I was always fascinated by comedy,
and it's very strange when I look back on it.
I can actually remember being ill in...
bed when I was 12,
using a school exercise book to write a...
a script for two radio comics
whom I used to listen to at that time.
And when I was at Clifton,
we used to have this little blue book
with all the information in it.
Every time I heard a good joke, I used to write it, you know,
on the white bits that didn't have print on it.
So it was something odd going on,
and when I watched comedy--
I used to watch an enormous number
of American sitcoms in the mid '50s,
you know, like George Burns and Gracie Allen,
Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Amos 'n Andy, Joan Davis--
a lot of them were American-- the majority.
I realize, in retrospect, that it was almost as though I was--
almost as though I was studying them,
or trying to understand what was going on in some way.
I was obsessional about "The Goon Show."
And when I was at Clifton, I did a couple of...
entertainments.
That is to say, I did kinds of sketches.
So there was something going on.
But the whole point was, if you came from Weston-Super-Mare,
you didn't go into show business;
you became an accountant,
or a lawyer, or possibly sold insurance.
I mean, there were no other possibilities.
So although I'd done some entertainments at school,
and I'd done sketches in front of audiences--
and quite enjoyed it, although I was terribly scared
in terms of stage fright--
I got to Cambridge,
and I got into the Footlights completely by accident,
but found I could make people laugh.
But I had no intention still of going into show business,
because in those days, '62, '63--
people from Cambridge didn't think of doing it.
Within three years,
all the people who went to Cambridge
were practically planning to go into show business
if they had those kind of talents.
And what happened was, I did the...
the Footlights show,
which was a kind of, like in America,
the Hasty Pudding show at Harvard--
a review show lasting two hours.
And I did that in '62,
and I thought it was terribly good-- which it wasn't--
but I thought it was terribly good.
So in '63 I very nearly didn't do the show,
especially since I hadn't done much work that year,
and I thought I might fail the exams.
But I did it in the end.
And to my surprise, one day,
after I got offstage and went up
to the Footlights club room to have a drink,
there were two very nice men in dark suits
who said, "How would you like to come and work
for the BBC as a writer and a producer?"
Because they'd noticed that I had written the material.
Interesting. Not the performance side,
but the writing side.
And I said, "Well, um, why not?" And I thought about it--
I could sell it to my parents because it was the BBC,
so there was a pension plan,
you know, it was like joining the civil service.
And...
from a money point of view,
they were offering me £30 a week,
and if I'd gone into the law,
which was what I was studying at Cambridge,
I'd have got £12 a week.
And I wasn't very attached to the law,
so I kind of-- I was out of there.
Once I finished with Python,
all I knew, oddly enough,
was that I wanted to do something with Connie Booth.
We were married at the time.
And I didn't know what, but I went and talked to Jimmy Gilbert,
who was the head of light entertainment,
and I said, "I'd like to do something with Connie."
and he said, "Fine, go, you know, come back with an idea."
And I went back, and I said to Connie,
they'd like us to do a pilot, what should we do?
And we spent about 20 minutes deciding
we couldn't do the sort of Mike Nichols-Elaine May stuff,
'cause that'd been done, and also very well done,
by the two Johns and Eleanor Bron.
And then I said, "What about that hotel we'd stayed in?"
Because when Connie'd been occasionally doing parts
in "Fawlty Towers," she'd come down to Torquay,
and she had stayed at this amazing hotel
run by Mr. Sinclair,
and it was called the Gleneagles Hotel.
He was the rudest man I've ever met.
He was wonderful.
And all the other Pythons wouldn't put up with it.
They moved out and went to stay in the Imperial,
which was a lot better.
And he was so extraordinarily rude,
I mean, one day, we were all at dinner,
and Terry Gilliam was eating as Americans do,
that is to say, they cut the meat like this,
and then they cut it all up,
and then they put the knife there,
pick the fork up in the right hand,
and spear the meat.
And he was walking by, and he looked down at Terry
and this look of astonishment crossed his face, and he said,
"We don't eat like that in this country," he said.
And on another occasion Eric Idle left his briefcase
by the front door, in the morning,
because we'd had to wait for the cab and he forgot it.
And then, in the evening, he got back, he said,
"I left my briefcase."
Mr. Sinclair said, "Yes, it's the far side of the wall."
Eric looked out of the main entrance where he was pointing,
and there was the swimming pool, on the far side
of the swimming pool, there was a wall.
And he said, "You mean the other side of the wall?"
"What?" he said. Eric said, "Well, why do you think--
why did you put it there?"
And Sinclair said...
"We thought it might be a bomb."
and Eric was astounded, 'cause this was pre '69,
pre the resumption of the IRA bombing,
and Eric said, "Well, why a bomb?"
and Mr. Sinclair said,
"Well, we've had some staff problems recently."
so he thought somebody
was coming back to blow up his hotel.
So this extraordinary man
was very, very big in my memory and Connie's.
And within a very short time,
we'd figured out
that that was where we wanted to set the hotel.
But the interesting thing is, nobody thought
it was a good idea.
All the expert advice we got was,
"It's going to be very claustrophobic in the hotel, you know.
You must try and get outside."
And when we wrote the first script,
there's a famous memo,
which the current head of light entertainment
has on the wall of his office,
saying that, "This is a very boring situation,
the script has nothing but very cliché characters,
and I cannot see anything but a disaster
if we go ahead with it."
And that's on the wall.
And a great friend of mine, Iain Johnstone,
who helped me write "Fierce Creatures,"
heard three producers at the bar say,
"Oh dear, have you seen this new script Cleese has done?"
"Oh, it's terrible, why'd he ever leave Monty Python?"
So it's kind of fascinating that when you try and do something new,
as William Goldman, the screenwriter, says,
"Nobody knows.
Nobody ever knows whether it's going to work or not."
I love the first series of "Fawlty Towers."
It was one of the most exciting times of my life,
because it was as though someone had opened the gate...
to a field of flowers that no one had picked before.
And you were able to gambol through the gate,
and there were flowers everywhere.
We'd entered a new territory.
It was though almost everything we thought of,
for about a year, seemed or felt original.
There was no immediate, positive critical reaction.
I think the Daily Mirror said,
"Long John Short on Jokes,"
after the second episode.
And one of the Edinburgh papers
said it was very poor.
Then, there was a sort of...
a rumble of fairly positive reaction towards the end.
And then the second,
when they repeated it for the second time,
that's when suddenly it started to take off.
But my experience has always been
that if you do something that is original,
it takes a little time
for any kind of momentum to build up.
And, in fact, that's a terrible problem--
In fact, that's a terrible problem these days with movies,
because if you don't score in that first week,
there's another movie coming in, and they take you out.
So there's no time for a movie to sit in a cinema anymore
and get an audience.
And that means that original stuff is--
it's at a disadvantage. 'Cause I once said to a marketing man,
"What's the hardest type of movie to sell?"
and he said, "Anything original."
Connie and I had no idea that it was going to have
the impact that it did. I mean, I'd always assumed
it might pick up half the Python audience.
And of course, the Python audience was not that huge;
it was rather smart,
because it was very much a comedy of ideas.
But "Fawlty Towers" was much more a comedy of emotion,
and more people were able to plug into it.
So, as far as I remember,
we got quite substantially bigger--
audience figures than Python.
But we had no idea. We were just writing
this little thing
that we thought was funny.
And when you hear, years later,
that it is liked all over the world,
there's a kind of puzzlement about why it travelled.
And I guess
the reason it travels, is that the characters
are in some way archetypes.
They're the types who crop up in all the different cultures.
But I have to say, there's a slightly different reaction
in this country from what there is in other countries.
In this country,
a certain number of people
assume that I must be Basil.
They do not see that this is kind of a performance.
They forget that Connie wrote it with me.
They kind of think that I wrote it, and I just wrote myself,
and I performed myself.
This doesn't happen in other countries.
In America, for example, people accept that it was a bit
of writing and performing, like any other performance.
And I think it's because I caught something
about the British character,
that was so essential to a certain kind
of lower middle class
conglomeration of attitudes,
that it struck home,
and caused me to be identified with this wretched character,
this awful man, ever since.
I've always had a tremendous love for farce.
And I think it's because
what I like to do, more than anything else,
is to really laugh.
You don't do it so much as you get older,
but in your teenage years there are some times
when you just laugh,
and you laugh so much that it hurts.
And you wish that you could stop laughing.
Wonderful feeling.
You don't get that so much as you get older,
although you get it a little bit, on stage.
Like, as a kid, you get it in church,
because it's kind of forbidden,
and that gives it an extra sweetness.
Similarly, on stage, if somebody breaks you up,
that business about trying not to laugh,
that gives it a certain sweetness.
And it can become almost convulsive again.
There was...
an extraordinary...
emotional reaction we used to have
when we used to think of things that would happen to Basil.
Because in a sense, we were like gods,
playing with this man's life.
And sometimes, when we would think
of what would happen next,
we would howl with laughter,
and then we would think,
"Oh, poor man."
You know?
Because as somebody pointed out years ago,
comedy is very like tragedy.
It's just a question of whether you're sympathetic
to the people who are suffering,
or whether you're standing back a bit,
and laughing at them.
Henri Bergson said, "Comedy requires
a momentary anaesthesia of the heart."
you have to be a little bit cool
towards the people that you're watching,
even if there's a fundamental affection,
before you can laugh at them.
Otherwise all you do is,
"Oh poor man! Oh, terrible!"
But we had that double reaction.
We laughed first,
and then we would feel sorry for him.
Great comedy is always about things
happening on different levels,
because people say that comedy is about conflict.
And people often think that that means character "A"
has got to be head to head with character "B."
But the interesting conflicts
are within people.
When something has happened which is absolutely terrible
but they're having to pretend that it's fine.
But if you see them just thinking it's terrible,
it's not funny.
