'A perfectly calibrated Swiss watch of cringe': why Fawlty Towers remains the greatest ever sitcom, 50 years on

[eShirl]

hard to believe it's 50 years old today

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/sep/19/fawlty-towers-greatest-ever-sitcom-50-years-on

The first episode of Fawlty Towers was broadcast on 19 September 1975. We are now half a century distant from that point; as far away as the first episode of Fawlty Towers was from John Logie Baird’s first successful transmission of greyscale television pictures in 1925. And, while the creation of Fawlty Towers wasn’t a technical breakthrough on quite the same level, Fawlty Towers does feel almost as fundamental and foundational to the medium. Like the music of the Beatles, it’s become part of the dominant cultural language of the era.

In a 2019 list compiled by the Radio Times, the show was named the greatest ever British sitcom. Has anyone ever done it better? Fifty years seems a reasonable point at which to assess the show’s legacy and conclude that they probably haven’t. And even if anyone has, they were almost certainly following a template that John Cleese and Connie Booth’s English Riviera romp established.

The apparent genesis of Fawlty Towers seems too good to be true and very easy to imagine. During the filming of the second season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the cast were staying at a hotel in Torquay. Thanks to the uptight, schoolmasterly proprietor, it was an interesting visit. He made a habit of waiting in the lobby for the group to return after an evening out, and even demonstrated the correct British use of a knife and fork to the American Python Terry Gilliam.

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There isn’t much of Fawlty Towers to watch. Two seasons of six episodes each, with a three-and-a-half-year gap between them. The writing of the second season was shadowed by the disintegration of Cleese and Booth’s marriage and Booth subsequently disappeared from the public eye. And yet even this scarcity feels like a feature rather than a bug. It didn’t decline into mediocrity. As such, its brevity has become a beacon for other sitcom writers – the creators of The Office and The Young Ones both cited the show’s decision to quit while they were ahead as an example.
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