Yes. Not needed for John Cleese's comedy called Fawlty Tower. Ooops I don't hate this one. Its killer laughs every time I see it.
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Fawlty Towers
Main article:
Fawlty Towers
Cleese achieved greater prominence in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager
Basil Fawlty in
Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with his wife
Connie Booth. The series won three
BAFTA awards when produced, and in 2000 it topped the
British Film Institute's list of the
100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 poll conducted by
Channel 4 Basil Fawlty was ranked second (behind
Homer Simpson) on their list of the
100 Greatest TV Characters.
[46][47] The series also featured
Prunella Scales as Basil's acerbic wife
Sybil,
Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter
Manuel, and Booth as waitress
Polly, the series' voice of sanity. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person,
Donald Sinclair, whom he had encountered in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in
Torquay while filming inserts for their television series.
[48] Reportedly, Cleese was inspired by Sinclair's mantra, "I could run this hotel just fine if it weren't for the guests." He later described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met," although Sinclair's widow has said her husband was totally misrepresented in the series. During the Pythons' stay, Sinclair allegedly threw Idle's briefcase out of the hotel "in case it contained a bomb," complained about Gilliam's "American" table manners, and threw a bus timetable at another guest after he dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.
[48][49]
The first series was screened from 19 September 1975 on
BBC 2, initially to poor reviews,
[50] but gained momentum when repeated on
BBC 1 the following year. Despite this, a second series did not air until 1979, by which time Cleese's marriage to Booth had ended, but they revived their collaboration for the second series.
Fawlty Towers consisted of two seasons, each of only six episodes; Cleese and Booth both maintain that this was to avoid compromising the quality of the series. The popularity of
Fawlty Towers has endured, and in addition to featuring high in greatest-ever television show polls it is often rebroadcast.
[51] In a 2002 poll, Basil's "
don't mention the war" comment (said to the waitress Polly about the German guests) was ranked the second funniest line in television.
[35]
