Swiroset.com

What really quite rude phrase was the only full anagram for Fawlty Towers as depicted in the titles of the pivotal 1970s sitcom? It was used in the penultimate episode (meaning the eleventh – this show was about quality and not quantity), The Anniversary. All anagrams used in the title sequences of other episodes were only partial anagrams; that is, they did not use all the letters. So while Flay Otters and Watery Fowls are great, they only use some of the lyrics; to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, “they have used some of the letters, but not necessarily in the correct order.”

But what about Fawlty Towers itself? It’s reasonably well known, I suppose, that the Monty Python gang was in Torquay to film a movie and they stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in town. Eventually, all the other members of the cast and crew moved on, but John Cleese was so impressed by the behavior of Gleneagles’ owner-manager, one Donald Sinclair, that he and his wife Connie Booth stayed where they were. Of course, what they witnessed there (or claimed to have witnessed) has now become the stuff of legend in the 12 half-hour episodes that make up the entire Fawlty Towers canon.

In addition to writing the series, Cleese and Booth took on two of the starring roles in Fawlty Towers, Basil Fawlty (the hotel owner) and Polly Sherman (a maid and, of course, so much more). Prunella Scales took on the role of Sybil, Basil’s wife, a strange mix of a woman, sometimes domineering, but at the same time long-suffering. The fourth and final leading role was that of Manuel, the Spanish waiter at Fawlty’s. This was taken by German-born British actor Andrew Sachs. Using her own experience of learning English as a second language allowed Sachs to bring a real sense of Manuel’s vulnerability as he was a young man struggling to understand what the hell was going on in this very dysfunctional place.

But what about the episodes themselves? Well, as I’ve already mentioned and as you’re probably well-known, there were only twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers. They were shown weekly on BBC2 in two series of six episodes. The first ran from September 19 to October 24, 1975. The second ran from February 19 to March 19, 1979 and the sixth and final episode was postponed to October 25 of that year due to to a strike at the BBC. The first series gifted us with the delights of A Touch of Class; The builders; the wedding party; Hotel Inspectors; Gourmet Night and of course, Los Alemanes. series 2 contained communication problems; The psychiatrist; Waldorf salad; The herring and carcass; The Anniversary and last but not least, Basil the Rat. The best one for me has to be The Germans, a bit cliche perhaps (on my part) but what the heck, they’re all brilliant and you really should have to pick a favourite.