May 2011 Archives

By Roz Laws

IN 1970, the Monty Python team stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, where they encountered someone John Cleese describes as "the most marvellously rude man I've ever met".

Owner Donald Sinclair snapped at guests, told off Terry Gilliam for holding his fork in the wrong hand and removed Eric Idle's bag because he feared it was a bomb placed by a disgruntled ex-employee.

While the other Pythons moved to another hotel, Cleese and his wife Connie Booth were fascinated with Sinclair and stayed on to study him. Five years later, he was immortalised on TV in the shape of Basil Fawlty.

Cleese played the hen-pecked owner of the Torquay hotel Fawlty Towers, while Booth was maid Polly Sherman.

Prunella Scales played the formidable Sybil Fawlty, variously described as the "toxic midget" and "rancorous, coiffured old sow" by her husband.

And Andrew Sachs was Spanish waiter Manuel, who mostly said 'Que?' and kept a pet rat called Basil he insisted was a Siberian hamster.

It's a wonder that anyone ever stayed in the hotel, as guests were looked down on by snobby Basil, who called them "riff-raff" and "cretins".

Only 12 episodes were made, six shown in 1975 and the rest in the second series, which didn't air until 1979. The delay has been put down to an unwillingness by Booth to write any more episodes, as she and Cleese were divorced by then.

The comedy nearly wasn't shown at all, as the first script was dismissed by a BBC executive as "full of clichéd situations and stereotypical characters".

Even when it was broadcast, it wasn't an immediate hit - one review had the headline 'Long John Short On Jokes'.

But ratings and acclaim picked up and in 2000, Fawlty Towers came top in a British Film Institute list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes.

In the 1970s, it was sold to 17 countries including Spain, although it was initially a flop there. It was successfully resold after Manuel's nationality was changed to Italian or, in the Catalan region, Mexican.

While set in Torquay, the white hotel pictured was actually the Wooburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire, which has since been demolished and a housing estate built.

The sign outside had differently rearranged letters in each episode, spelling out phrases like Fatty Owls, Flay Otters and Watery Fowls.

Memorable lines of dialogue include "Don't mention the war" and "Duck's off", along with "Can't we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? Next contestant, Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, specialist subject, the bleedin' obvious."

Cleese revealed that his favourite scene is when Basil attempts to hold a fire drill.

In other trivia, the hotel has 26 rooms, the final episode was broadcast seven months after the other five because of a union strike at the BBC, and Andrew Sachs received £700 in compensation after being burned in a kitchen fire during the making of The Germans episode.

HOW disappointing that The Apprentice failed to show much of Birmingham last night.

Lord Alan Sugar made a big deal of sending his candidates to our 'wonderful' city, yet viewers failed to see why it's so great.

Compared to all the swooping shots of London, showing off the Gherkin and other landmarks, we just got a few quick glimpses of the Bullring.

And the other location for the beauty treatment challenge got even less airtime. Blink and you'd miss the outside of Merry Hill, merely described as an "out of town" shopping centre.

So out of town that it's actually in another town.

Here Susan patronisingly complained that people weren't buying her products because they were 'poor'. Maybe it's because we are more sensible with our money and don't want to waste it on overpriced gunk.

Susie is the yo-yo candidate - one week she's great, the next hopeless.

I'm still loving Tom and Jim, while Leon is just scary with his weird finger pulling trick. He's also ridiculous, with his "I can't promote this, I've got a girlfriend!" whining.

Surely he and Vincent are still firmly in the firing line.

I'm not sure why I find Made In Chelsea so totes fascinating, sweetie.

Maybe it's because I can't work out if any of it is real or not. They surely couldn't invent such stupid characters as these aristocratic folk in the latest so-called 'reality' series.

One very posh girl - I forget her name, Binky or Camilla or Tiggy or some such - wanted to organise a charity bash to raise money for blind people because her mother is partially-sighted in one eye and - horrors - can't drive at night. Surely a chauffeur puts paid to that horrendous disability?

One of the fundraising ideas was to sell Louboutin designer shoes "even though they can't see the red soles". Even stuck-up Francis thought that was tasteless.

He rather blew any Brownie points he'd won by then pompously declaring: "Business is the warfare of the modern age and I'm a general", later followed by "Business is a jungle but I'm an animal lover".

I expected him to start spouting, Apprentice-style, about fields of ponies.

Clearly they didn't make up this ridiculous exchange, but some parts of Made In Chelsea look horribly contrived, with all the stilted conversations and awkward silences.

