It’s the late 1970s. Eleven million people are watching as Basil Fawlty collapses to the floor. We’re on the first-floor landing of the Torquay “Towers” bearing his name. The two metres of his stick-insect frame have slowly folded into an arched human ball. Then, arms clenched behind his head, he starts to hop, like a giant clothed toad. Four times he jumps, as two of his hotel guests watch on, before he rolls backwards in final mortification and the screen fades to black.
Of course, it’s taken a complex series of events to bring him down to this. Basil hasn’t only compared one of his guests to a monkey, told another how frequently he and his wife have sex and been discovered hiding inside a wardrobe. He’s also peeped (with the help of a ladder) through two of his guests’ windows, been locked out of his own room by his wife, and left a sooty handprint on an Australian girl’s breast. But it’s all been worth it because this is the delicious pay-off, the physical humiliation of our lead. That’s the purpose of the episode, and of any episode of Fawlty Towers: to see a very tall man reduced to the very small man inside.
Half a century since this collective ceremony began, we’ve never lost our taste for it. So much so that John Cleese, the actor and writer behind Fawlty’s degradation, has published Fawlty Towers: Fawlts & All – My Favourite Moments. Cleese is no stranger to commercial opportunism: his two previous stand-up tours were titled “The Alimony Tour” and “How to Finance Your Divorce”, and in 2023 he fronted a GB News show called The Dinosaur Hour. You can almost sense the regret that, cleaving roughly to the anniversary of the first series of Fawlty Towers airing in 1975, he couldn’t have launched this glossy almanac closer to Fathers’ Day or Christmas.
Nonetheless, in these several thousand words, which bear no strong trace of having been dictated, Cleese emerges as a committed and reflective practitioner-critic. There’s self-reproach (“As I performed it, he is a real asshole”), theoretical digression (“The philosopher Henri Bergson said that any laughter requires ‘a momentary anaesthesia of the heart’…”) and only the occasional swerve on to the rocky terrain of Cleese’s contemporary politics (“Unless you are an extreme woke believer…”). But why not: this is merely the latest and far from the most tawdry ornament in a Fawlty continuity empire that comprises everything from collected scripts and long-players to Fawlty Towers teapots. The scale of industry only serves to stress the power and longevity of Cleese’s invention.
Modern British comedy should thank Fawlty Towers the way poets thank spring: that’s where it all begins. Just look at its contemporaries: Till Death Do Us Part, George and Mildred, Are You Being Served? and something called It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – all moulder in the Britbox archive and the care-home VHS cupboard. And as older allusions stale in the thesaurus – who are Mr Pooter and Lord Fauntleroy anyway? – Basil Fawlty remains terrifically, terrifyingly alive.
“Everyone knows how a hotel is supposed to work,” Cleese has always said of the show’s setting, and the conceit of a Fawlty Towers episode is always the same: the hotel simply doesn’t work. But this is to underestimate the labour of the farce, what Clive James – channelling Blake, and, via Blake, God Himself – called the “fearful symmetry” of the scriptwriting. Basil makes a mistake; then the narrative cat’s cradle begins to tighten, every attempt he makes to conceal the mistake bringing closer the bind of the final knot: the imminent collapse of a hotel wall, the goose-step, the thrashing of an Austin 1100.
Plot is the beat that Fawlty Towers stomps to, played at a remorseless accelerando, but deeper energies are at play. As Cleese writes in Fawlts and All, in a hotel there’s “a backstage, and a front stage”, with complex rules of engagement governing both. The oldest form of English comedy involves the violation of manners, while the vitality of the genre depends on the long persistence of class hierarchies. Basil – a reactionary and a lickspittle and a snob – is hyper-conscious of these rules and the class system they protect (“Have you seen the people in room six? They’ve never even sat on chairs before”), and therefore hyper-fearful of breaching them. He will always follow the instructions of the farce if he thinks they will save him face, going to the most extraordinary lengths to preserve the dignity of his hotel from, among other threats, pre-marital sex, the scorn of Torquay high society, and the potential incursion of “riff-raff”.
Basil cannot comprehend the nature and currency of his profession. He always introduces himself as the “owner” rather than the “manager”, and the details of his pretensions are obsessive. At various points in the series, Basil wears the ties of the Old Wykehamists and of Balliol College, Oxford, raising the hilarious prospect of his having journeyed from Devon to Ede & Ravenscroft to buy a job-lot. But “service” had another meaning in the earlier part of Basil’s century. The truth is that for the duration of his guest’s stay, a good hotelier is a domestic lackey: valet, butler, footman, maid. It’s a demand that he, running his hotel on a principle of caveat emptor, cannot accept. As he rages to his assembled guests in an outburst of petit-bourgeois effrontery, lunging for a deeply conservative historiography of the Second World War in the process:
You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot – well, I’m trying to run a hotel here. Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not! You’re too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking about for things to complain about, aren’t you? Well, let me tell you something, this is exactly how Nazi Germany started: a lot of layabouts with nothing better to do than to cause trouble!
