An Interview With John Cleese - Fawlty Towers Special Features

I was always fascinated by comedy and it's very strange when I look back in the day I can actually remember being ill in bed when I was 12 and 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 and every time I heard a good joke I used to write it you know on the white bits that didn't have print on so with something odd going on and when I watched the 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 and Andy Joan Davis a lot of them were America the majority I realized in retrospect it was almost as I was almost as I was studying them while 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 kind 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 done some entertainments at school and I done sketches in front of audiences and quite enjoyed it although I was very 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 63 people from Cambridge didn't think of doing it within three years all the people who had 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 tours 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 because I hadn't done much work that yeah and I thought I might fail the exams but I did it in the end and to my surprise one day after I got off stage 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 noticed that I had written the material interesting not the performer side but the writing side and I said well why not and I thought about 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 pounds a week and if I had gone into the law which is what I was studying at Cambridge I they got 12 pounds 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 is that I wanted to do something with karlie both we were married at the time and I didn't know what but I went and talked to Jimmy Gilbert who was they had a light entertainment and I said I'd like to do something with Corrine he said fine we'll 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 shall we do we spent about 20 minutes deciding we couldn't do the sort of Mike Nichols Elaine may stuff because that had been done and also very well done by the two John's and and Ellen Doubront and then I said what about that hotel we'd stayed in because when can't eat been occasionally doing parts in Fawlty toshi come down to talk to you and she had stayed at this amazing hotel run by mr. Sinclair and it was called the Glyn Eagles 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 down I 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 the knife there picked the fork up the right hand and spear the meat and he was walking by and he looked down at Terry and his 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 cabin he forgot it and then in the evening he got back he said I left my briefcase mr. Sinclair said yes it's that it's the far side of the wall and Eric looked out at the main entrance where he was pointing and there was the swimming pool the far side of the swimwear was a ward he said well you mean the other side of the sea but what he said Oh Eric said well what what do you think him why did you put why did you put it there and and and Sinclair said um we thought it might be a bomb and Eric was astounded because this was pre 69p pre the resumption of the IRA bombing and Eric said well why a bomber mr. sinker said well we've had some staff problems so he thought somebody was tell so this extraordinary man was was very very big in my memory and Connie's and within a very short time we we'd figured out that that was where we wanted to set the hotel the interesting thing is nobody thought it was a good idea all the expert advice we got was 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 and the script has nothing but very cliched characters and I cannot see anything but a disaster if we go ahead with it that's not the wall and a great friend of mine Ian Johnston who helped me write fierce creatures heard three producers at the bar say oh dear you seen this new script please a tall tower why do you ever leave Monty five 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 on them I love the first series of 40 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 gamble through the gate and there were flowers everywhere we'd we'd entered a new territory and it was as though everything we 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 and then there was a sort of a rumble of fairly positive reaction towards the end and then the second when they repeated it 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 this do in fact it's a terrible problem these days with Moo these 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 because 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 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 the comedy of ideas but 40 times as much more comedy of emotion and more people are 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 traveled and I guess that the reason it travels is that these 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 a 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 perform 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 this wretched character it's awful man ever since I've always had a tremendous love for fast 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 in your teenage years there are some times you just laugh in your laugh so much that it hurts and you wish you could stop laughing wonderful feeling you don't get that so much as you get older there you get it a little bit in on stage like as a kid you get it in church because it's kind of forbidden and that gives it as 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 a 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 how would laughter and then maybe think oh poor man you know because if somebody pointed out years ago comedies very light 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 or ebooks and 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 could allow for them otherwise all you do is oh poor man Oh terrible but we had that double reaction we'd laughed first and then we would feel sorry for him great comedy is always about things happening on different levels because people talk say the comedies about conflict and people often think that means the