It's the fact that they have to keep up the act.
So anytime that someone is doing something at one level
and something almost contradictory,
in conflict with it, is happening at another level,
it's funny.
But the thing about farce is...
The thing about farce is, that everything is happening
in an exaggerated way.
That although you may start it quite low key,
quite real,
it kind of winds up,
and people get more and more frantic.
They may be trying to keep the frantic feelings in,
and present some sort of calm façade,
to someone they have to impress,
but you know that inside, they're like this--
and what I love is the intensity of the emotion,
because with that,
comes more frantic behaviour, more energy,
and the possibility of huge laughs.
I mean the best--
I think the best evenings of my life
have almost all been spent at the National Theatre,
when they do farces, like the Feydeau farces.
So, what a lot of people haven't spotted
is that "Fawlty Towers" is just little 30-minute farces
that start very, very low key,
and finish up absolutely frantic.
I thought it was wonderful when I heard "Fawlty Towers"
was being used as a training film.
I think by the Hyatt chain,
and one other chain, in London.
But it didn't really surprise me,
because, you see, we started "Fawlty Towers"--
the first series is '75--
and Tony Jay, Peter Robinson, and Michael Peacock and I
started Video Arts in '72,
so I'd already done quite a number of videos
about customer relations, selling across the counter,
selling services.
And I had a pretty good idea by that time
of how you really were supposed to treat customers,
so it was very simple doing the opposite with Basil.
And a lot of the time,
it was absolutely as simple as that.
You knew what the rule was, and you broke it.
And sometimes, you find that things happen in hotels
that are so wonderfully funny and creative,
that you could never have thought of them.
My favourite one is--
you know when you arrive in a hotel,
you have this utter... what's the word?
delusion that the room is in some way yours.
Whereas, in fact, the hotel is full of people
who want to get into the room.
They want to restock the minibar,
they want to pull the curtains,
they want to turn down your bed,
they want to do-- so you have to remember,
it's not your room.
You have to put up the "do not disturb" sign
just to get any peace at all.
And on one occasion, I had about three interruptions,
and I finally put up the "do not disturb" sign,
and five minutes later,
as I was lying on the bed doing a crossword--
I don't believe this.
So I go to the door, and I open the door,
and there's a young man, bellhop, standing outside,
pointing at the "do not disturb" notice,
saying, "Is this supposed to be out here?"
You couldn't, you know, you couldn't make that up.
And a time I stayed in the Randolph hotel in Oxford,
and I'd had a very, very good dinner at Merton College,
superb dinner, got in rather late,
went off to sleep, with a late alarm call,
and at 5:45--
"Hello?" They said, "Mr. Cleese, your alarm call."
and I said, "No, no. It may well be somebody else's.
It is not mine, mine is 8:30, thank you."
And you're just in that lovely dropping off--
You pick it up, and they say,
"Just to apologize for waking you up."
You know, there's some things you could never invent.
At the beginning, I wrote most of Basil
and most of Manuel.
Connie wrote most of Sybil and most of Polly,
and I found it very interesting,
'cause I'd sometimes suggest lines for Sybil,
and she'd say "No, no, a woman would never say that."
And I'd think--
but gradually, she started to write more of Basil,
and I started to write more of Sybil.
And then we just kind of--
cooperated, more and more,
on all the characters.
Then, the one the two of us loved the most
was the Major.
We love this guy who was in his own world.
He never quite understood what was going on,
but always added his own insane interpretation of it.
And Ballard Berkeley, he's no longer with us;
I was hugely fond of him.
He was a wonderful fellow.
And having had a very distinguished career,
it was lovely that right towards the end of it,
he had this huge hit.
But he was like me-- he was an insane cricket fan.
When I'd be in the rehearsal room,
playing a scene with Sybil,
I'd glance over Sybil's shoulder,
and I'd suddenly see Ballard doing this--
which meant that there were six Australian wickets down.
And he was-- I just loved that man.
And then the old ladies were absolutely terrific.
It was a very happy group, because everybody was very...
pleased with what they had to do.
Nobody was trying to build their part up.
Everyone was happy, so that was good.
And then each week, you'd have some guests in.
Getting Connie's character right
was not too difficult,
because...
she is the sensible one.
But she's also Basil's confidant.
When he gets in terrible trouble, he will go to Polly,
and say, this has happened,
and this is what I have to achieve.
It's terribly useful as a writing device,
to have someone--
somebody once described her as Horatio to Hamlet.
It's wonderful to have someone
that the protagonist can go to and say,
"This is what I've just done,
and this is what I'm going to do next,"
if there's any doubt about what's happening in the plot.
She, in the pilot episode,
was a philosophy student.
We didn't feel that worked as well as art student.
So we re-recorded just a little,
maybe four or five minutes,
and cut that into the first episode,
before it was transmitted to the general public.
Sybil, I think, is much, much stronger
and more independent than Basil.
She could really function perfectly well
if Basil buzzed off or fell under a bus.
I don't think Basil could.
I think he's very-- he's much more dependent on Sybil,
and that's why he's much more frightened of her
than she is of him.
"My little nest of vipers," I always liked that.
It was funny; you never really minded
the things that Basil said to Sybil
because she was never hurt by them.
You see, if she'd been hurt by them, then it wouldn't have worked.
There's a certain degree of discomfort
that people can tolerate in comedy,
but they don't want to see anybody in real pain,
at least, not in this kind of comedy.
Probably not in any kind of comedy.
So, it was water off a duck's back.
She just didn't give a damn.
So, although the insults were funny,
they were fundamentally ineffectual.
That's why we could get away with them.
I think that Pru began to develop her laugh--
and I think that she and I
talked about it a bit at one point.
Because, I remember it was--
No, deeper than that--
and I described it in one script
as somebody machine gunning a seal,
which was a very good description.
I think that was something, again, we worked on.
That was the delight of going into the shows.
After we'd done one or two,
we were able to borrow
from what the actors and actresses
were beginning to create.
We were beginning to incorporate that in the script.
Connie and I had a different conception--
I can't remember now,
through the mists of time, what it was,
but we had a different conception of the character
from the way Pru played it at the first read-through.
And I remember going home and saying to Connie,
"What do you think about the way Pru's playing it?"
And her saying, "Well, it's not what we thought of."
We were a bit worried, then after about two days,
we actually saw that what she was doing was better,
and worked better,
than the way we thought it would be played.
And...
So that helped us,
because when we came to write the second episode,
and the rest of them,
we began to have her voice in our ear,
which we didn't have when we wrote the first one.
I'd seen Andrew in a marvellous play
by John Mortimer called "Habeas Corpus."
He had just made me laugh till I hurt.
And I realized how good he was
at physical comedy.
So I got him,
and he just--
this just touched something in him,
because he's so quiet.
He's immensely thoughtful,
an extraordinarily kind man, very considerate,
and rather quiet,
almost introverted.
And then you put that moustache on him,
and he goes--
and this energy explodes,
something just comes through,
that you don't normally see.
One of the points I was trying to make with Manuel
was not that Manuel was some kind of an idiot,
that wasn't it at all.
What annoyed me when I went into a lot of...
British hotels and restaurants,
particularly one particular chain of steakhouses,
is that almost nobody there
spoke any English at all,
so the chances of you getting what you ordered
were about one in six.
And I knew what that was about.
That was not about the fact that foreigners were stupid.
it was about the fact that the owners were not prepared to pay proper salaries,
so they got people who were desperate for any kind of work.
They did not bother to train them.
They did not bother to make sure
that they could speak English properly.
And that was the fundamental joke
about Basil and Manuel,
Because Manuel is one of the sweetest people--
he's always trying to get it right.
There's no way you can blame him, except,
that his English is not quite as good as it might be.
And that's Basil's fault 'cause Basil doesn't pay
to give him extra English lessons, as he should.
We saw Basil as...
someone who was tremendously class conscious,
who was always trying to become a little bit grand,
who adopted attitudes of superiority over people
that were really quite unjustified,
and someone who was fundamentally terrified of his wife.
If you look at the episodes, they're almost all...
fuelled...
by the fact that he is trying to hide something from Sybil.
It's always struck me--
I don't know if the British newspapers carry this out,
but people who aren't getting enough sex
are fascinated by it.
Even if the fascination takes the form
of being very, very cross,
'cause other people are getting some.
And that's obviously Basil's problem.
I mean, I'm not quite sure
when he and Sybil last did it,
but it's a very, very long time ago.
Somewhere around the Second Punic War, I suspect.
The essence of that
was all about how disapproving he is,
and how he tries to catch them at it.
I enjoy very much the degree of...
how he gets worked up--
you know when people say, "I'm not a prude, but--"
which always means, "I am a prude, and--"
it was an exploration of all that stuff.
The episode in the first series--
it's about Basil's dislike
of any kind of sexual behaviour at all.
There's some very, very good lines at the beginning
about how people dress.
Sybil says Basil's idea
of a sexy attractive man
is Earl Haig.
And she points out that he did, actually,
wear his decorations, which is quite interesting,
'cause it's all right, in the army,
to have all these brightly coloured things on you,
which is an interesting thought.
But the key to all that
is Basil's utter embarrassment
about any kind of talk about emotion.
And all his assumptions
about what psychotherapy is good--
in the British press, still, you constantly see
analysis and psychotherapy
attacked for what it isn't.
It's very strange.
I suppose it's very hard for some people
who haven't been through it to understand what the process is.
And maybe I've been lucky
with the therapists that I've had,
because there are bad therapists,
the same way there are bad plumbers and bad doctors.
Because you had a bad doctor doesn't mean, necessarily,
all orthodox medicine is rubbish.
The same way, if you've had a bad therapist,
as I think Faye Weldon felt that her ex-husband had,
it doesn't mean that all therapists
and all psychotherapy is useless.
But it makes people anxious because people on the whole,
do not want to look at themselves.
The first lesson in life, there's a small group of people
who do want to look at themselves,
but most people are pretty uncomfortable about it.
The presence of those two psychiatrists,
brings out all Basil's fears,
that somebody might actually start looking
into what's going on inside him.
You really see
what an awful man Basil is,
because he has no interest
in other human beings,
as human beings, at all.
They're either objects of derision and scorn,
or an opportunity to improve his position
in the social hierarchy.
In this particular case, it's the professional hierarchy--
you know, can he get a good recommendation for his hotel?
And I love the idea
that by having different people arriving,
and him never quite knowing
which one of them was the inspector or not,
he would switch from one way of addressing them,
to another and back again,
without any kind of consistency.
So that you could see really what a bastard he was.
I mean, that's the thing about Basil,
he's an absolutely awful human being.
But the strange thing about comedy is
that if an awful character makes people laugh--
think of W.C. Fields--
people feel affectionate towards him. It's insane.
Because if they had to sit next to him,
for five minutes at a dinner,
they would absolutely not be able to cope with him.
They would loathe him.
But because he makes them laugh,
they think, deep down, he's all right, and he isn't.
When my friends and I started, on the whole,
we had a slightly low opinion of catch phrases.
Because there used to be
certain BBC radio comedy shows
that consisted entirely
of catch phrases.
You know, you'd hear the door open,
and someone would come in and say,
"I won't take my coat off, I'm not stopping."
and they'd be--
And it would go on for about four minutes.
When the laugh faded, another door would open,
and someone would come in and say,
"I don't like cauliflower, I prefer the peas."
So we got very fed up with it.
It seemed to us, it was nothing to do with comedy at all.
It was some kind of... in-joke that people enjoyed
simply because they felt part of the in crowd.
It was nothing to do with humour at all.
But what happens, of course,
is that, of course,
dear Manuel says "qué?" a lot,
'cause he has no idea what's going on.
It was never intended to be a catch phrase.
What else would he say? Do you see what I mean?
But sometimes I think we realized
that "I am from Barcelona" kind of got funnier
with repetition.
But there was almost no intention
of creating catch phrases.
Oddly enough, the lines that I remember
are very frequently not the ones
that other people remember.
There's a line in the Whizzo chocolate factory sketch,
about crunchy frogs,
there's a line when Inspector Praline says,
"Where's the pleasure in that?"
And that's a phrase
that I often want to say to people.
When they talk about the fact they've been mountaineering for four weeks,
I always want to say, "Where's the pleasure in that?"
and there's another one which is in the pet shop sketch,
the dead parrot, when I say,
"I see, I see. I get the picture."
and I sometimes think of that.
"I see, I get the picture."
But these are not the phrases that other people pick up.
And sometimes I discover that something's become a catch phrase,
and I didn't even know it.
I think the great secret
is that the scripts were very good.
And they were very good, I think, for two reasons.
One is, for a start, there was an awful lot in them.
the average BBC half hour, 65 pages.
"Fawlty Towers," we used to do 135 to 140 pages.
We literally did twice as many.
Camera cuts-- average show's got 200,
we used to have 400 camera cuts.
So there was an enormous amount in them.
The other thing is, they were very well constructed.
What Connie discovered worked for us,
was that we never started to write the dialogue,
until we got the plot worked out.
So we would spend, sometimes,
as much as two and a half weeks on a plot--
Not always the same one,
'cause if we got stuck, we'd sometimes put it to one side
and pick up another one that we were halfway through
and try and run with that--
But we never really bothered to write the dialogue,
as I said, until we really got the story worked out
in considerable detail.
You always have to change it a bit,
'cause you can never visualize it all
when you've just got the story line there,
and you'll find that one scene you'd imagined
doesn't work because Basil comes into it
in a different frame of mind,
or in a different mood from what you need.
You're always having to change-- re-jig it a bit.
But that was the key--
We never started until we had the story,
so we always knew where we were going.
Some people try to write comedy by starting
"Scene One" and they start writing the dialogue.
Well, the chances of them getting
to a satisfactory ending
are one in 100.
You've gotta kind of know where you're going
while you're building the thing.
One of the characteristics of those episodes
is that there's always one...
key idea.
But what we often tried to do,
Along with that key idea,
Was to have one or two other subplots,
Other threads running.
They would run parallel for a time.
And then, hopefully, they would become intertwined.
By the end, the last five minutes,
They would all come together.
That's what we managed to do in the best of the episodes.
But the most useful thing we used to do
Was to ask people for ideas--
People who were in the business.
For example, Connie and I were on holiday,
In Monte Carlo for two weeks,
And we met a very nice woman
Who was just sort of helping us with the hotel,
And we had coffee with her.
We said to her,
"what's the most difficult kind of guest that you have?"
And she described Mrs. Richards
Absolutely perfectly,
And we wrote it all down.
