As with so many sitcoms, the premise is simple, stable, and rooted in everyday life (reputedly being based on the proprietor of a genuine Torquay hotel in which Cleese and the Monty Python team stayed while shooting location footage). Basil Fawlty (Cleese) and his wife, Sybil (Prunella Scales), run the down-at-heel seaside hotel of the title, hampered by a lovingly drawn cast of believable characters embellished in varying degrees from comic stereotypes. Yet Fawlty Towers stands out from the commonplace through its intensity of pace and exceptional characterization and performance, with the result that otherwise simple narratives are propelled, through the pandemonium generated by Basil and Sybil's prickly relationship, to absurd conclusions. 

Cleese plays Basil as a man whose uneasy charm and resigned awkwardness scarcely contain his inner turmoil. An inveterate snob, Basil is trapped between his dread of Sybil's wrath and his contempt for the most of the hotel's guests-the "riffraff" whose petty demands seem to interfere with its smooth running. In Sybil, Prunella Scales created a character who is the equal of Basil in plausible idiosyncrasy-more practical than him but entirely unsympathetic to his feelings, a gossiping, overdressed put-down expert who can neverthe­less be the soul of tact when dealing with guests.

     Fawlty Towers turns on their relationship-an uneasy truce of withering looks and acidic banter born of her continual impatience at his incompetence and pomposity. For Basil, Sybil is '"a rancorous coiffured old sow," while she calls him "an aging brilliantine stick insect." With Basil capable of being pitched into wild panic or manic petulance at the slightest difficulty, the potential is always present for the most explosive disorder.

     Powerless against Sybil, Basil vents his frustrations on Manuel (Andrew Sachs), the ever-hopeful Spanish waiter, whom he bullies relentlessly and with exaggerated cruelty. Manuel's few words of English and obsessive literalism ("I know nothing") draw on the comic stereotype of the "funny foreigner" but reverses it to make him the focus of audience sympathy, especially in later episodes. When the final show reveals Manuel's devotion to his pet hamster (actually a rat!), it is gratifying to find it named "Basil."

     Connie Booth, co-writer of the series and Cleese's wife at the time, completed the principal characters as Polly, a beacon of relative calm in the unbalanced world of Fawlty Towers. As a student helping out in the hotel, her role is often to dispense sympathy, ameliorating the worst of Basil's excesses or Manuel's misunderstandings.

     Such was Cleese's reputation, however, that even the smaller roles could be cast from the top drawer of British comedy actors. Among these were Bernard Cribbins, Ken Campbell, and, most notably of all, Joan Sanderson, whose performance as the irascible and deaf Mrs. Richards remains her most memorable in a long and successful career.

     Beyond the tangled power relations of its principal characters. a large part of the comic appeal of Fawlty Towers lay in its combination of the familiar sitcom structure with escalating riffs of Pythonesque excess. The opening of each episode (with hackneyed theme tune, stock shots, and inexplicably rearranged name­ board) and the satisfying circularity of their plotting shared with the audience a "knowingness" about the norms of sitcoms. Yet it was this haven of predictable composition that gave license to otherwise grotesque or outlandish displays that challenged the bounds of acceptability in domestic comedy. Basil thrashing his stalled car with a tree branch, concealing the corpse of a dead guest, or breaking into Hitlerian goose-stepping before a party of Germans were incidents outside the traditional capacity of the form, which could have been disastrous in lesser hands.

     The British practice of making sitcoms in short series gave Cleese and Booth the luxury of painstaking attention to script and structure, which was reflected in the show's consistent high quality. An interval of nearly four years separated the two series of Fawlty Towers, and some episodes took four months and as many as ten drafts to complete. Perhaps as a result, the preoccupations of the series reflected those of the authors themselves. Basil's character is a study in the suppression of anger, a subject later explored in Cleese's popular psychology books. This, together with an acute concern with class, contributes to the peculiarly English flavor of the series and may have had its roots in his boyhood. A long-standing fascination with communication problems seems to have been the motivation for the creation of Manuel and is character­istic of much of the interaction in the show (as well as being the title of the episode involving Mrs. Richards). 

     Fawlty Towers has been shown repeatedly throughout the world. In the I977-78 season alone, it was sold to 45 stations in 17 countries, becoming the BBC's best-selling program overseas for the year, although the treatment of Manuel caused great offense at the 1979 Montreux Light Entertainment Festival, where Fawlty Towers was a notorious flop. More recently, however, it has successfully been dubbed into Spanish, with Manuel refashioned as an Italian, and in 2001, with references to Hitler tactfully changed, the show was remade with a German cast-a project that involved Cleese as a consultant. In Britain Fawlty Towers has almost attained the status of a national treasure, and Basil's rages and many of his more outlandish out­ bursts ("He's from Barcelona"; "Whatever you do, don't mention the war"; "My wife will explain") have passed into common currency.