character Ray has got to be head-to-head with character B but the interesting conflicts 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 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 that it it anything it opposed the thing about farce is that everything is happening in an exaggerated way that other you may start it quite low-key and 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 facade 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 behavior more energy and the possibility of huge laughs I mean the best I think the best evenings my life have almost all been spent of the National Theatre when they do fasces like the Phaedo forces so what a lot of people haven't spotted is that forty towers are just little 30-minute facets that start very very low-key and finish out absolutely frantic I thought it was wonderful when I heard the 40 toes 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 40 tires the first series is 75 and Tony J Peter Roberts Michael Peter and I started video Arts in 72 so I had 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 was supposed to treat customer 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 a thought of and my favorite one is you know when you arrive in a hotel you have this utter that'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 it so you you have to remember you or 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 interruption I finally put up the Do Not Disturb sight and five minutes later as I was lying on the bed don't husband I don't believe this so I go to the door and I open the door as a young man bellhop standing outside pointing at the do door disturb notice say is this supposed to be out here now you couldn't but you know you couldn't make that up and a time I stayed the Randolph hotel in Oxford and I'd had a very very good dinner at Merton College superb dinner got in rather late went up to sleep a late alarm call and a 5:45 oh listen mr. clears your alarm call you said no no it may well be somebody else's is not mine mine is 830 thing and it just in that lovely dropping off oh if you don't sit just to apologize for waking you up you know there's some things you could never invent at the beginning I wrote most of Basel and most of Manuel and Connie wrote most of Sibyl and most of Pali and I found it very interesting because I'd sometimes suggest lines for civil and she'd say no no a woman would never say that night but gradually she started to write more about and I started to write more a Sybil and then we just kind of cooperated more and more on all the characters then with the one the two of us loved the most was the major we loved 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 Barkley he's no longer with us I was hugely fond of him he was a wonderful fella and it's 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 it was an insane cricket fan and when I be in the rehearsal room playing a scene with civil I glanced over Sybil's shoulder and I'd suddenly see Bala doing this which meant that there was six Australian wickets down he was I just love that one and then the old ladies were absolutely terrific and it was a very happy group because everybody was very pleased with what they had to do nobody was trying to build that part up you know everyone was happy so that was good and then we each week you'd have some guests it 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 would go to Polly and say this has happened and this is what I have to achieve it terribly useful as a bit of as a writing device to have someone somebody once described her as Horatio to Hamlet you know it's wonderful to have some someone that the protagonist can go to and say this is what I have 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 and the pilot episode was a philosophy student and we didn't feel that that worked as well as art students so we re-recorded just a little maybe four or five minutes and cut that in to the first episode before it was transmitted to the general public a civil IC is much much stronger and more independent than Basel she could really function perfectly well with Basel buzz doleful fella grab us I don't think Basel good I think he's very he's much more dependent on civil 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 Basel said to Sibyl 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 who tolerate them come in comedy but they don't to see anyone in real pain or at least not in this kind of comedy probably not in any kind of goal so it was water off a duck's back she just given a didn't give a damn so although the insults were funny they were fundamentally ineffectual that's why we could get away with I think that Pru began to develop enough and I think she and I talked about it a bit at one point because I remember it was no deeper than that ah and I described it one script of somebody machine-gunning a seal which is a very good description but I think that was something again we worked on and that was the delight of going into the show's after we'd done one or two and 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 Prue played it at the first read-through and I remember going home and Santa Connie what do you think about the way Prue is playing it this thing well so we thought oh we were a bit worried and then after about two days we actually saw that what she was doing was better and worked better than the way that 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 we wrote the first one I'd seen Andrew in a marvelous played by John Mortimer called habeas corpus and he had just made me laugh till I heard and I realized how good he was at physical comedy and so I got him and he just this just touched something in him because he's so quiet he's immensely thoughtful extraordinary kind man very considerate and that brother quiet almost introverted and then you put that moustache on him any good thing and this energy explodes and it's it's you know something just come through that you don't normally see but one of the points I was trying to make with Manuel was not that Manuel was some kind of an idiot or something that wasn't it at all what annoyed me when I went into a lot of British hotels and restaurants particular one particular chain of steak houses is that almost nobody there spoke any English at all so that the chances of your getting what you ordered were about one in six and I knew what that was about that was not about the fact that partners were stupid it was about the fact 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 you know 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 that's Basil's fault does basil doesn't pay to give him extra you know English lessons as he should he's so basal 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 fueled by the fact that he is trying to hide something from Sybil it's always trapped 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 that being very very cross people are getting is them and that's obviously Basil's problem I mean I'm not quite sure in here civil nurse did it but it's a very very long time ago some around the Second Punic War I suspect and the the essence of that was all about how disapproving years at how he tries to catch them at it and and I enjoy very much the degree of how he gets worked out you know when people would say I'm not a prude back which was means I am a prude and and it was it was an exploration of all that stuff the episode the first series it's about Basil's dislike of any kind of sexual behavior towards some very very good lines at the beginning about how people dress and basil as a civil says Basil's idea really so sexy attractive man is Al Haig actor she points out that he did actually wear his decorations which is quite interesting because it's alright you've your army to have all these brightly colored things on to you which is an interesting thought but the 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 because 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 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 in 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 Fay 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 hill do not want to look at themselves and it's the first lesson in life as a small group of people who do want to look at themselves most people are pretty uncomfortable about it and 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 well you really see what an awful man basil is because he has no interest in other human beings as human beings at all there are either objects of derision and scorn or an opportunity to inflate it so improve his position the social hierarchy and in this particular case it's the 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 absentee or for human being but the strange thing about comedy is that if an awful character makes people laugh think of WC Fields people feel affectionate or it's insane because if they had to sit next to him for five minutes at a dinner they would they would absolutely not be able to cope with him they wouldn't know them but because he makes them laugh they think deep down he's alright and he is when my friends and I started on the hall we had a slightly lower opinion of catch phrases because there used to be certain BBC Radio comedy shows that consisted entirely of catch phrase you know people would you'd hear the door open and someone would come in and say I won't take my coat off I'm not stopping you in the mirror when the laugh faded another door would open someone would come in and say I don't like cauliflower I prefer the peat ah so we got very fed up with it it seemed to us there was nothing to do with comedy atop lips 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 gay a lot because he's no idea what's going on every tender to be a catchphrases and what else would he say 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 catchphrases and they oddly enough the lines that I remember are very frequently not the ones that people other people remember there's a line in The Wizard Chocolate Factory sketch Bert crunchy frog there's a line when inspector prilae and says where's the pleasure in there and that's a phrase that I often want to say to people and they talk about the fact they've been mountaineering for four weeks I was want to say where is the pleasure in that and there's another one which is in the in the pet shops gives 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 catchphrase 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 that there was an awful lot in them the average BBC half-hour 65 pages faulty tires we used to do 135 240 pages we literally did twice as many camera cuts average shows got 200 we used to have 400 cameras so there's an enormous man in there the other thing is they were very well constructed and what Connie and I discovered worked for us was that we never really started to bob to write the dialogue until we got the plot work to him so we would spend sometimes as much as two and a half weeks on a plot not always the same one because 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 till we'd really got the story worked out in considerable detail you always have to change it a bit because you can never visualise it or when you've just got the storyline there and you'll find that one scene that you'd imagine doesn't work because basil comes into it and a different frame of mind or in a different mood from what you need so you're always having to change rejigger 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 a one in a hundred you've got to 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 and they would run parallel for time and then hopefully they would become intertwined and by the end the last five minutes they would all come together that's what we managed doing the best of the episodes but the most useful thing we used to do is 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 and we we said to her what's the most difficult kind of guests that you have and she described as his Richards absolutely perfectly and we wrote it all down the fact that they always complained about everything but they don't want it change they just want a reduction and this business of strategic deafness hearing what they want to hear and she just gave us a character portrait another time I said to a great friend of mine called Andrew Lehman who was a restaurateur I said what was the worst problem you had when he used to work at the Savoy Hotel and he said all the stiffs I said what