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Fawlty Towers
1975 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Connie Booth, John Cleese
Owner Basil Fawlty, his wife Sybil, a chambermaid Polly, and Spanish waiter Manuel attempt to run their hotel amidst farcical situations and an array of demanding guests.
17 positive1 negative19 neutralfrom 37 commenters
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41 comments on Hacker News
My Spanish friend was explaining how some dubs can be better than the original - because the voice actors are good. I think anything with Jeff Goldblum could be easily improved.
The voice actors become well known and some were popular . . . although they can really change the tone of a movie (for good or bad) which they said was sometimes jarring when watching the movie in the original language.
I remember them saying they Manuel in Fawlty Towers is cast as Mexican, which is darkly humorous to me.
I think this is an important point - it's very easy to find oneself slipping into the protagonists' viewpoints, in a lot of media the protagonist is 'good', we see the story unfold from their viewpoint, then sympathise and empathise with them, even when they make mistakes, their motivations were pure, and what’s unfolding isn’t due to problems with them exactly.
But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.
So when the article says this -
> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.
Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
I always wondered why so many British shows were never broadcast in America. I think the most I ever saw growing up in the 80s and 90s was a bit of monty python, mr bean and fawlty towers on PBS, but otherwise nothing. Were the licensing fees so high that it just wasn't worth it? I suppose you could argue that the style wasn't a perfect fit for American audiences, but even then, having a large source of already produced tv shows must have been worth it to one of the tv stations?
> 12 episodes total
I read John Cleese’s autobiography long ago and he mentioned the very different economics of TV in the UK vs the US.
I think it was either the lack of money going into UK TV shows or the lack of a profit motive that led to ridiculously short runs like that.
Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister are top quality shows that should’ve run for 10 seasons.
Luckily their system did better with this when Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear came around and we got a lot of that.
It's not just availability, they also don't want it retrospectively edited, censored, flagged, or deleted at the whims of transient corporate faux morality. You will have to tear my DVD copy of Fawlty Towers from my cold dead fingers :)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/27/no-ifs-no-butts-how-the-film-industry-is-digitally-revising-its-history-splash-daryl-hannah https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/14/disney-attaches-warnings-of-outdated-cultural-depictions-to-classic-films
This post contains outdated cultural depictions. Reader discretion is advised.
"comparatively, very few episodes. Especially places like the UK"
OK - Fawlty Towers: 12 episodes. Now, look up the Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise, Victoria Wood, Absolutely Fabulous, French and Saunders, Lenny Henry, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Ben Elton, The Fast Show, ... oh and I'm watching Dawn French doing current stand up right now. Jo Brand, ... oh this is getting boring and I've missed out loads. That's just a few comedians.
We have a few soaps that have stood the test of time too and a few current affairs programmes that have been around for a while: Coronation Street, East Enders, Have I got News for you, QI, The Archers, Panorama.
The BBC alone has been running for quite a while and I'll finish with an honourable mention for Blue Peter.
I haven't really refuted your argument but then that was pretty arse to start with. Gave me an excuse to reminisce for a while 8)
From Wikipedia:
> Three men developed and created the Cheers television series: Glen and Les Charles ("Glen and Les") and James Burrows, who identified themselves as "two Mormons and a Jew."
> The original idea was a group of workers who interacted like a family, the goal being a concept similar to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The creators considered making an American version of the British Fawlty Towers, set in a hotel or an inn. When the creators settled on a bar as their setting, the show began to resemble the radio program Duffy's Tavern, originally written and co-created by James Burrows' father Abe Burrows. They liked the idea of a tavern, as it provided a continuous stream of new people, for a variety of characters.
> Early discussions about the location of the show centered on Barstow, California, then Kansas City, Missouri. They eventually turned to the East Coast and finally Boston. The Bull & Finch Pub in Boston, which was the model for Cheers, was chosen from a phone book. When Glen Charles asked the bar's owner, Tom Kershaw, to shoot exterior and interior photos, he agreed, charging $1.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheers#Production
I remember being distinctly befuddled when I was younger watching an episode of Fawlty Towers when the obnoxious “American” orders “a couple of filet mignons”.
As an American myself, it felt like one should know how precisely how many filet mignons one wanted when ordering in a restaurant, rather than leaving it up to interpretation.
Didn’t realize then that “couple” in British English was almost certain to mean exactly two. I wonder if Americans also used it in that sense back in the 1970s when that episode was filmed, or if that is actually a bit of a shibboleth goof — the “American” actor was of course British, like everyone on the show except John Cleese’s real-life wife Connie Booth.
(Now that I think of it, as Booth was a co-writer, she probably would have caught this mistake if it was in fact a difference in American vs. British English. I imagine instead the American meaning has drifted toward less specificity over time.)
Also the denouement to the Fawlty Towers "Builders" episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfBOIbjbLv0
(or, jump to https://youtu.be/jfBOIbjbLv0?t=1560)
It can be seen as a transgression because you're knowingly choosing words that will cause someone distress.
In my experience people are normally careful about what kind of jokes they make around someone who has suffered a traumatic experience, an "there's a time and a place" kind of thing.
I believe many people would find it transgressive to make jokes about public transport around someone whose child had recently been killed by a bus.
You can see this even in popular culture. I'd give the famous "Don't mention the war" episode of Fawlty Towers as an example.
I think it's part of the human experience to exhibit sensitivity towards others and to reflect that in your language.
It sometimes beautifully worked across seasons as in "The Puffy Shirt" (where George becomes a hand model).
I think this was mostly Larry David's work. Jason Alexander once mentioned in an interview that after David left, this "dovetailing" of story lines kind of stopped, and I tend to agree. David continued it (even more pronounced) in "Curb Your Enthusiasm". Even the golf ball twist was kind of repeated - in extreme form and with a baseball - in "Curb".
Side note: another early TV show that often pulled this off to great effect was "The Honeymooners". I think this is the show that had the most influence on Seinfeld. Ed Norton is basically Kramer, Ralph Kramden is basically George, Alice is Elaine, and Alice's mother is Newman (you can also map "The Honeymooners" characters, and even entire plot lines, to "The Flintstones", but that is another story, and AFAIK Jacky Gleason, the creator of "The Honeymooners", considered suing Hanna-Barbera in the 60ies).
Jerry Seinfeld himself once said that we should wait and see if "Seinfeld" is still funny in 50 years like "The Honeymooners" (that was 20 years ago).
"Fawlty Towers" also did this very well.
A lot of people, obviously, but I didn't like the original Fawlty Towers for a lot of the same reasons I find Cleese unpleasant now. He does a lot of "punching down", and gets ticked off when people object.
It's a common "free-speech" trope: "I have the right to speak, but you have no right to reply".
I didn't know he supported Brexit, but it doesn't surprise me. It too seems to come from the same attitude that "we" are fundamentally better than "them". Even setting aside the often-not-subtle racist undertones, there was a constant insistence that Britain would dominate the EU in negotiations afterwards. They utterly failed to recognize that the EU just didn't consider the UK as indispensable as they imagined.
I really liked Cleese in the Monty Python films (though I find Flying Circus inconsistent at best). He's clearly got a comic gift. But on his own, he often seems mean, and I just don't find that interesting.
Seinfeld was the first good sitcom.
That's such a silly thing to say I'll assume it's intentionally provocative and not intended to be truthful rather than representing genuine ignorance.
But for anybody young enough/daft enough to take it seriously, check out
Fawlty Towers
Young Ones
Blackadder
Yes Minister
Dad's Army
Etc
Etc
That's just a quick UK list off the top of my head, I'll leave others to correct the parent comment with US (Bilko?, Cheers?, etc) and other national (Let The Blood Run Free?) suggestions...
See also: there are only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.
There are extremely few comedy shows I really enjoy: Arrested Development, Curb you Enthusiasm, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, Malcolm in the Middle - and Seinfeld. I think they all have something in common: while they all offer plenty of easy-to-digest but clever short-term jokes, they regularly feature completely unexpected long-term jokes, to great effect.
Seinfeld stands out because they typically achieve this across storylines. A great example (spoiler alert) is Kramer's golfing vs. George's lying in "The Marine Biologist", where the literal act of revealing that the joke was actually a storyline collision got the biggest laugh in the show's history. They sometimes even did it across episodes, for example George's job as a hand model. I think this is one of the main reasons Seinfeld nearly topped the 2013 WGA ranking of the best written TV shows [0].
Larry David became the master of this technique during the 3rd year of Seinfeld, and he further perfected it in "Curb".
[0] https://www.wga.org/writers-room/101-best-lists/101-best-written-tv-series/list
TL;DR people are turning on closed captions (i.e. subtitles of the same language as the video) to increase their focus.
I've been doing something slightly similar in reading Fawlty Towers scripts [1] on my phone while watching the episodes, and it yielded about 20% more jokes (ones I'd missed in the past, even from 10+ viewings of each episode!).
For example, Basil mumbling this brilliancy in his initial exchange with Mr Hutchinson:
> In a nutshell
> Case, more like.
[1] https://subslikescript.com/series/Fawlty_Towers-72500/season-1/episode-4-The_Hotel_Inspectors
That doesn't ring true to me at all. I'm more inclined to agree with Stephen Fry [1], who explains that it's ultimately a matter of optimism versus pessimism.
The great American comics are people like John Belushi, the wisecracking charmer who gets the girl in the end, while the British comedian prefers to play the failure; British comedy comes from strife and tragedy and embarrassment and loss of dignity, which is why most British comedy focuses on lower/middle class people and their relationship with the hierarchy: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese's character in Fawlty Towers), Blackadder, David Brent (The Office), and so on.
The types of comedic personalities you tend to see in American culture are the likes of Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, featuring people who may be average, but generally don't start as failures, and if they do (or if they have an unfortunate fall from grace in the middle of the story), the central theme isn't the inevitability of their failure, but an optimistic path towards self-betterment and reclaiming control over their own destiny.
The US also doesn't have the kind of history of tensions between the classes that Britain has (even though wealth inequality is objectively worse, and the system is simply not recognized as being a class system among ordinary people). The American style of comedy goes hand in hand with the idea of the American dream, that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough.
The most "British" American comedy I've seen in recent times was Forgetting Sarah Marshall (written by Jason Segel, an American, but directed by a Brit, Nicholas Stoller), which basically revels in the haplessness and constant failures of the main character, and his path to happiness isn't the traditional American one (though it has that "pull yourself by the bootstraps" approach).
I recommend watching the clip. Fry delivers a very eloquent thesis. If you're not familiar with Fry, his answer might sound rehearsed, but it's clearly not; he's just extremely articulate.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao
Some American comedy (Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99, Cheers, Community, etc) is amazing. Most of it is crap (2 1/2 Men, Big Bang, 90% of SNL, 100% of "middle aged dude with a family and a wife that's way too good looking" sitcoms).
Some British comedy (Fawlty Towers, Black Books, Fleabag) is amazing. Most of it is crap (Mr Bean, Keeping Up Appearances, One Foot in the grave).
There are some terrible British bands, and some great French cars.
Generalising about culture is pointless.
> (e.g. taxpayer-funded BBC removed an old episode of Fawlty Towers, itself a taxpayer-funded BBC production, from their streaming platform for being racist after the George Floyd incident [1])
Just read up on that and am shaking my head in disbelief about the fragility of, well, everything really. Technology, emotions, interpretations, a general sense of having to pre-emptively react to anything and everything. Even at the time of creation, Basil Fawlty was a caricature of a deeply despicable man and other characters equally so. Best leave it to John Cleese himself to sum it up:
> Cleese spoke against the removal of the episode due to the Major's use of racial slurs: "The Major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say?"
Turning a dump of wikipedia (the kind you get on dumps.wikimedia.org) into a running instance of wikipedia that you can browse is actually insanely hard. I put considerable effort into it a few years back and gave up. Don't know what the state of this is right now. So unless the servers that survive are the ones running wikipedia in production now, archaeologists will be out of luck.
But those won't survive, the simple reason being that the people running them now are making continuous changes to them now and there is no guarantee that those changes preserve whatever information future archaeologists will find of value (which we can't really know now).
And this is true for much simpler mediums than software as well. Take film for example. For film printed on celluloid, all you need is for a good copy of each reel of each film to survive and you've got pretty much a guarantee that this piece of culture will be preserved somehow. Nowadays films are digital thingamajigs rather than celluloid artefacts and the institutions tasked with looking after that digital cultural heritage go about it with an editorializing rather than archival mindset. (e.g. taxpayer-funded BBC removed an old episode of Fawlty Towers, itself a taxpayer-funded BBC production, from their streaming platform for being racist after the George Floyd incident [1]).
Besides: With virtualization and the various forms of infrastructure abstraction in combination with encryption-based security models, even a hypothetical scenario where all human life ceases to exist but all servers somehow survive on the bare metal layer would probably fail to preserve our digitual cultural artefacts.
Hard disks owned by private individuals with a "digital hoarder" mindset would probably make for a more useful archaeological find than servers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Germans
See Fawlty Towers episode 6.
He's such an idiot
https://screenrant.com/original-office-show-ricky-gervais-cancel-culture/
> "Now [The Office] would suffer because people would take things literally...This was a show about everything — it was about difference, it was about sex, race, all the things that people fear to even be discussed or talked about now, in case they say the wrong thing and they are cancelled...I think if this was put out now, some people have lost their sense of irony and context."
> “…They’re even more scared now because people don’t take an explanation for an answer, they just say, ‘Well, I don’t want to see it, so let’s ban it.’”
Obviously the Office isn't in the limelight anywhere near as much as it used to be, but I never hear people having a problem with its tone or style of comedy. A few other sitcoms have had scenes removed from streaming platforms / boxsets (Peep Show, Fawlty Towers etc). But the Office I've never really seen mentioned in a similar way. In fact it's still pretty much beloved by everyone and regularly polls amongst the best British sitcoms of all time.
Argh. My dream is that one day people will understand that a really large chunk (probably the vast majority) of piss-ripping found in humour isn't actually racist or misogynistic but is actually the complete opposite in making a statement about the stupidity of the protagonists' racism or misogyny.
Fawlty Towers 6th episode "The Germans" is a classic case in point. The entire premise of the episode was not "Germans are stupid" but "the idiot who is xenophobic who is being horrible to Germans is stupid". I don't know anyone - least of all any Germans - who are in the slightest bit offended by this. It's one example, but it happens time and time again. Literally the only people actually being offended are - who...?
Anyway. Sigh.
Counter point: British television shows are too short!
My two all time favorite TV shows are Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones. Each consist of two 6 episode seasons. I really wish there were more. (though honestly, they did exactly what they set out to do, mic dropped, and the rest is history)
Yeah, agree with the general sentiment of the post, but I think it does not go nearly far enough.
The TV Series rating link: call me old or highbrow but I really thought Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" should be in the top 10. Nope, not even in the top 146.
The U.S. "The Office" makes the top 146 (#13) but not the U.K. version.
Fawlty Towers? Nowhere.
Etc.
Me trouble and strife caught me seeing https://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/
Which substitution was used in an episode of Fawlty Towers, though I lack time to find the reference.
EDIT:
> Cleese told The Age newspaper: “If you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of, you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them. The major was an old fossil left over from decades before. We were not supporting his views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that – if people are too stupid to see that – what can one say?”
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/12/john-cleese-attacks-stupid-removal-of-fawlty-towers-episode
The URL given doesn’t seem to be working (404 error). The correct URL seems to be: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/11/fawlty-towers-dont-mention-the-war-episode-removed-from-uktv
Update: The new URL states the episode is being reinstated: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jun/12/john-cleese-attacks-stupid-removal-of-fawlty-towers-episode
Eh, not sure it's all art. Some mediums (like hollywood blockbuster movies and video games) lend themselves to more of a team effort than a solo artist one, and there are classics in those mediums/artforms too.
There are also quite a few British TV shows made by duos and small teams rather than a single creator, including some of the best in the medium. Like Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army and Monty Python's Flying Circus.
”as many takes as necessary to get it right”
That’s also what gave us Fawlty Towers (sitcom, 2 series of 6 episodes, each of which took weeks to write) and Fred Astaire looking an even better dancer than he was (edit: just came across https://youtube.com/watch?v=lfyXPONE7Ws, showing two versions of the same Fred Astaire scene side by side (I can’t find info on how much time there is between the shots, but Wikipedia says ”Long after the photography […] was completed […] the entire sequence was reshot.”, so it likely was days, if not weeks))
That's a great point. I have no idea why I also didn't mention Fawlty Towers, possibly the greatest sitcom ever made.
