Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All: A 50th Anniversary Celebration

Duck surprise. The car that wouldn’t start. The psychiatrists. Those builders...

Fifty years ago Fawlty Towers hit British TV screens for the first time, becoming an instant classic. Now for the first time John Cleese tells his stories from behind the scenes of his favourite moments. From writing scripts that were so carefully planned they were double the length of similar shows’, to casting, lighting, how the show was almost cancelled before it started, and other production shenanigans, these are your favourite moments from Fawlty Towers as you’ve never seen them before. Exploring the how and why of creating classic comedy, there is a laugh on every page, and a dose of nostalgia for vintage TV fans. With gorgeous commissioned illustration and archival imagery, the book revisits such iconic scenes as Basil thrashing his car, a rat appearing in a box of cheese biscuits, and Basil goose-stepping across the dining room to an audience of horrified guests.

Written by and starring Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth, the first series of Fawlty Towers aired in 1975, with a second series broadcast in 1979. It featured Cleese as the irascible hotel manager Basil Fawlty, Prunella Scales as his sybaritic wife Sybil, Andrew Sachs as the hapless waiter Manuel, and Booth as Polly, an efficient waitress and art student. It won three BAFTAS and, despite having only 12 episodes in total, continues to be regularly voted the best sit-com in British history.

John Cleese was born and brought up in Weston-super-Mare. However, he recovered enough to win a place to study science at Cambridge. After sampling the conversation in the Chemistry laboratories, he switched to Law. The success of the 1963 Cambridge Footlights Revue, which played in the West End and on Broadway, saved him from a legal career. He co-founded the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe, writing and performing in the TV series and in films including Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In the 1970s Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, co-wrote and starred in the now-classic sitcom Fawlty Towers, which won three BAFTAs. Cleese co-wrote and starred in the 1988 smash hit A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won a BAFTA award for acting. He went on to appear in many other films, from James Bond to Harry Potter, and guest-starred in numerous TV shows, including Cheers and Will and Grace. He wrote his first autobiography So Anyway, which was published in 2014 and has sold 600,000 copies worldwide. In 2020, he also penned Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide. In his twilight years he passes his time writing film scripts, making speeches to business audiences, doing seminars on creativity and teaching at Cornell University.