he said Oh getting rid of the stiffs I mean people died a lot I said Oh a lot he said the old dears I'm afraid they know the survivor 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 Savoy staff would walk you can pick out those that we got another one and then the problem was getting getting the stiffs into the service elevator without a lobby the other gate 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 though tell it it's it's kind of a joy some of those some of those worked out very well it's interesting because sometimes we had a wonderful ending for the dead body when we couldn't use it the guy who died and who you know gets put in the basket and all that stuff we thought it would be terribly funny if we'd established without basil knowing that he had a twin brother soft bass had finally got a river near the basket the brother would walk it come up the death bowel would abuse 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 it would be too difficult mixing that kind of emotion timing is all important and the hardest thing is to get it well enough rehearsed now five days was never really enough plus the day of the studio to get it right and what happened was that we did anything between twenty and twenty five 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 you could just tighten it up just tighten it there and take out a line of dialogue there and sometimes take out a repetition there they 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 in the studio recording it felt to me very much like a team because the first series John hard day was second series Bobby Spears and Prue 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 prune then Connie and Andrew would just sit there watching and after a time they might easy Andrew might say what about that or that isn't quite working but because Connie and I had written and then rewritten the scripts there wasn't an enormous amount of scrip 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 and I just did an American show third Rock from the Sun and it was lovely was just like 40 towers again with about six key people giving ideas and nobody bothering whether their idea was accepted or not was just that sense of making it as good as possible all the BBC shows at that time are always recorded with the live audience and 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 and then that would cut back to the studio and the audience would still be watching the monitors and they would fail to see that we have supposed to be back in the studio and sometimes you would find that there would be a complete silence after joke because the audience is looking in the wrong place or they're still looking in the studio and they should be looking at the monitor and then we used to take one of our own laughs off the soundtrack and put it in the in the place if it needed it but I said to the actors very early on I had a theory about it I said we're not going to play this at the pace the studio audience I said we don't have to in the theater you have to go at the pace the audience because they can't hear you otherwise you have to wait for that laughter to curb you know the laughter curve to come down then you start to be here but in television you have this wonderful thing got a microphone that's there and if you talk into the mic well the audience is still laughing and the wonderful thing is the people at home can hear it so you can keep the pace up and when people are watching at home there's only one or two of them it's not like being in an audience in a theater so they don't laugh as much so what you have to do is play it faster when people are you know 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 the people at home the second show that we did which was about the builders was performed almost entirely to complete sales and it was not a very comfortable experience and afterwards I was a bit disturbed people said no no it was it was a funny show actually I think it's at least good at the 10 shows that 12 shows but you know they said no it was fine it was funny I said well what about the audience they said well we don't know we found out later that a large number of people from the Icelandic broadcasting cooperation had visited the BBC that 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 fate whiff of cod coming from the front row which had we recognised my to give us the explanation and I've got to say it was a pretty tough recording and it needs quite a lot of editing to tighten it up 40 tasks took a little time to get started it didn't pick up a very big order of 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 this of the first series and after that on the whole the criticisms were very good but Carney 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 I mean the problem with fierce creatures was not fierce creatures with probably the fierce creatures was 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 like it is striking 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 now the problem we have with the second series of 40 times is that the expectation was unreasonably high because I realized that people were already remembering the first series is better than it was because if there's three or four things in the first series that are really funny the audience remembers that is the kind of general standard rather than the highlights then they expect the second series to be at the high light 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 fast because of the high level of energy the kind of mania involved people have to get very wound up and 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 the 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 depth a little bit dodgy here and there there's a lot of taboo in there and anybody in comedy knows that if you get into taboo areas if it's done right two things happen which you've both good one is that you're exploring something that is a little unfamiliar and a little dangerous and a little exciting and therefore a little bit interesting and secondly it arises 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 jerks the BBC ever objected to I think bill cotton was worried about - 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 