A lot of classic British TV shows from the 70s and 80s hold up really well today. After all, Fawlty Towers was a 1975 and 1979 series, with other greats from the era including Dad's Army (1968-1977) and Steptoe and Son (1968-1972). Blackadder and Only Fools and Horses were good in the next decade as well, and that's only counting some of the comedy ones.
As for whether TV now is better or worse... well, probably the same to be honest. Sturgeon's Law reigns supreme where any fiction is concerned, so every generation will have about 90% utterly forgettable crap and 10% amazing classics. The crap just gets filtered out over time as people choose to preserve the stuff that truly matters.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NostalgiaFilter
Either way, there's really not any one era where 'no TV shows' or 'all TV shows' hold up well.
This is the new film by Adam Curtis, the maker of The Century of the Self and other great documentaries. Worth a watch. It was just shown on the BBC TV and http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation here , and ought to be available to those with BBC Worldwide subscriptions.
Note: I hope it's available in other ways, so that others can buy this this public service institution is rewarded more so it can make more such things in the future. (ie, if you torent it, please find a way to contribute back, like buying old DVDs of Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, Ab Fab, etc)
And of course, there are outliers. Stanley Kubrick did both insane amounts of planning _and_ an insane number of shots. Eyes Wide Shut, at 2 hours, 39 minutes, took 400 days of filming (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia). I guess that gets you over the 100:1 ratio.
On the sitcom front, there is Fawlty Towers, where they six spent weeks writing and up to 25 hours of editing on each _episode_ (http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-towers/)
As a Dutch guy brought up with BBC and other British humor (and dystopia but that is another story) I saw the movie when I was 10 or around that and found it very not funny. Humor has a lot to do with taste and I guess I am not a big fan of US humor (exceptions aside) and I think it is because of my British humor upbringing: I wonder if that is the other way around? For instance my Dutch friends who grew up like me with Fawlty towers, Monty Python and Blakes' 7 (not a comedy but brilliant) hate Friends but love Seinfeld and the ones who only got Dutch and German and after that American humor love Friends and hate Seinfeld. No idea if this is just my sample group or if it is far more random than this.
Edit: remembered a few popular ones from my childhood: space balls and porky (forgot the complete name) which my friends in the above 2nd category liked and which made me scratch my brain out of boredom.
"But I think in the end, American audiences want to see the good in people, especially the main characters."
I used to work in TV series development. One of the ongoing legends in the TV development business is how every American TV exec loves Fawlty Towers, and even though everyone's tried to adapt it for American TV, none of their attempts has been successful. The reason being that American audiences need the protagonist to be "likable," and making the John Cleese character "likable" totally saps the comedic power of the show.
I suspect there's more to it than that. Fawlty Towers plays to some decidedly more British cultural issues surrounding class and social climbing. Also, it's really freaking hard to find someone who can fill Cleese's shoes. Nevertheless, the likability issue is a big one.
Interestingly, I was introduced to Hugh Laurie by way of Blackadder.
When I wan in high school our local public television satiation (WILL) would run episodes of several 1970s and 80s british sitcoms. Among them were Blackadder, Are you being Served? and Fawlty Towers.
There's decades of good TV to watch. You don't need the newest stuff. Who only reads books that came out last week? If you've never watched The Prisoner or Fawlty Towers, for instance, you can get access to them cheaply and watch a TV episode every day for about a month. And it'll be better than almost everything you could get with a TV subscription today.
Fawlty Towers ended after only 12 episodes because John Cleese basically wanted every episode to be 100% awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawlty_Towers#Episode_guide (see the last para in that section)
This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his PC). He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his PC). He listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his PC repeatedly rebooted itself.
Methinks its humor, not a real attack on Apple products.
No. I realized TV was what I would now call a "time sink" (didn't have a word for it then) when I was about 15, and stopped watching it. I've never owned a TV. I do sometimes watch old TV episodes on DVD though. I especially recommend Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Saint.