The fact that they always complained about everything,
But they don't want it changed, they just want a reduction;
And this business of "strategic deafness,"
Hearing what they want to hear.
She just gave us a character portrait.
Another time I said to a great friend of mine,
Called Andrew Leeman, who was a restaurateur,
I said, uh... "What was the worst problem you had
When you used to work at the Savoy Hotel?"
And he said, "Oh, the stiffs."
I said, "What?"
He said, "Oh, getting rid of the stiffs."
I said, "Well, you mean people...
died a lot?"
And he said, "Oh, a lot, the old dears.
I'm afraid they know
the Savoy will always treat them really well
and do these things,
so they would sometimes check in with a bottle of pills,
take them in the night. In the morning,
the Savoy staff would walk in, pick up the phone,
and say, "We've got another one."
And then the problem was getting--
getting the stiffs into the service elevator,
without alarming the other guests.
Well, once you've been given that--
that as an idea, I mean, it's kind of--
It's just wonderful.
Then you put a doctor in the hotel,
it's a kind of a joy.
Some of those worked out very well.
it's interesting because sometimes--
we had a wonderful ending for the dead body one,
and we couldn't use it.
The guy who died
and who gets put in the baskets and all that stuff--
We thought it would be terribly funny
if we'd establish, without Basil knowing,
that he had a twin brother.
So after Basil had finally got him in the basket,
the twin brother would walk in
and come up to the desk,
and Basil would abuse him.
This mindless practical joke.
And we couldn't do it
because there was no way
of Basil
telling the twin--
that his brother was dead.
You couldn't do that in a comedy show,
you see what I mean?
So it was a great shame.
It would have been too difficult,
mixing that kind of emotion.
Timing is all important.
The hardest thing is to get it well enough rehearsed.
Now, five days was never really enough--
plus the day in the studio-- to get it right.
And what happened was that we did anything
between 20 and 25 hours editing on each show.
Almost every minute you see up on the screen,
we spent one hour editing.
And it was only by doing that,
that you could just tighten it up,
just tighten it there,
and take out a line of dialogue there;
sometimes take out a repetition there,
then lose two lines of dialogue there;
that's what really got the pace on it.
And there wasn't time
to get it that good,
in terms of just the rehearsal period,
and the studio recording.
It felt to me,
very much like a team.
Because, in the first series, John Howard-Davies,
second series, Bobby Spiers,
and Pru,
and Andrew and Connie and I,
listened to each other a great deal.
And people-- you know, if I was doing a scene,
with... let's say... with Sybil, with Pru,
then Connie and Andrew would just sit there,
watching, and after a time,
they might-- Andrew might say,
"What about that?" or "That isn't quite working."
But because Connie and I had written,
and then rewritten the script,
there wasn't an enormous amount
of script rewriting.
They were more or less right most of the time.
But how we did them,
was very much a cooperative thing,
with lots of suggestions coming in.
I just did an American show, "Third rock from the sun,"
and it was lovely.
It was just like "Fawlty Towers" again,
with about six key people giving ideas.
And nobody bothering whether their idea was accepted or not.
It was just that sense of making it as good as possible.
All the BBC shows, at that time,
were always recorded with a live audience.
It was kind of understood
that you didn't use
any kind of sweetening.
You didn't use any kind of canned laughter.
We did sometimes.
And I'll tell you what we did--
Occasionally you would have something on film,
and the audience would, of course,
have to watch that on the monitors.
That would cut back to the studio,
and the audience would still be watching the monitors,
and they would fail to see
that we were supposed to be back in the studio.
And sometimes you would find
that there would be a complete silence after a joke,
'cause the audience is looking in the wrong place.
Or they're still looking in the studio,
when they should be looking at the monitor.
Then we used to take one of our own laughs,
off the soundtrack and put it in that place--
If it needed it.
I said to the actors, very early on--
I had a theory about this--
I said, "We're not gonna play this
at the pace of the studio audience."
I said, "We don't have to."
In the theatre, you have to go at the pace of the audience,
because they can't hear you otherwise.
You have to wait for that laughter to curve,
you know, the laughter curve to come down.
Then you start speaking again.
But, in television,
you have this wonderful thing called a microphone that's there,
and if you talk into the mike,
while the audience is still laughing,
then the wonderful thing is, the people at home can hear it,
so you can keep the pace up,
and when the people are watching at home,
there's only one or two of them.
It's not like being in the audience in a theatre.
So they don't laugh as much.
What you have to do is play it faster
when people are at home in ones and twos,
than you ever would if you were doing it
in front of a full audience.
So we deliberately ignored the studio audience,
and tried to play it faster
than was right for the studio audience,
in order to get the sufficiently rapid pace
for the people at home.
The second show that we did,
which was about the builders,
was performed almost entirely to complete silence.
and it was not a very comfortable experience.
Afterwards I was a bit disturbed.
People said, "No, no, it was a funny show."
Actually, I think it's the least good of the 12 shows.
They said, "No, it was fine, it was funny."
I said, "Well, what about the audience?"