Mombasa was getting very confused the word popped up and I was not very sure about it myself and when bill said can you worried about that I just cut it but we didn't have any pressure and the PC Lobby the politically correct Lobby is something I don't understand because a lot of what I see on television now both here in America seems to me much riskier then we would have got away with even in the Python days and then at the same time you hear about these politically correct movements which i think of by and large run and staffed largely by obsessions but there's a good idea at the back of political correctness but it gets taken at absurd 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 really relaxed you're not as spontaneous you can't be more real you have to kind of be more formal now if you find that society is being run by the tuchas members then in a sense that's a bit sick because you're trying to take as the general standard the standard the people who have the greatest problem controlling their emotions in that area in that anniversary program basil actually is thinking of someone else for a short period of time before the panic overtakes him and you do get the impression that there is something positive underneath all the other stuff between him and and symbol and Connie and I particular episode because we felt that we were beginning to explore character a little bit more it was a little less farcical it was a I remember we thought it was a little bit more in the area of Alan Ayckbourn and we both adored and 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 a into a 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 and it was postponed they settled that the strike and everything was put off a week and Julian Holloway was unable to do the second week because he had another commitment we brought in dear Ken Campbell I've always adored he's such a marvelous strange funny man so he was the only one who was new and we had all this time to rehearse it and it was really really good because everyone was able to get familiar with the show and then bring little things to it so it's one that I think it's one of the very best episode I watched basil Barret 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 anything the young couple say they're just trying to see where the rat is I thought it was extraordinary funny yet I couldn't explain quite why I found it so funny and I love the dinner more the way that we finally get Polly presenting the box of biscuits looking at the expect and dazzle actresses would you care right because what else do you see those ooh and the actor down Arthur his name is so good who is who just looks at the rat that absolutely doesn't believe it he knows it's not there although he could see it and he plays that so well and then right at the end you see basil being being dragged out I'm very very fond of that episode because again there's quite a lot in it and some very good lines early on I love when when Manuel of course thinks that it's a filigree Siberian hamster and basil persuades if he's a rat he said don't you have rat he said you have reservation or did did Franco have them all shot that's what my favorite line 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 to death died so we we came up with the idea that the thought he'd poison him and then when he discovered he hadn't poised if he'd be really happy and then the doctor could walk here but he was originally that's not happy it's a again utter ruthless selfishness no thought for this gyrus family at all it's just it easy on the hook or is he off the hook because I say he's a terrible man think about the beating the car sequence is how technical 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 and we tried beating it with a floppy branch and that didn't work and then we finally got a branch that had the right degree of flexibility and it became terribly funny and it showed that now 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 in the abstract as though any branch would have been funny similarly when he's cursing the car it is much funny that if any that that sound is kind of contained as though it's coming from inside sort of goldfish bill that if you heard it at full volume from inside the car and often you don't know why these things are the case and you just have to stumble around trying things until you discover what works the key to battle 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 would take advantage of Basel in a particularly endearing way and Michael Guin who did the part was not only excellent he was very funny he told me about a hotel really lodging house he used to stay with and they had so many signs up you know switch third light off you know 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 was from say 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 and I said don't worry we can read you those the main thing is we go we basically got the show right and one or two of my closest friends you know my work whelk were very pleased with it and encouraged me a lot so that I felt that we were alright we were onto something good so many people have said to me you're going to do anymore 40 tires and the you're up against an expected not win 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 faulty tires 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 another peak it doesn't interest me I had an idea for a plot I love the idea of Basel being finally invited to Spain to meet Manuel's family and getting to Heathrow and then spending about 14 hours there waiting for the flight you know finally getting on the flight being furious and then a terrorist pulls gun and tries to hijack the plane and battle is so angry he overcomes the terrorists when the pilot says we have to fly back to Heathrow to buzzes no fly it's just Pedro shoot you arrived in Spain mmediately arrested spends the entire holiday at a Spanish jail is released time to go back on the play with civil but it's it's funny isn't it and that I don't I don't want

Channel: Reuben Barker

Views: 124,169

Rating: 4.9465957 out of 5

Keywords: Fawlty Towers (TV Program), Basil Fawlty (Fictional Character)

Id: JEwoHwMCkVA

Length: 50min 13sec (3013 seconds)

Published: Tue May 13 2014