On Wednesday I went along to the Fawlty Towers: Re-opened press launch, which saw G.O.L.D. introduce its new 30th anniversary shows to the world’s media. It was exciting. The aforementioned first show is on this Sunday (10 May, 9pm) and sees the cast and crew (including Connie Booth, in her first onscreen interview for three decades) reminisce about Fawlty Tower’s history and their favourite moments from the two series. Stephen Fry narrates. I’ve already posted up interviews with Andrew Sachs and Prunella Scales, but here’s what John Cleese had to say about it all. Your bona fide ledge he may be, but he can sure talk for England… you’re in for a long, but interesting read. The most interesting comments? Fawlty Towers almost never made it off the ground, he thinks modern comedy isn’t as good as your old comedy, and he loves Only Fools And Horses and Last Of The Summer Wine.
Related: TV Scoop interview: Andrew Sachs
First off, I must mention the absolute caning he gave the G.O.L.D. channel person. After this chap had rightly espoused the channel’s happiness in securing the cast for such a programme and delivering the corporate line that the channel aims to make people laugh every day blah blah, Cleese got up and apologised for the all the marketing and corporate tosh. Marketing, he said, was organised lying but conceded, tongue in cheek, that Fawlty Towers was the best thing ever and that G.O.L.D., or whatever the channel was called, was the best channel in the cosmos.
I’m sure he was mucking about, but it was quite a start to a press launch.
While some clips of the show were played to the throng (the clips looked good), I watched Cleese for a while. It’s not often I’m in the presence of greatness, so I took the opportunity to, erm, stare at him for a while. What I found was really nice was that he laughed at all the clips of Basil doing silly things, and with his friends (like Michael Palin) as they said funny things. Fawlty Towers still obviously has a special place in his heart.
TV Scoop: Is it true that the BBC really originally thought that the concept for Fawlty Towers was dire?
JC: There is a famous note that I have a copy of, in fact it’s framed. What happened was that when Connie and I wrote that first episode and sent it into Jimmy Gilbert, who was an old friend. Jimmy produced the Frost Reports I did with Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. He went from being senior producer to the head of light entertainment, and he took me out in about 1974 to lunch in west London. He asked what I’d like to do and I told him I’d like to write a series with Connie, but we hadn’t really talked about it seriously. He told me to go away, have a think and when I was ready give him a call and he would commission whatever I came up with. That was the way things were done in those days. It was so different then. When we were doing Monty Python we didn’t know what the viewing figure was and we didn’t care. That’s astounding. We cared about the AI (Appreciation Index), which showed whether a small audience liked it or not. That’s what we cared about, whether some people adored it. But we didn’t have to worry about viewing figures. So Jimmy said to me just give him a call, and I went back to Connie and asked her what were we going to do. We thought for a time that we would do something about like John Bird and John Fortune, but then one of us thought about doing something on the hotel we once stayed at. Connie and Lyn Idle had come down and they did little bits of filming for Monty Python. So she had stayed at the hotel with me all the way through this. When we wrote the pilot and sent it to him he told us it was kind of interesting, but the fellow whose job it was to assess all the writing said, and I can quote this fairly accurately, this is full of clichéd situations, stereotypical characters and I cannot see this as anything other than an absolute disaster. Jimmy himself said: “You’re going to have to get rid of the hotel.” But of course, it’s in the hotel where the whole pressure cooker situation built up. Ian Johnstone, the guy I wrote Fierce Creatures with, said that he heard four BBC producers at the bar saying, “Have you seen this new script from Cleese? How embarrassing. He gave up Monty Python to do that? Why on earth did he do that?” You do realise, as you get older that almost nobody knows what they’re talking about. They really don’t. My greatest friend in New York is Bill Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy and All The President’s Men, and he wrote a book called Adventures In The Screen Trade. His motto is: nobody knows. That’s why you get very philosophical about people who don’t like things. As you know, there wasn’t a single American studio that would give us $2million to make Life of Brian. If it wasn’t for George Harrison that film wouldn’t have been made, and it wasn’t even a lot of money. When I wrote A Fish Called Wander, every US studio bar MGM passed on it. They said it was too British. So what happens is that there are very, very few people who know what they’re talking about.
TVS: Was there a danger that it wouldn’t have been recommissioned after the first series?
JC: If it hadn’t worked I wouldn’t have expected to be recommissioned and I wouldn’t have wanted to be. After we did the first episode, Connie was philosophy student instead of an art student. When we did the second show we changed Connie’s character to an art student and we shot some extra scenes, which we then cut those scenes back into the pilot. If you look at that very first one it is much cruder. But after the first series? The initial response was kind of puzzlement. I remember the Daily Mirror printed the headline: Long John short on jokes. It kind of began to get very liked by the time they repeated it, because it was a bit different. In the reviews for Python in the early days, almost nobody said it was any good. They didn’t know whether it was good. It was too strange. My recollection is that Alan Coren wrote a piece, either at the end of the first series or after they repeated, saying that he like it and all of a sudden people started to like it.
TVS: In the face of that negativity, how did you keep yourself going and believing?
JC: It wasn’t that negative, it was just that there was a complete lack of enthusiasm. And I’m afraid we just loved making each other laugh. My happiest moment is still reading out the cheese shop sketch and Michael falling off his chair. That for me is perfection… to make Michael Palin fall off his chair. We just thought we were going to make each other laugh and either there would be enough people to support that or there weren’t. When we were doing the Frost Report with that wonderful gang, it was a great writing team and a pleasure to be there. All the writers would fall about and Jimmy Gilbert would say, “It’s very funny, but they will never get it in Bradford.” That was his key phrase. What we discovered was that when we did Python and then Fawlty Towers is that there were enough people who got it in Bradford. Monty Python never had a huge audience, but it had a nice, medium-sized audience that were terribly enthusiastic. That was probably because that there were references in there that were a bit recherché for a core audience. When we did Fawlty Towers the figures were better because it could be understood.
TVS: Do you think there’s anything on television at the moment that is as good as Fawlty Towers?
JC: The problem is I don’t watch TV anymore. I’ve almost stopped watching television and that’s because I’m so guilty at not having read enough, if I’m not having dinner with friends I tend to read or watch sport. Now and again I see something. I saw The Office and I thought it was really good. I’ve only seen three of them but I liked them. Saw one of Extras. Excellent. But I tend not to watch things all the way through, and that includes my own stuff. When I did the commentaries last year for Fawlty Towers, I hadn’t seen one of the episodes for 20 years.
TVS: Did ever feel regret at only doing 12 episodes?
JC: No, no. Connie and I thought that we had both done our best and neither of us wanted to. We just knew if that if we did any more it would be good but not very good. You see I made a mistake with Fierce Creatures, which does have some very funny stuff in. But it was up against the reputation of A Fish Called Wanda and it just couldn’t reach it. There’s this real problem if you have a big success, there’s so much hype these days that even if you do something it doesn’t live up to it. Someone once said to me… someone who was in an ITV sitcom at the time when Monty Python started. He said: “I like Monty Python, but you’re trying too hard. You put too many jokes in. You should hold a few back and use the other half next week. You’re in this to earn a lot of money over a long period of time, so don’t try too hard!” That is not an unintelligent approach if you’re doing it to make a lot of money.
TVS: Is there any truth to the fact that you pitched the idea of Manuel In Barcelona?
JC: I speculated about it once, but it never really got to the point of even putting a word down. I thought what would be really funny was that Basil and Sybil get on a plane to visit Manuel. The set-up might be he would have his own place in Barcelona or something. I thought Basil would be terribly funny if the plane was hijacked. See what I mean? He would become so furious and overcome the hijackers, and become a total hero. And then of course they would have to bring the plane back to Heathrow, which would make him even more angry. He would then hijack the plane himself and get the pilot to fly the plane to Spain, get arrested on arrival and spend the whole time in a Spanish prison. It kind of amused me, but I don’t think I ever mentioned it to Connie.
TVS: Do you think that’s a fault of programmes today, the fact that they seem to run and run and run?
JC: Yeah. I think it’s fault, but I understand. I’ve always tried to be as funny as I possibly can. That was always my aim. There were many people who tried to do much cleverer types of humour that was more amusing and not so funny. So when you come to some of series that I love, like Only Fools And Horses and Last Of The Summer Wine, I think you watch them not because they’re trying to be as funny as they can but because you fall in love with the characters and enjoy their company. They’re not pushing the limits of comedy but there’s a feeling of affection.
TVS: Is there the same talent out there today?
JC: I think the talent is there, but I don’t think the writing work as hard as they used to and I think they lack experience. I also think that the writing isn’t as good as it used to be. Going back to television, I do proudly say that in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s we had the least bad television in the world. That’s quite a claim, but I don’t think it’s true any more. Now it’s run on the basis of money, and they don’t want to pay writers.
TVS: Is there a danger that Fawlty Towers is repeated too much?
JC: Oh yes. But don’t ask me whether it’s being repeated too much because I don’t watch it. When TV shows these things they don’t ring you up and tell them that it’s going to be repeated. It’s very strange, but when you make movies or television there’s very little information that’s given to you about what’s going on. And if I hear that Monty Python or Fawlty Towers is being repeated in American then it will be from someone on the street.
TVS: If someone bought the rights and tried to do it with a new cast, what your reaction be?
JC: Yeah… let them try it. The Americans tried it three times. The first time it was played much too slow. Also they were embarrassed about the edginess between Basil and Sybil. The most extraordinary one was the second one with Bea Arthur. I remember being at a house party and meeting with some people from Viacom, who told me that they were going to be doing Fawlty Towers. I said I thought it was great, with ears pricking up and cash registers going. The reason I’m not really rich is that originally Cheers was going to be set in a hotel, and they wrote the first episode and found but it was set in a bar. Otherwise I’d be getting royalties! Americans are familiar with all these huge chains of hotels, so I did wonder whether they would understand this small, family-run hotel. They told me they would change only one thing, and that they were going to write Basil out if it. That’s absolutely true; they took Basil’s line and Sybil’s lines and gave to Bea Arthur. Who would play me? I always thought that Peter Boyle, who is now longer with us, could play me.
TVS: There’s a story that the German episode hasn’t been repeated and that there’s a reluctance to show it again…
JC: I don’t think that’s true. What I can tell you is that the Germans have no problem with it at all. When we tried to do a German language version a few years ago, they got a terrific German cast together. But they decided it was too expensive. They started off by watching the Germans episode and they loved it because they do not identify with the Nazis, no more so than we identify with Nelson. It’s too long gone now. They can laugh at it.
TVS: It does have the ‘wogs and niggers’ line…
JC: Oh it’s got all that stuff. It all depends on how intelligent the audience is. If you’re doing all that to make fun of prejudice… but this the Alf Garnett thing. When Alf Garnett came on television there was a lot of people who said things like, “It’s refreshing to hear someone say these things finally.” No, no, no! There’s two ways of attacking something – one is a head-on critical attack, and the other is to espouse the particular attitude you want to make fun of and make fun of it.
TVS: Do you think episodes like that would get made today?
JC: No, I don’t think they would. We were so lucky to be working in television when were did – the 60s, 70s and 80s. It was wonderful because there wasn’t the fear. The moment people get anxious people tighten up and they start counting things. They want figures to tell them whether to do something or not. It’s only when people are allowed to trust their gut when you get interesting things happening.
TVS: Do you have favourite scene from Fawlty Towers?
JC: I love the line, when Basil is trying to explain to Andrew that it’s a rat and not a hamster: Don’t you have rats in Spain? Or did Franco have them all shot?
