John Cleese stars as Basil Fawlty, the sharp-tongued, short-tempered owner of Fawlty Towers, a hotel plagued by crisis, chaos and bizarre characters.
A Touch of Class: Basil advertises for a better clientele and attracts a bit of riff raff.
The Builders: I'm so sorry; I'm afraid the dining-room door seems to have disappeared.
The Wedding Party: I know what people like you get up to and I think it's disgusting.
Hotel Inspectors: Oh please! It's taken us twelve years to build this place up. If you put this in the book we're finished.
Gourmet Night: If you don't like duck, you're rather stuck.
The Germans: So that's two eggs mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Herman Goering and four Colditz salads.
Communication Problems: Basil can't win...even when he wins.
The Psychiatrist: Basil provides enough material for an entire psychiatry conference.
Waldorf Salad: You ponce in here expecting to be waited on hand and foot, well I'm trying to run a hotel here.
The Kipper and the Corpse: Number 8 is dead! Twenty-five to go.
The Anniversary: I'll just pop upstairs and ask her to stop dying and then you can all come up and identify her.
Basil the Rat: Wanted--kind home for savage rodent.
Basil Fawlty, the put-upon manager of a hotel, is told by his wife, Sybil, that he needs to hang a picture. He needs to do the menus, but his wife orders him to hang the picture anyway. Then she insists on helping to determine the placement of it. Two guest come down in order to check out. They are in a hurry because they are late because they didn't get their alarm call.
Fawlty tries to get in a quick bite of breakfast while his wife goes into the town. She didn't go out, however, and confronts him about an advertisement he placed in a local publication. He wants to build a higher class of clientele, but Sybil sees the ad as a waste of money. However, they already have a reservation because of the ad. Another guest, fairly low-brow, checks into the hotel. Fawlty doesn't want him to stay, but Sybil rents him a room anyway. Fawlty returns to hanging the picture, but Sybil reminds him that he needs to do the menu for lunch.
While attending to the guests at lunch, another guest shows up to check in. This guest, however, ranks above the others as he is a Lord. After lunch, Lord Melbury asks Fawlty to cash a check for him. Fawlty sends Polly, the maid, to do it, and she runs into the low-class guest, Mr. Brown. It turns out that Brown is with the CID and they are watching Lord Melbury, who is a conman. Melbury had convinced Fawlty to allow him to take Fawlty's coin collection to be appraised, but Fawlty has found out Melbury's true plans.
Fawlty and his wife are going for a weekend away. While they are gone, Sybil has arranged for a builder to come in and have a door put through to the kitchen, and another door will be closed off. What she doesn't know is that Basil has arranged to have his incompetent builder take Sybil's builder's place.
Unfortunately when the men come to do the work, Polly is upstairs asleep and Manuel didn't want to wake her. When Fawlty arrives home, he discovers that rather than putting through a door into the kitchen the door now covers the old opening to the upstairs, and they blocked off the dining room, rather than blocking off his private quarters. When Sybil discovers it, he blames her builder. She figures out the truth, however, and asks her builder to come over and fix the problem. Fawlty makes his builder fix his own problem, though. When her builder shows up the next morning all the work has been fixed. He points out that the door they put through to the kitchen will probably cause the hotel to fall down. Fawlty takes a gnome that his wife ordered to insert into his builder.
An unmarried couple come to the hotel to get a room. Fawlty doesn't want to rent to them. Sybil takes over and rents them a room anyway. As the couple are going up to their room, they run into Polly, who went to school with the girlfriend. They are there for a wedding that evening.
Later that evening, Basil goes to let in a guest getting in late. It turns out to be a French guest, who has been flirting with Fawlty. The couple come in and find Fawlty and the French guest in a suspicious position. Fawlty talks his way out of it and returns to his room. He leaves to let in another guest, but it is just Manuel returning from his birthday celebration. The boyfriend discovers the two of them in a suspicious position.
During breakfast the next morning another couple rent a room. They are the mother and stepfather of the girlfriend. Fawlty finds the girl and her stepfather hugging, and jumps to the wrong conclusion. He keeps the wife away until he sees that the girl has left her stepfather. In the meantime, Polly enters the stepfather's room to say hello. Fawlty finds her in there when bringing the wife upstairs and jumps to another wrong conclusion. When Polly leaves he allows the wife to enter her room.
