Fawlty Towers: Encyclopedia II - Fawlty Towers - Background and inspiration

Fawlty Towers - Background and inspiration

Even before this programme existed, English seaside boarding houses and their proprietors had something of a reputation for firmness and intransigence, possibly stemming from the days when soldiers were billeted in small hotels during wartime or national service. Cleese had also parodied the contrast between organisational dogma and sensitive customer service in many personnel training videotapes issued with a serious purpose by his company Video Arts. Basil Fawlty's behaviour can often be taken to represent macho management at its worst.

Fawlty Towers was inspired by the Monty Python team's stay in the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay. Cleese and Booth stayed on at the hotel after filming for the Python show had finished. The owner, Mr. Donald Sinclair, was very rude, throwing a bus timetable at a guest who asked when the next bus to town would arrive and placing Eric Idle's suitcase behind a wall in the garden in case it contained a bomb (actually it contained a ticking alarm clock). He also criticised the American-born Terry Gilliam's table manners for being too American, and it is reasonable to assume that his treatment of Gilliam partially inspired Basil's treatment of an American visitor in the episode "Waldorf Salad".

For the outside taping, instead of an actual hotel, the Wooburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire was used. It served as a nightclub named "Basil's" for a short time after the series ended, until it was destroyed by fire.

Sinclair died in 1981, having emigrated to Canada in the 1970s where he was once tracked down by a British newspaper after Cleese named him in an interview. Mr Sinclair and his relatives have never been too happy about the way he has been portrayed, and his widow Betty is now campaigning to remove what she sees as a slur on her husband's reputation, but former staff and visitors have remembered actual events there that were allegedly as ludicrous as those depicted in the programmes. Also the children of Donald Sinclair confirm that it is an accurate rendition of their father.

At the beginning of nearly every episode the name of the hotel appears on a sign outside. The letters are rearranged each episode, as if by naughty children (an anagram, though with artistic license): Fatty Owls, Farty Towels, Flowery Twats, Watery Fowls, etc.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Background and inspiration", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki