Still the greatest of them all – because it’s who we really are

Some of the important events of 1975: Margaret Thatcher is elected leader of the Conservative party, a referendum is held on UK membership of the European community, Bill Gates establishes Microsoft, and the first episode of Fawlty Towers is broadcast. Fifty years on, we’re still being shaped and reflected, more or less, by all of those things, especially Fawlty Towers. Fawlty Towers is us.

The first episode, in case you need reminding, is the one about the bricks in the briefcase and the lord who turns out not to be a lord and it’s exactly 50 years ago this week since it was first shown which is a perfect opportunity, which I do not intend to resist, of celebrating the greatest sitcom of all time. No, don’t argue. Frasier. Dad’s Army. Steptoe. Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard people make the case for all of them as the greatest, and they’re wrong. Objectively, statistically, scientifically wrong. It’s Fawlty Towers.

There are some people (some people under 30) who may feel uncomfortable about this idea, or the idea of Fawlty Towers as great comedy at all; they may even believe we shouldn’t be watching it because it does not align with their values. Basil is racist, snobbish and sexist, the Major says terrible things, and the Spanish waiter is mocked and abused. But great comedy is never about nice, well-adjusted people who subscribe to and live by a perfect set of progressive values because 1: such people do not exist and 2: the best comedy reflects who we really are and who really are is not very nice.

As it happens, I once talked to John Cleese about the subject and asked him, as someone who should know, what Fawlty Towers was really about and why it worked and his answer was interesting: fear. Cleese grew up with a mother who had a fear of almost everything; anything above medium size that could move around a bit was a hazard to her, he said, and her list of fears included vacuum cleaners (not including those being used by her) and hairdryers (including those being used by her). Cleese’s word for his mother was omniphobic.

Unfortunately, Cleese carried some of this fear with him into adulthood – he says his ingrained habit of walking on eggshells with his mother dominated his romantic relationships with women for many years – but the fear, the terror, is also there in Fawlty Towers for all to see. When I talked to Cleese, I told him I enjoyed the show so much because it all came from anger but he stopped me there and then. “Oh no,” he said, “it comes from fear – Basil’s fear of Sybil – but his main fear is being caught out. There’s some piece of information that he doesn’t want his wife to have and that’s what fuelling the frustration.”

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Looked at that way, you can see why Fawlty Towers works so well, especially for a British audience. It reminds me of the speech Cleese wrote for his character in A Fish Called Wanda in which he describes the dread that lies at the heart of the way we still run our lives in this country (he was talking about the English specifically but it could apply to a lot of Scottish people just as well). “Do you have any idea what it’s like being English?” he said. “Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone ‘Are you married?’ and hearing ‘My wife left me this morning,’ or saying ‘Do you have children?’ and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday.” It’s the fear again: always the fear.

And class. Definitely class. The first episode of Fawlty Towers shown 50 years ago about the lord that isn’t really a lord goes to the heart of who Basil is. As Sybil puts it, he’s either crawling all over the guests licking their boots or spitting poison at them like a benzedrine puff adder, and it leads to his downfall in the first episode because he’s licking the boots of somebody who’s really a confidence trickster. Has it changed 50 years on, the centrality of class? Not really – the same attitudes, divisions and consequences are still with us in 2025 like they were in 1975. And before you say anything, Scotland’s no different; we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns until we open our mouths.

And of course Basil was based on a Scot: Donald Sinclair, proprietor of the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, where Cleese and the other Pythons stayed in 1970. At one point, Sinclair walked past the group as they were dining in the restaurant and spotted Terry Gilliam eating little bits of meat with a fork in his right hand. “We do not eat like that in this country!” said Sinclair and walked off. Pure Basil.

It’s an extreme obviously – Cleese says Sinclair was the rudest man he had ever met in his life – but we laugh because we know it. We laugh as well because we’ve stayed in British hotels and know how terrible the service industry generally is, which also goes back to class: people are often sneering, uninterested or dismissive because there’s a suspicion in this country that service jobs aren’t worthy of respect. Special mention goes to the hotel in Galloway I visited recently whose staff told me that under no circumstances could any kind of food be served to me as I had arrived at 2.01pm and lunch stopped at 2.00pm. Hidden away in the kitchen was John Cleese writing the script.

But oh, the joy of laughing when it isn’t happening to you and is happening to someone else. James Thurber described humour as “emotional chaos remembered in tranquility” which is a perfect way to describe Fawlty Towers and one of the reasons we still enjoy it (or most of us do). I’m thinking of the people who believe it’s not the sort of thing we should be watching because it does not align with their values.

But I’m also remembering something else Cleese said. Neurotic people, he said, can sense that humour and comedy is usually critical so view it as unkind. But the end result of that is political correctness and no one wants that do they? Political correctness isn’t funny, or not intentionally anyway, and Fawlty Towers is, then and now. So laughing wins. Keep on laughing.