I'm not at all convinced about the love triangle. Are there real feelings being messed with here or is it all for the cameras?

I really felt for Ollie's girlfriend when he dumped her, but has anyone suggested that the real reason behind it could be that he's quite possibly gay?

I mean, TBH, OMG!

Image by jamescronin via Flickr

Each time The Apprentice starts I wonder if it can keep on delivering quality entertainment, each time it proves that it can.

The formula is perfect....

1 Very rich bloke with a grumpy old face only his mother could love
+
2 Gurning sidekicks with a patronising manner and a barrowload of well-timed glares
and grimaces
+
12 deluded and egotistical drongos
=
TV heaven.

The line that reassured me all was well was when one drongo said to another drongo in a Braveheart esque rallying call "Come on, let's make soup like we have never made soup before."

The response from the other drongo?

"We never have made soup before."

It's amazing how quickly you can go off someone.

The first time I saw Edward on The Apprentice, I really warmed to him.

Everyone was bragging about their jobs, the firms they'd set up, their 'global consultancies' and their inventions (a curved nail file - wow, revolutionary!).

Then good old Ed piped up "I'm a humble accountant really".

I actually wrote down in my notes "Bless, I like you - but you won't win".

I was right about the second bit, but this was not the real Edward. In the blink of an eye, he turned from being this humble bloke into a bombastic, obtuse, really annoying man.

He kept repeating "I didn't want to speculate", "Don't fit the mould" and "It's all there" in the boardroom, then whined "I'm the youngest and the shortest". Of course he was getting fired, a decision confirmed when he walked out in a huff without so much as a 'thank you for the opportunity'.

Walsall's Melody should do well after shining in the first challenge. I am torn between wanting her to succeed because she's a Midlander and I kind of admire her, to disliking her bragging about her 'bold risks' and being friends with Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.

And then there's her awful catchprase: "Don't tell me sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon." Which makes no sense at all.

Other amusing candidates include musketeer Vincent, who thinks he's really good-looking but isn't.

Then there's Edna, with her phobia of limp handshakes, who really doesn't look like an Edna.

My money is on lovely Ulsterman Jim, though I also like Michael Sheen lookalike Tom.

This is shaping up into another brilliant series, though the main question remains. Who would want to go into an 'uncivil partnership' with grumpy Lord Sugar? Surely he's the work colleague from hell.

One of the great mysteries of TV, as far as I'm concerned, is its obsession with grime and filth.

And I'm not talking about a style of hip hop music or rude programmes.

I mean actual dirt and filth.

I just cannot understand why anyone would want to watch people with disgusting jobs like hygiene inspector, binman or working down a sewer.

Series like Grimefighters make me heave. And why on earth anyone wants to sit through horrible programmes like BBC2's Filthy Cities is beyond me.

Neil Morrissey seems oddly obsessed with the subject. He volunteered to go into the sewers for an edition of Celebrity Grimefighters (surely this was scraping the reality show barrel), and now he's narrating yet another new series on the subject, Channel 5's Supersize Grime.

Any shows about girme are bad enough, but having them supersized is just my idea of hell, thanks.

One of the beauties of the internet is its immediacy - no sooner has something happened, than we can all find out about it on the web.

Like the earth-shattering news I've just read that Cheryl Cole IS going to be a judge on the US X Factor. Phew! What a relief, I was worried for a bit that our Chezza might not be 'worth it' after all.

Television shows, unless they're live, don't have such an instant response. Even one like Channel 4's Ten O'Clock Live is largely scripted in advance.

One of the best, Have I Got News For You, is filmed a day or two before transmission, which works pretty well.

But what I can't understand is the increasingly habit of repeating 'topical' shows. And not just to fill the Dave and BBC3 airways, which are full of old episodes of Mock The Week, HIGNFY and Russell Howard's Good News, but also on the main channels.

One of the barmiest bit of scheduling I've seen recently is repeating an episode of Frank Skinner's Opinionated tomorrow night on BBC2 at 10pm.

If they wish, viewers can watch the Black Country funnyman chewing over 'the week's news' - ie the news from April 30 2010. His guests, Lee Mack and Sarah Millican, are funny, but why should we want to hear them talk about things that happened a whole year ago?

I could understand more if this was a late-night repeat, but a primetime slot - and tagged on to the end of the latest series as if to fool us into thinking it's a new episode - is a waste of airtime.

Topical shows should be just that, so stop fobbing us off with old news.