Review: "Fawlty Towers" Remastered

Are you tired of unemployment, recession, inflation, Ayatollahs and malaise?

Don't lose heart, something good from the 1970s has turned up at last.

Fawlty Towers - The Complete Collection Remastered has just been released by BBC Video, as if to offer sunny encouragement that it's mathematically impossible for a decade to be a total loss.

The new DVD release includes new interviews with the cast, exclusive commentary by John Cleese and separate commentaries by the series' directors, and all twelve episodes.

Just twelve episodes. If you've seen Fawlty Towers, it is hard to believe that all those gags, all those bits, all those fall-on-the-floor, pound-on-the-carpet funny sequences could be contained in only twelve half-hour episodes.

"The average BBC sitcom is 65 pages," John Cleese tells viewers at the start of the third episode. "We used to do 135 pages. The average sitcom had 200 different cuts, camera cuts. This has 400."

Fawlty Towers stars John Cleese as Basil Fawlty, the outrageously rude, guest-detesting owner of a small country hotel in England, which he runs with his terrorizing wife Sybil and a staff of two.

Connie Booth plays Polly, an art student working as a waitress (actually the show's co-writer playing the role of 'straight man'), Andrew Sachs is Manuel, the Spanish-speaking waiter from Barcelona (actually one of the funniest physical comedians ever to work in front of a camera), and Prunella Scales is Sybil Fawlty (so funny and razor sharp as the shrewish wife that if Oliver Hardy could have cast her, Mae Busch would have been doing dinner theater in Stockton.)

Each episode is a perfectly constructed, hilariously funny, brilliantly performed farce. They don't make 'em like that any more, but then, they didn't make 'em like that before. Fawlty Towers might be the funniest television show ever made.

But wait, there's more.

There's an extra audio track on every episode with John Cleese's commentary, and it is a graduate-level class in comedy writing and performance. No, it's better than that. It's the authentic voice of a comic genius explaining, joke by joke, scene by scene, why the comedy works, why it's funny, and what the actors are doing that is making the written material even funnier. Often he points out things he would have done differently, explaining how and why it would have made the scene better.

Some examples, from the pilot/premiere episode, "A Touch of Class":

"What is absolutely key to Andrew's performance [as the bungling Spanish-speaking waiter, Manuel] is he's always trying his best. If he was in any way sullen or uncooperative it wouldn't be anything like as funny, but it's his sheer eagerness that makes all the incompetence funny."

"Now, I have a slight criticism of this scene, which is there's so much plot set-up in it. Latterly I think Connie and I got better at setting up plot because, you see, if you set up plot in such a way that there's not much humor in it, the audience almost at an unconscious level registers the fact that it is 'plot,' and also at an unconscious level perhaps they kind of think ahead and a part of their mind is beginning to see how the story might pan out. So what Connie and I normally did was to try to hide the plot points in humor. Here the plot points and the set-ups are made a little bit seriously, it's as though one, sort of, the comedy backs off for a bit while we sort of set up what's going to happen, and I think we did the subsequent episodes better when we were setting up the plot."

"It's very tricky how rude he [Basil] is, sometimes--you have to be very careful about being rude, rudeness can be funny, but it's usually funnier if it's not direct."

"Notice that the--that line, 'Go away,' is much funnier said very calmly and politely. If I'd shouted it, it wouldn't have been funny."

"Watch this next bit of business, this doesn't work. I back against that thing with my leg and you don't see that I've bumped into it and that I take it as an assault and threaten it, and that's because I didn't focus the attention of the audience on the fact that I was bumping into it. They miss it, so the thing appears to be unmotivated. In fact, it was just wrongly indicated."

And from the episode, "The Builders":

"You see, little lines like that -- 'Oh, all right' -- I love, because in the context, they're very funny, and yet on the paper, of course, they don't look humorous at all. One of the great problems in presenting scripts to film and television executives is that they never see that lines like that have got a comic potential."

"Almost all the comedy in Fawlty Towers, almost all of it, is based in Basil's fear of Sybil. If he wasn't so--what's the word--terrified--so utterly, utterly full of fear of her, then he would never behave so strangely or indeed so badly, and that's [why] when people send me scripts with sort of, attempts, to write Fawlty Towers in it, and make Basil very rude, they always miss out the fact that the rudeness and the insanity is always coming out of this extraordinary fear."

"Now, that's so over the top and so ridiculous but this period, this period in the next few seconds where they're screaming at each other and he's going completely hysterical, it is, I think, funny, but it's only funny because it's motivated by this absolute terror of Sybil."

From the same episode, here's John Cleese on the secrets of physical comedy:

"One of the things about physical comedy, and I mentioned just now that some of the slapping was good but there was one slap that Connie didn't hit me hard enough and another that I overreacted to, what I like about this bit now, is that when I grab Manuel, I really, really grab him and bang him. And Manuel and I had done enough farce to know, it's a little bit like playing football, you are going to get banged if you do this kind of comedy -- now that is really good. And then the way he reacts, I mean, that's hysterical, then he goes down there and I thump him with my knee, that's really good."

"Now that's good, because she really throws that. But there's one problem about dear, dear Pru [Prunella Scales]... and that is, she's just too damned nice. She is so kind and concerned about everyone--and what you'll notice is that when she's being mean and nasty physically she doesn't go at it in the way that Andrew and I do, because Andrew and I know you're going to take a few knocks and expect to bang yourself and hurt yourself a little bit, but you see, she wouldn't kick me properly so we had to shoot it like this [framed from the knees up] so that we could mime it all."

"She hit me well there, that's a good hit."

"Now, you see, the umbrella, in case you think it's a funny shape, it's because it's been padded. And Pru did not hit him hard enough because she's too damned nice. She should have really clocked him. It's like in A Fish Called Wanda when Kevin is to hit me with the bedpan. And he just wouldn't hit me hard enough. We had to--in the end we had to go back and do a final take after we'd actually decided to print the previous one, and the first assistant said to me, 'He's still not hitting you hard enough.' You've absolutely got to go for it in physical comedy. You cannot hold back because it immediately signals to the audience that you're holding back a little bit, and that reminds them that it's not real."

For six hours, John Cleese teaches the techniques he has mastered in the four decades since Monty Python's Flying Circus broke the mold.

It is like watching Rembrandt explain his secrets.

And he's giving this away as a DVD extra.

He should open a university and charge $20,000 a year tuition for it.

Quick, go and buy the DVD before he reads this and figures it out.


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Fawlty Towers - The Complete Collection Remastered
Written by John Cleese and Connie Booth
Directed by John Howard Davies (Series One, 1975)
Directed by Bob Spiers (Series Two, 1979)
Starring John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and Connie Booth
Number of discs: 3
Feature Length: 347 mins approx
List Price: $49.98
Available from BBCAmericaShop.com
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More for fans:
Fawlty Towers on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fawltytowersDVD
Fawlty Towers on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fawltytowersDVD
Lookalike Contest: http://tr.im/fawltycontest
John Cleese on tour, November 2009: Ticketmaster

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