Basil then storms out of the hotel, and there’s a risk, you feel, that he might march right off the end of Torquay’s Princess Pier and sink raging into the sea. Of course, he comes back, and his pretensions of escape or ascent – a British empire coin collection, a tape recorder blasting Brahms – are phony. Basil is no intellectual. In the privacy of his bedroom, we see him reading Peter Benchley’s Jaws.
The film version had only just come out at the time, but the joke is still funny in 2025. And for its age, the hiccups of anachronism in Fawlty Towers are remarkably rare. In a notorious moment in “The Germans” episode – probably better known now than the episode’s Nazi jokes – the dippy veteran Major Gowen lapses into racial slurs. Foul language has its shock effects, but in this case the shock of offence is stronger than the gag. But the pace in a Fawlty Towers episode is so unrelenting that before you notice the kink, the rope has flown through your fingers. For its original viewers, the joke about the builder called Mr O’Reilly began with the name O’Reilly, and therefore with his nationality (Irish), his fee (cheap) and his standards (low). Now the joke simply begins when O’Reilly’s men accidentally seal off the dining room door. Later, but by no means never.
But Fawlty Towers offers more than mere throwbacks; there are authentic shivers of the 1970s, now buried deep in the British nervous system. Ted Heath once admitted to “a hidden wish, a frustrated desire to run a hotel”, and Fawlty Towers is run rather like Heath’s Britain. The lead headlines in the newspapers read by the characters are, on each occasion: “More strikes, dustmen, Post Office”, “Another car strike”, “Another car strike” and, in the final episode, read by a guest, “Strike, strike, strike – why do we bother, Fawlty?” It’s proof enough that the mediocrity and scrimshanking and decay of the time was no myth. The Longbridge British Leyland plant, which built Basil’s busted Austin, had become the Verdun of a vicious national industrial dispute. The prime minister, whom Basil curses as “bloody Wilson”, needed four brandies to get him through PMQs. At times, pages in Basil’s newspaper would have appeared blank, the columns scrubbed by a print union who regarded its content as politically hostile. Fawlty Towers permits Basil one full digression on economics:
Another car strike. Marvellous, isn’t it? The taxpayers pay them millions each year so they can go on strike. It’s called socialism. If they don’t like making cars, why don’t they get themselves another bloody job – designing cathedrals or composing violin concertos. That’s it! The British Leyland Concerto – in four movements, all of them slow, with a four-hour teabreak in between.
The final broadcast of Fawlty Towers was delayed by seven months due to industrial action at the BBC. And if the 1970s was when British national decline became real, no one felt it worse than Basil Fawlty. But, thanks to him, it’s when we also found a cure, or at least a palliative. Not Margaret Thatcher – though she does have a walk-on in Fawlty Towers in a hotel guest’s quip about a very short book called The Wit of Margaret Thatcher (this receives a mirthless response from Basil, three months out from his – surely – voting for her in the 1979 election). No: Fawlty Towers was the first sublimation of a once imperial power’s contraction into comedy.
The decade that broke British self-confidence was also the decade we chose to laugh rather than cry about the fact. Until the late 1960s, like a balding man combing forward his remaining locks, Britain could still imagine herself vestigially imperial. The sterling area was still intact and Qatar and Brunei still flew the Queen’s colours. Indeed, the British flag had, thanks to bands like the Who, become in its dotage the unlikely symbol of a global youth pop phenomenon. Americans were still finding out new things about England, encountering Liverpudlian accents for presumably the very first time. But something in the water changed as Wilsonism flowed into Heathism. These events were not simultaneous – I don’t think there was any snickering as the flag was lowered at Aden. And there had obviously been thwarted patriarchs before Fawlty. But now only Nigel Farage dares reference Alf Garnett, the proud bigot from Till Death Do Us Part, and even then only to describe rogue Reform activists. Fawlty raised the standards of masculine self-abasement to an art form, at exactly the moment that Britain became truly alive to its diminishment. The first of many – Victor Meldrew, Alan Partridge, David Brent – he’s the one we all remember.
This is the irony of our much-vaunted national sense of humour – perhaps the only claim of chauvinist exceptionalism that crosses all political boundaries. As the satirist John Bird once said, reflecting on the culture his work had helped create by the 1990s: “Everything is a branch of comedy now. Everybody is a comedian.” In a time of national humiliation, figurative humiliation is our soma. Now, we’re all rolling on the floor with Fawlty.
Fawlty Towers: Fawlts & All – My Favourite Moments
John Cleese
Headline, 224pp, £25
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop