Blair Loveday
Fawlty Towers is an absolute icon of British comedy for so many reasons.
John Cleese at his best, classic comedy moments generously scattered throughout, and the limitation of two short seasons meaning it never overstayed its welcome or thinned the quality out.
That’s why nearly 50 years later, I was keen as hell to check it out again. And I loved every second of it.
If you haven’t watched this incredible series, it follows Basil and Sybil Fawlty as they try to run their small hotel.
Basil is a bit of a snob and wants to belong to the higher class, but has to have lower class people staying in his hotel. This results in him swooning over the odd rich or fancy person that comes through, while being annoyed and inconvenienced by the general guests that come through.
Sybil on the other hand is a much more reasonable person who wants to keep the business running and keeps trying to get Basil to pull his thumb out and complete tasks. This dynamic, well it doesn’t seem like there is a great married life there, but it makes for some incredible comedy. Fortunately they have help in the way of Polly who keeps a lot of the actual tasks occurring, and their bag-boy / waiter Manuel. Manuel is a Spanish immigrant who speaks very limited english.
So much of the best lines come through Basil either being a complete ass, or Manuel struggling to understand his requests in English. One of my favourite moments is in the first episode where Basil is saying he put too much butter on the trays. As Basil points at the three trays saying “On Those Trays” Manuel corrects him “Uno, dos, tres”. For this joke to land you have to have the exact right level of physical comedy and clever writing, and even on, god knows how many times, watching it, I still absolutely love this joke.
As far as the remastering of this goes, don’t expect this to look like it was filmed this year. The aspect ratio and the video quality is still very ropey. But to be fair, it was filmed for TV 50 years ago, so I doubt they had a lot of widescreen film available to remaster the content from. Having said that, it’s a 50 year old show that looks solid, and much more importantly the comedy stands up so incredibly well.
There is a third disc with special features, plenty of which are additional content we have seen on other DVD’s. The gems are the interesting interviews including more recently filmed ones adding some fantastic insight into how this iconic show came to exist.
If you are a fan of Fawlty Towers or British comedy in general, this is a DVD collection you need on your shelf. It is physical comedy and clever writing at its absolute best, that alongside shows like Blackadder and Monty Python remind us that some early British comedy is just timeless.
