The distraction wars are undermining the culture wars and the BBC are also culpable. The Corporation-owned UKTV panicked and removed an episode of the sitcom containing racist remarks by that silly old goat of a retired major. This act in itself didn’t come as a shock. After all, no organisation in Britain, possibly the world, is more preoccupied with wanting to be seen to be doing “the right thing”. But that Fawlty Towers was flung on to the pyre – albeit temporarily – was shocking.

Fawlty Towers is more than just the best comedy of all time. In 2015, the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast, it was hailed as “after the NHS, arguably Britain’s greatest achievement since the Second World War”. It is one of the BBC’s crown jewels and should always be treated as such.

Instead, this epic saga of a small man standing 6ft 5in tall, spouting lofty ideals from a low-rated hotel’s reception desk, suddenly found itself standing next to Little Britain, another show booked for a spot of cultural cleansing but a vastly inferior work.

Fawlty Towers was painstakingly written long into many nights with not a single line wasted and ultimately broke up Cleese’s marriage and whole chunks of that diamond dialogue are carried around by fans like personal details on an organ donor card – and yet there it was being lumped along with Love Thy Neighbour.

Fawlty Towers wasn’t just a showcase for Cleese and his Olympic-standard physical comedy and the world-class insults of Basil because every other character including Maj Gowen was brilliantly drawn – but still it was being forced to languish in a holding cell of bad shows out of (goose-) step with the modern world, among them It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Mind Your Language.

The last-named pair plus Love Thy Neighbour were very much of their time and unlikely ever to be re-shown while Little Britain was a nasty piece of work for which David Walliams and Matt Lucas couldn’t hide behind the excuse that they were working in the grim, old 1970s and didn’t know any better.

The BBC should have had the balls to stand by Fawlty Towers but it was more interested in playing to the political moment and being what it deemed on-trend in the culture wars. Only when Cleese subjected the Corporation to one of Basil’s damn good thrashings, calling it “cowardly, gutless and stupid”, was the episode reinstated.

This was the one called The Germans and you might have assumed its “offence” was the moment when Basil hisses to Polly “Don’t mention the war” and then can’t stop referencing it, climaxing in an order for starters which goes: “So that’s two egg mayonnaise, one prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads.” Real Germans, by the way, love Fawlty Towers.

But beyond the relentless taunting of his guests, which could have been excused by a bang on the head caused by a stuffed moose falling on top of Basil, there was Maj Gowen’s use of the n-word during the upper-class bigot’s blithering anecdote about a cricket match.

Really, though, where do you stop finding -isms in Fawlty Towers if you’re so inclined? The major’s martini-addled outburst comes five minutes into the episode. By then Basil has already been rude to his wife Sybil – a regular occurrence of course – and the NHS about which we’re so protective right now, first to a ward sister who does nothing wrong, then to a black doctor, staggering backwards as if in stunned amazement that a person in such a role should be this colour (a gag repeated later when Basil wakes up after the moose incident).

Basil is rude to all women, not just the long-suffering Sybil who gives as good as she gets, but also to the very old and the very young. He’s rude to Americans, Australians and his Spanish waiter. He’s rude to Irish builders, slightly effeminate men and macho, medallion-wearing men. He can’t stand the riff-raff of Torquay who clog up his establishment and sucks up to anyone he considers a better class of clientele.

Maybe the Beeb only remembered all of this belatedly. Perhaps the “marketing people and petty bureaucrats” who Cleese says now run the Corporation don’t know these stupendous scripts as well as Fawlty Towers obsessives. Fingering the show for racism would be letting the cat, or rat, out of the bag. Best to stick it back in.

Complete with a viewer alert offering “extra guidance”. Why? When we laugh at Fawlty Towers – and I reckon we always will – it’s not at the targets of Basil’s sneers and tirades but at the lunatic running the hotel from hell.

Since we’ve all got to be offended by something these days can I be offended by the inference that I don’t get the joke?

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our advertisers - and consequently the revenue we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to scotsman.com and enjoy unlimited access to Scottish news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content. Visit www.scotsman.com/subscriptions now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Joy Yates

Editorial Director