They said, "We don't know." We found out later,
that a large number of people
from the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation
had visited the BBC that day--
The BBC were always helpful to shows like mine--
thought, wouldn't it be nice if we put all 70 of them
in the front row?
And they sat there, being very pleasant
and charming and Icelandic,
and not laughing at all.
Just this faint whiff of cod coming from the front row,
which, had we recognized, might have given us
the explanation.
I've got to say, it was a pretty tough recording.
And it needed quite a lot of editing to tighten it up.
"Fawlty Towers" took a little time to get started.
It didn't pick up
a very big audience, the first series.
It's suddenly, on the repeats.
You got the impression something was happening.
Some kind of groundswell of approval was happening.
The critics...
began to quite like it,
towards the end of the first series.
And after that, on the whole,
the criticisms were very good.
But Connie and I found doing the second series
probably as difficult as anything we'd done.
Because the hardest thing in this business
is to deal with unreal expectations.
The problem with "Fierce Creatures"
was not "Fierce Creatures."
The problem with "Fierce Creatures" was "A Fish Called Wanda."
People thought not only that it was going to be
as funny-- which is unlikely,
because at the time, it was arguably
as successful as any British film ever made,
so lightning was not likely to strike
in the same place twice--
But there was also a feeling
it would be in the same style,
and because it was not in the same style,
people couldn't see what style it was in.
The problem we have with the second series
of "Fawlty Towers" is that the expectation
was unreasonably high.
I realized that people were already remembering
the first series as better than it was.
Because if there's three or four things
in the first series, that are really funny,
the audience remembers that
as the kind of general standard,
rather than the highlights.
Then they expect the second series
to be at the highlight level all the way through.
So it was a huge effort
to get those scripts
as good as I think they finally were--
about six weeks each.
If you think about farce,
because of the high level of energy,
the kind of mania involved,
people have to get very wound up.
It's easier to do that
in the context of subjects that make people
particularly anxious,
which usually means taboo.
So if you look at a lot of "Fawlty Towers" episodes,
you'll find that one's about dead bodies;
one's about rats,
which people are like that about;
one's about a woman who pretends that she's deaf;
it's a little bit dodgy here and there,
there's a lot of taboo in there.
Anybody in comedy knows
that if you get into taboo areas,
if it's done right,
two thing happen, which are both good.
One is that you are exploring something
that is a little unfamiliar
and a little dangerous and a little exciting,
and therefore, a little bit interesting.
And secondly, it arouses a degree of anxiety,
which means that people laugh more.
I mean, the basis of sexual jokes,
99% of which are not the slightest bit funny,
is that they harness people's anxiety
and embarrassment about sex,
so that they get big laughs. As I say, very few of them,
I think, are actually funny.
In the whole 12 episodes,
there are only two jokes the BBC ever objected to.
I think Bill Cotton was worried about two.
One had already been cut.
And the other one I was very unsure about.
I think it was a reference...
to one of the concentration camps.
Just when Basil was getting very confused,
the word popped up.
I was not very sure about it myself.
When Bill said, "Can you-- I'm worried about that."
I just cut it.
But we didn't have any pressure.
And the P.C. Lobby,
the politically correct lobby is something I don't understand.
A lot of what I see on television now,
both here and in America, seems to me much riskier
than we would have gotten away with,
even in the Python days.
And then at the same time,
you hear about these politically correct movements
which I think are by and large,
run and staffed largely by obsessions.
There's a good idea at the back
of political correctness,
but it gets taken ad absurdum.
And I think that the danger is this:
If you're in a group of people,
and you find that one person
is particularly touchy,
they have difficulty controlling their emotions,
greater difficulty than the other people in the group,
then you can't have so much fun about them,
because they're touchy, and they're likely to explode.
So when they're around, you're not as relaxed.
You're not as spontaneous, you can't be more real.
You have to kind of be more formal.
If you find that society
is being run by the touchiest members,
then, in a sense, that's a bit sick.
Because you're trying to take, as the general standard,
the standard of the people who have the greatest problem
controlling their emotions in that area.
In that Anniversary program,
Basil is actually thinking of someone else,
for a short period of time,
before the panic overtakes him.
You do get the impression
that there is something positive,
underneath all the other stuff,
between him and Sybil.
Connie and I particularly liked that episode,
because we felt we were beginning to explore character
a little bit more, it was a little less farcical.
I remember we thought it was a little bit more in the area
of Allan Ayckbourn, whom we both adored.
We liked that episode a lot.
And the great joy of it was,
we had much longer to rehearse it than we normally did.
Because we got about five days into rehearsal,
and a splendid thing happened.
A BBC executive got into an argument
with a rigger--
someone who puts the lights up,
and eventually punched him.
and the unions went on strike,
and we couldn't record the program on the ordinary day.
It was postponed. They settled the strike
and everything was put off a week.
And Julian Holloway
was unable to do the second week,
'cause he had another commitment,
and we brought in dear Ken Campbell,
whom I've always adored. He's such a marvellous--
strange, funny man.
So he was the only one who was new.
We had all this time to rehearse it.
It was really, really good,
because everyone was able to get familiar with the show,
and then bring little things to it.
I think it's one of the very best episodes.
I watched "Basil The Rat" last Sunday
as part of a sort of fundraising thing,
and I was very, very pleased with it.
There's a particular scene at the end,
when he and Manuel
are talking to a young couple
and they're really not taking in anything the young couple is saying.
They're just trying to see where the rat is,
and I thought it was extraordinarily funny.
Yet I couldn't explain quite why I found it so funny.
And I love the denouement,
the way that we finally get--
Polly presenting the box of biscuits
and there's the little rat looking cute at the inspector.
And Basil actually says,
"Would you care for rat?"
'Cause what else do you say there?
And the actor-- damn, I forgot his name, he's so good--
who just looks at the rat,
and absolutely doesn't believe it.
He knows it's not there, although he can see it.
And he plays that so well.
And then right at the end you see Basil
being dragged out.
I'm very, very fond of that episode,
because, again, there's quite a lot in it.
There's some very good lines early on.
I love when Manuel, of course,
thinks that it's "A filigree Siberian hamster."
and Basil persuades him it's a rat.
He says, "Don't you have rats in Spain,
or did Franco have them all shot?"
That's one of my favourite lines.
When we started writing "The Kipper and the Corpse,"
we started with the idea of getting rid of a dead body,
and I was fascinated by the idea of trying
to get Basil very happy about the fact
someone had died.
We came up with the idea
that he thought he'd poisoned him,
and when he discovered he hadn't poisoned him,
he'd be really happy and then the doctor could walk in
when he was ranting, "I'm so happy, I'm so happy!"
Again, utter ruthless selfishness.
No thought for this guy or his family at all.
It was just-- is he on the hook or is he off the hook?
As I say, he's a terrible man.
The thing about the beating the car sequence,
is how technical it is.
It took a very long time to find a branch that was right.
We tried beating it with a fairly rigid branch,
and it wasn't funny at all.
We tried beating it with a floppy branch,
and that didn't work.
Then we finally got a branch that had the right degree of flexibility,
and it became terribly funny.
And it showed that no matter how good an idea is,
there's always an enormous amount
of getting it right technically--
which nobody knows, unless they actually do it.
People always talk about it in the abstract,
as though any branch would've been funny.
Similarly, when he's cursing the car,
it is much funnier that that sound
is kind of contained,
as though it's coming from inside a sort of goldfish bowl,
than if you heard it at full volume
from inside the car.
And often you don't know why these things are the case,
you just have to stumble around,
trying things until you discover what works.
The key to Basil is the snobbery,
and therefore, we thought that in the first episode,
someone who was pretending to be a lord and who wasn't,
would take advantage of Basil
in a particularly endearing way.
And Michael Gwynn, who did the part,
was not only excellent, he was very funny.
He told me about a hotel or lodging house he used to stay with.
And they had so many signs up.
You know, switch the light off
and do this and don't do that.
And no things allowed here.
He realized that if you followed
all the signs,
if you carried out all the commands
issued by the signs,
they wouldn't need any staff in the hotel at all.
I always remember him saying that,
it was a wonderful insight.
But that was a very experimental episode,
I remember I was very pleased
with the way that it had gone.
Connie was... very happy
with the overall show,
But wasn't very happy about a couple of the little bits
with her as the philosopher.
I said don't worry, we can redo those,
the main thing is we basically got the show right.
And one or two of my closest friends
who know my work well,
were very pleased with it and encouraged me a lot.
So I felt that we were all right.
We were onto something good.
So many people have said to me,
are you going to do any more "Fawlty Towers"?
And you're up against an expectat--
I could not win.
If I had to go back now,
I think I probably would not do "Fierce Creatures."
You're up against an expectation
that absolutely cannot be matched.
And the thing is, do something different.
I like working with the same team again and again,
because if you have a good team, why break it up?
But the fact is, the same team
brings the same expectation.
Also trying to make "Fawlty Towers" work
at 90 minutes, would be very difficult.
Because, as I said earlier,
you can build it like that-- for 30 minutes,
but if you're in a movie,
then there has to be a trough and then another peak,
it doesn't interest--
I had an idea for a plot,
I love the idea of Basil being finally invited to Spain
to meet Manuel's family,
and getting to Heathrow,
then spending about 14 hours there,
waiting for the flight.
Then finally getting on the flight,
being furious,
and then... a terrorist...
pulls a gun...
and tries to hijack the plane,
and Basil is so angry, he overcomes the terrorist.
When the pilot says...
"We have to fly back to Heathrow,"
Basil says, "No--
fly us to Spain, or I'll shoot you."
Arrives in Spain, immediately arrested.
Spends the entire holiday in a Spanish jail,
is released in time to go back on the plane with Sybil.
But, it's funny, isn't it?
But...
I don't...
I don't want to do it.