Polly goes into the first couple's room to try on her dress for the wedding, which was designed by the girlfriend. Fawlty hears the boyfriend's appreciation for his backrub and assumes the worst again. He fired Polly and asks both couples to leave. Sybil fills in Fawlty on the situation and makes him apologize, which he does while blaming Sybil. Later that evening, thinking there is a burglar in the hotel, Fawlty is once again discovered by the whole family in a suspicious position with Manuel.
A guest is staying at the hotel who talks in a roundabout way. After squabbling with him about drawing a map and hiring a taxi, he finds out from Sybil that some hotel inspectors are in town. Fawlty jumps to the conclusion that the talkative guest is one of the inspectors. After Fawlty has multiple squabbles with him, Sybil discovers that he isn't the hotel inspector, so Fawlty gets his revenge. Unfortunately, it's in front of the actual hotel inspectors.
Basil is too cheap to take his car to a garage to have it fixed. Meanwhile, Sybil talks with the manager of a local restaurant about having a gourmet night at the hotel. While having dinner with the manager, Andre, Basil squabbles with the guests.
On the gourmet night, half of the guests cancel, and the chef gets drunk because he is rejected by Manuel. With the chef disabled, Fawlty calls Andre to get him to make meals for the guests. He picks up the duck that Andre has prepared while the rest of the staff serves the appetizers to the guests. Unfortunately, on arriving at the hotel, Fawlty drops the duck, and Manuel steps in it. They request another duck from Andre, and Fawlty goes to pick it up. Unfortunately while his back is turned, a waiter makes off with his duck and leaves him a dessert. On the way back to the hotel, his car breaks down, and he is forced to run back to the hotel.
Sybil is in hospital to have an in-growing toenail removed. She reminds Fawlty that he needs to hang the moose head that he bought, that there is a fire drill in the morning, and that Germans are coming to stay at the hotel. After squabbling with the nurse, he returns to the hotel and begins hanging the moose. He finally gets it hung the next morning just before the fire drill. Unfortunately, Fawlty sets off the burglar alarm and the guests take it to be the fire drill. After squabbling with the guests, he finally does the fire drill, but Manuel, cooking in the kitchen, begins an actual fire. In trying to put it out, Basil knocks himself out and ends up in the hospital with Sybil. He escapes and returns to the hotel. He then attempts to help by taking the Germans' lunch orders. After making a mess of it all, he gets hit on the head with the moose.
A rude woman comes to the hotel and tries to get helped before another gentleman who was there before she was. Polly asks Manuel to help her. Meanwhile another guest gives Fawlty a tip on a horse, though Sybil doesn't let him bet anymore. The rude guest, Mrs. Richards complains about her room. After dealing with her, Basil asks Manuel to place a bet for him. His horse wins, but he must hide the winnings from Sybil. Mrs. Richards claims to have had money stolen, and Sybil sees Polly counting the money that Fawlty had her collect for him. Polly claims to have won it on the horse herself, but when asked the name of the horse, Fawlty and Polly play a game of charades to get her the right answer. Sybil suspects Basil, though. He gives his winnings to the Major to hold, and when the forgetful man finds the money in his coat, it is taken as Mrs. Richards's money. It turns out that Mrs. Richards actually lost her money while out shopping. It gets returned with a vase that she bought, but there is more money than she thought she lost. Basil pays her the difference and he is still ahead...until he breaks her vase and is forced to give her all the money.
Two psychiatrists arrive to stay at the hotel. Meanwhile a very pretty Australian girl arrives, and another guest has a girl in his room, which is against Basil's rules. Basil attempts to see in his room to verify the girl is there, but continually ends up looking into the room of the psychiatrists, or getting caught in the room of the Australian girl.
After various displays of customer dissatisfaction, Basil leaves the dining room to check in an American and his British wife. Wanting a hot meal, the American gives extra money to Fawlty in order to get the chef to stay. Fawlty asks Terry, the chef, to stay, but then dismisses him. The American orders a Waldorf salad, and Basil doesn't know how to make one. The American discovers that he paid the money to Basil so that Basil would make them dinner, and he gets upset and makes Fawlty stand there while the other guests complain.
