Reviewed by Stuart O'Connor
Stars John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Connie Booth, Andrew Sachs, Ballard Berkeley, Gilly Flower,
Renee Roberts, Brian Hall, David Kelly, Bernard Cribbins, Joan Sanderson | Written by John Cleese & Connie Booth
UK certification 12 | UK RRP £24.99 | Runtime 350 minutes | Directed by John Howard Davies & Bob Spiers
They only made 12 episodes, but Fawlty Towers is acknowledged as one of the best, if not THE best, British sitcoms to ever grace our televisions screens. John Cleese has done many things in his long (and, for the most part, illustrious) career, but I feel it's his role as the harried hotelier Basil Fawlty for which he'll be best remembered.
Do I need to tell you what Fawlty Towers is all about? Really? Oh well, if you insist. Snobbish, put-upon Basil Fawlty (Cleese) runs a small hotel in the British town of Torquay with his annoying wife, Sybil (Scales), efficient maid Polly (Booth) and scatty waiter Manuel (Sachs) – he's from Barcelona. They get up to all sorts of crazy misadventures as they try to deal with their guests, who seem to constantly get in the way of Basil running the place.
The 12 episodes were made in two seasons - the first in 1975 and the second in 1979. But the four-year break didn't hamper the comedy one bit. As Cleese himself tells us in the audio commentaries (and more on those in the discussion of the extras), Fawlty Towers is classic farce. And it's aged surprisingly well. No matter how many times I've seen each episode (and trust me, in the 30-odd years since they were made, it's been a lot), I still get a laugh from many of the lines. The scripts, written by Cleese and Booth, are absolutley perfect - word perfect, in fact. Unlike most TV comedies, the scripts were written over a period of six weeks, rather than a few days. They were also twice as long as the average script for a half-hour comedy.
And all that hard work on the scripts paid off, in spades, on the screen. Each episode is sharp, tight, beautifully performed and, most importantly, as funny as hell. Eveybody has their favourite episode, and for most people it's The Germans - and, like everybody else, I adore it for Cleese's goose-stepping silly walk. But my favourite episode, ever since I was a lad, has always been Communication Problems - the one about their hard-of-hearing guest Mrs Richards. What this episode really points out is that as well as being a brilliant farce, Fawlty Towers was also superb character-driven comedy.
This release marks the 30th anniversary of the show's second season. And in those 30-odd years, I don't think anyone has come close to the perfection that is Fawlty Towers. And I doubt that anyone ever will.
EXTRAS ****½ The special feature that really sets this release apart from all the previous DVD releases of Fawlty Towers is that, finally, each episode carries an audio commentary by John Cleese himself. And what an absolute pleasure those commentaries are. John's delight at watching the episodes again, and his genuine affection for the show, is a joy to listen to. He gives us behind-the-scenes stories of things that happened while filming, he tells us what he would change if making the show now, he shares his love for all his fellow cast members and he just generally comes across as a great bloke. There are also separate audio commentaries from directors John Howard Davies (series 1) and Bob Spiers (series 2), but I haven't listened to them yet. As well, there are interviews with Cleese, Sachs, Booth, Scales and others that were filmed in 2009 for a 2-hour UK cable network reunion special – surprisingly, though, that special does not appear here. There are also some interviews done with Cleese, Sachs and Scales for the 2001 DVD box set release; Torquay Tourist Guide, a 12-minute documentary about the real-life "Fawlty Towers", the Gleneagles Hotel, which inspired the series; a short gag reel; and some out-of-date biographies of the cast and some of the guest stars.