LAST year John Cleese got me worried. He had no time to write his autobiography, he said, because he was working too hard. Some of the work didn't sound worthy of an ageing, brilliantined, stick-insect comedy genius, but he couldn't afford to be fussy: he had a third divorce to pay for. Oh no, I thought at the time, he's going to bring back Fawlty Towers.
I'd always admired Cleese for not dining out on Fawlty Towers – on Gourmet Night duck or anything else. I didn't need to be reminded of the show's brilliance, and the absence of contrived anniversary documentaries only enhanced its reputation some mo
re. Thankfully, though, Fawlty Towers: Re-opened wasn't a revival or a reinvention or even the great, lost, and (turns out) mythical 13th episode. It was still a documentary marking the 30th anniversary of the end of the greatest television comedy ever, which seemed only marginally less contrived than a documentary examining Anglo-German relations on the 34th anniversary of Fawlty uttering the immortal words: "Hors d'oeuvres, hors d'oeuvres ... orderz, vitch must be obeyed at all times vizout question."
But, that said, I loved Re-opened from the first minute, the first incidence of frying-pan brutality, the first triple-packed joke. I'm ready for the hors d'oeuvres programme at any time.
The best Fawlty Towers gags always came in packets of three: "Mickey mouse shape? Amphibious landing-craft shape? Poke in the eye shape?" Then there was: "Sydney Opera House? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically…?" And occasionally Cleese and co-writer Connie Booth handed them out to other characters, such as Sybil, to Basil: "You seem to think that we girls should be aroused by men like Gladstone and Earl Haig and Baden-Powell, don't you?"
Cleese and Booth hadn't spoken jointly about Fawlty Towers before, or at least not since the 1970s. They weren't actually together here, their reminiscences being gathered separately, but it was obvious that he still has a lot of affection for his first wife, and she for him. It was obvious, too, that she was crucial to the show's success.
They would spend six weeks merely thinking about each episode. The finished pieces would be 130 pages long, more than twice the length of the average sitcom scripts, and all 12 instalments disrupted the schedules by running over. This made you wonder about all the Fawlty Towers gags that never made it, and how those crumbs from the Cleese-Booth stripped-pine table could have saved lesser comedies through the ages.
They were a glamorous couple, back in the day. I always thought of Booth as glamorous but not Cleese, so it was a surprise to see archive shots of him sporting long hair, un-brilliantined, and a wide sheepskin collar, as opposed to Ministry of Silly Walks pinstripes or the Baden-Powell-esque weekend tweeds favoured by Fawlty. Of course, just because a performer plays lunatics, it doesn't mean he's one himself.
Initially, the BBC thought Fawlty Towers was "dire". This wasn't a clodhopping misjudgment to rank alongside Decca Records signing the Tremeloes instead of the Beatles, but it was bad enough. The show was cheaply made, the walls wobbled when Fawlty scudded Manuel's head off them, and the Major's sherry-hour verdict on "wogs" suggested the distance travelled from Love Thy Neighbour wasn't so vast. But of course it was.
There were four years between the first and second series, Cleese and Booth turning up for the resumption of filming in separate taxis. "Connie and I, as far as I can remember, got divorced," he said. She said: "Fawlty Towers couldn't save our marriage but it did become a kind of refuge for our demons." By then, she added, both were undergoing group therapy. Cut to footage of Fawlty squat-hopping along the upper landing, to the astonishment of visiting head-doctors.
Cleese today speaks like he's still receiving help. He's quite Californian now, quite gushy, and he made an inappropriate remark about sex causing me to think that, post-Booth, he's been hanging around with the wrong kind of women. Recently a girlfriend blabbed about his "nice package". Fawlty would be appalled by such salacious talk, although it's unfair to wish that Cleese was more like his comedy monster, condemned to separate beds since the death of the old king. All in all, that autobiography, if it ever gets written, should be a terrific read.
Basil Fawlty considered himself one of the most advanced forms of human life, at least in Torquay: everyone else not invited to Gourmet Night was rubbish and riff-raff. In The Incredible Human Journey, anthropologist Alice Roberts went back to the very beginning, or at least to Ethiopia's Omo River, home to a 195,000-year-old tribe from which new-ish DNA research claims we're all descended.
Fascinating stuff, to be sure, but are we really any more advanced than those hairy, flint-knife enthusiasts if the BBC thinks we need to see the jolly-hockey-sticks Roberts bed down in the wild for some Blair Witch-style snivelling into a camcorder ("Is that a leopard? Is that a hyena? I really am quite scared now!") in order to illustrate that jungles are, golly and gosh, dangerous places? I can feel a Basil-style rant coming on: why is TV so self-indulgent and solipsistic now? Why does there always have to be a "journey"? I mean, what is the point …?
Flight Of The Conchords returned for a second series with New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo finally sacking their berkish manager Murray. He told the boys they were "persona non regatta – you know what that means?" The one with the spectacular sideys ventured: "That we're not at the yacht race?" Unfortunately that was as good as the opener got, suggesting this quirky show has run out of good jokes already. Mind you, even in the week of a spurious anniversary, Fawlty Towers was bound to make every other comedy seem as vital as Manuel's flamenco-playing, or Sybil's reading matter for the hairdryer.
FAWLTY TOWERS: RE-OPENEDGOLD Thursday, 9.40pm
THE INCREDIBLE HUMAN JOURNEY BBC2 Sunday, 9.30pm
FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS BBC4 Tuesday, 10.05pm