One of the residents at the hotel dies. Unfortunately Basil doesn't realize this when he brings up his breakfast. Polly discovers it when she brings up something that Fawlty forgot. Fawlty is sure that the guest died because of the kippers he had been served for breakfast that had been past their sell-by date. A doctor that was staying in the hotel, however, says that he died of other causes. Fawlty then goes out of his way to try to keep the death of the guest from his other guests.
It's the Fawlty's anniversary, but Basil goes out of his way to make Sybil think he's forgotten it again. His plan backfires when Sybil leaves him in anger, while he's got all their friends coming around for dinner. Polly, who needs money for a car, agrees to take Sybil's place, pretending to be sick. Their plans are almost ruined, however, when Sybil returns. Basil covers by saying that she's a Sybil look-alike from the north.
The hotel inspector comes in and finds quite a bit wrong with the health and safety of the hotel. While trying to repair the items on the list, Fawlty discovers that Manuel's hamster is actually a rat. Fawlty forces Manuel to give up his hamster/rat, which he has named Basil, and Polly tells Manuel that the rat can go stay with a friend of hers just down the street. Meanwhile, a poisoned piece of veal gets mixed in with others, and the inspector has ordered veal for his lunch. The rat, which was supposedly sent down the street to Polly's friend has actually been kept in the shed out back of the hotel. It gets in, and Fawlty and Manuel attempt to keep the rat away from the hotel inspector while also trying not to poison the inspector.
This disc shows its compression quite a bit. There are rainbows everywhere, and it seems somewhat out of focus or hazy and lacking in detail, though I think that's an effect of the compression. The sound, which is two speaker mono, is quite clear.
There is a commentary with the director, John Howard Davies. While spotty, he does provide some insight into things such as the set construction and the financial burdens of putting on a television show. My problem with him was that he would seemingly get caught up in watching the episode and forget to say anything.
The disc also contains a wonderful interview with John Cleese about his creation of Fawlty Towers. There is also a documentary on Torquay, the town in which Fawlty Towers takes place, followed by a montage of the worst customer service moments in the series. Oddly this is followed by a film showing the degrading of the hotel that was used for the exterior shots. There are biographical segments on most of the major and minor characters' actors. This disc also contains trailers for other BBC DVD releases, such as Father Ted, French and Saunders, League of Gentlemen, and Wallace and Gromit, as well as one for BBC America.
This disc looks much better than the first one. Most of the rainbows are gone, at least from the second two episodes, and there is little to no shimmering or haziness. It appears that most of the trouble occurs with the episodes from the first series. And as with the first disc, the sound is quite adequate.
There is a commentary with each episode's director, the first two with John Howard Davies, the second two by Bob Spiers. As with the first disc, Davies' commentary is spotty, with his getting too wrapped up in watching the episode to share much with the audience. Bob Spiers, however, had very little dead air, and was quite informative about his processes for making each episode.
The disc also contains another wonderful segment of an interview with John Cleese. There is also has an interview with Andrew Sachs (Manuel) in which he talks about his character. The final video segment shows clips from the series during which Basil and Sybil deal with the staff. This disc also contains the biographical segments for the actors and trailers for other BBC DVDs, as did the first disc.
The video quality of this disc is so completely different from the first disc. There are no rainbows to be seen. The video is practically pristine. The audio, again is adequate.
There is a commentary with Bob Spiers, the director of the four episodes on this disc. His commentaries are extremely informative and there is little to no dead air time. He talks about the fame of the show, the work involved, and gives a great look behind the scenes.
The disc also contains yet a third segment of an interview with John Cleese, and an interview with Prunella Scales, who played Sybil. The next video segment consists of clips from the series that show Basil and Sybil interacting, and so demonstrates their relationship. The last video segment is a hilarious set of outtakes that were apparently used in an ad for the show. As on the other discs, there are actor biographies and trailers.
Last updated: July 28, 2002
Web Author: David Akers
Copyright ©2002 by David Akers - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED