Rent Fawlty Towers (1975 - 1979)

MASTER-CLASS IN WELL-STRUCTURED COMEDY - Fawlty Towers review by Frank Talker™

Intricately-plotted by John Cleese and Connie Booth (whom also star), superbly-timed by every performer & a very-funny revelation of the many emotional hang-ups of White-British culture.

Basil Fawlty, the shows hotelier antagonist, is the revealed internal-hurricane at the centre of an attempted external-calm whom never fails to display his contempt for most of the hotel's guests. From those whom happen not to be upper-class; to those whom are not White; &, then on to those whom are - for him - frighteningly female, all are subject to his inveterate snobbery.

Mr Fawlty is a man desperately seeking relevance and importance in a world that stubbornly refuses to see him as either relevant or important. Secretly, he seems to know full well that he's the third wheel on a bicycle and that Fawlty Towers is a hostelry that would function just as well, if not better, without him around.

Perhaps it's to avoid personally-confronting the very possibility of his irrelevance that Basil Fawlty constantly attempts to impose his repressive Victorian-morality onto others; endlessly makes mostly-false assumptions about them based upon superficial judgements; &, incessantly pokes his nose into the guests' private affairs. All the while vainly trying to conceal the fact that he is actually doing these very things - only to then make it supremely obvious that he's lying about this in the very absurdity of his denials when he's inevitably caught-out.

The only real problem with this tv series is that - unlike, for example, the contemporaneous Rising Damp (1974-78) and its snobbish landlord - the psychological basis for Basil Fawlty's awfulness is never explained in terms of the wider White community. His rabid erotophobia & mother-fixated gynophobia; self-destructive class-consciousness; &, his instinctive Negrophobia are never comedically-explored in a way that shows him as an inevitable product of his culture rather than just as a social aberration.

Fawlty Towers' dishonest aversion-to-wider-political-issues via its tacit denial of a larger social-context makes it little more than an above-average exercise in technically-precise farce, violent slapstick & mild cultural-satire.