John Cleese reflects on 50 years of Fawlty Towers ahead of UK stage tour

“My moment of great happiness was when we started doing the stage auditions. The sheer quality of the people... I was astonished. We could have had three Basils, a couple of Sybils and three Manuels, they were so good. And I thought: it can’t really go wrong because (a) the material is fundamentally funny and (b) the theatre is absolutely the best venue for farce.”

Fellow Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam came to the first night: “I was thrilled, they really loved it." The play, which interweaves three episodes (The Hotel Inspectors, The Germans and Communication Problems, plus a smidgen of one other) works like a dream, with its ingenious take on a familiar set, pacey direction and huge laugh count. Even the cosy, string-quartet theme tune by Dennis Wilson gets a good workout, and you may spot the odd dislodged letter.

It took me right back to appointment-to-view evenings in front of the family television, when we young ones laughed until we hurt, and couldn't wait to discuss the episode at school the following day. Endlessly quotable, the show famously overran the traditional 30-minute sitcom slot due to its packed plotlines.

The play opened at London’s Apollo Theatre in May, the run was extended to next March, and a UK tour will follow that in the 50th anniversary year, but it may surprise many to learn that the stage show debuted in Australia in 2016. Was that basically the same production? "Absolutely right, yes," says Cleese.

Was there ever a eureka moment that he should turn it into a play? "It was a slowly evolving idea, various people had been making suggestions about a film, somebody wanted to do a musical, which would have been a disaster... But I had sold the theatrical rights to [producer and promoter] Phil McIntyre." This was around 2015, prior to testing out the show Down Under, with Caroline Jay Ranger directing.

"She had that template from Australia so that when she settled into doing the show in London, some of the uncertainties were removed because first of all it’s one set – that’s a big help – and secondly we’d already done the show once and had pretty much done any rewrites that were necessary. So we were dealing with something that was already very well rehearsed."

It seems a very flexible format; could other episodes be adapted? Plans are afoot, apparently. "I was so impressed with Adam [Jackson-Smith, who plays Basil], I said, would he like to work with me on another version. We could take three other shows and he’s already come up with a very good suggestion.”

Porridge and Likely Lads co-writer Dick Clement once said of good casting, “It’s the best favour you can do yourself." Would Cleese agree? "Yes. Absolutely. I mean when I saw Adam I just thought this is extraordinary. During the whole process when I was going in and watching a lot of performances and making suggestions, they come up and ask you questions and you say one word, and they go, 'Ah!' And they got it. It’s too easy when you’re working with people as good as that.

"People say, 'How do you feel about seeing it performed?' It’s hard for people to believe but I see myself much more as a writer than a performer. And therefore when I write something it doesn’t surprise me if somebody else does it, because I’m coming at it from that angle."

Prior to turning the sitcom into a stage play, did he have meetings with his first wife Connie Booth, with whom he co-wrote the original series? "Obviously I mentioned it to her, she was perfectly happy, but Connie retired from showbusiness a long time ago. She’s kept a very low profile since she became a therapist. But yes we talked to her about this because of course there are contractual matters so she needed to be contacted to get her permission."

But then Fawlty Towers, despite its ramshackle architecture, was built on firm comedy foundations. In 2019 a panel of experts voted it the greatest sitcom of them all in a Radio Times poll. Looking back, Cleese says, "To say one show is better than another is really a question of taste in humour but what you can say, it’s one of the best. It’s up there with a Ronnie Barker and it’s up there with Blackadder and it’s up there with The Young Ones and that’s the important thing.

"It’s in that small group of exceptional comedy programmes. But The Good Life, you see, that was an excellent comedy. Not as funny because it’s not farce, it’s a different type of comedy. What I love about farce is it’s basically always about the protagonist having done something that he or she but usually he has to cover up, and his attempts to cover it up get more and more complicated and so the emotional level is much higher than it is in ordinary light comedy, which means that the laughs are bigger."

Fawlty Towers ran on BBC2 for just 12 hilarious, precision-tooled episodes. Its married co-writers/co-stars Cleese and Connie Booth divorced after the first series in 1975 but continued to work together on the second in 1979.

Describing their writing process, he says, "Creative people are no more or less intelligent than the average reasonably intelligent people, but they know how to play, that is to say they know how to just let go and just have ideas and see where they go, without knowing whether they’re right or not. It’s a very experimental thing.

"In a sense it’s a little bit like doing improvisation without an audience. So when you’re working like that you can’t say there’s much of a plan. All you’re doing is listening to each other and trusting your sense of humour and suddenly you think, 'Oh, that would be funny.' And then you start working on that."

Cleese adds, "I don’t think Connie thinks this is true, but I always felt at the beginning I was writing Basil and Manuel and she was writing Sybil and Polly. And it was very helpful because I remember I suggested a line for Sybil, and Connie said, ‘No, a woman wouldn’t say that.’ And I thought, ‘I didn’t know that.’

"She was invaluable there: she was better on character, I was better on plot. I can get caught up in plot and then start putting the character maybe slightly off-centre and she was always the one who said, “No no, that’s not right for the character at that moment.

"Connie was an extraordinarily good actress; I saw a production of hers when she did The Glass Menagerie, the Tennessee Williams play, at Cambridge... she broke your heart.

"If you watch her in the scenes like I was the other day, in The Germans, nobody’s looking at her at all, they’re all looking at Basil. She just plays it so beautifully, she’s a very fine actress, so having all those instincts was incredibly helpful for somebody like me who’s quite good on plot but not so good on character.”

And does Cleese recall any nerves during the first TV episode to be recorded, nearly 50 years ago, on 23 December 1974? “I felt reasonably comfortable. It was a much simpler storyline than the other episodes because the main thing about the pilot is to establish the characters. And a lot of it was played at a slightly slower pace than later episodes.

"I just remember performing it to a reasonable reaction from the crowd – not great, but very reasonable – and I’m just thinking, 'Well this is OK, at least it isn’t embarrassing.' And one or two of my friends raved about it afterwards when I had a drink with them and I suddenly thought, ‘Oh, well maybe it’s better than I thought!’ I mean, it never occurred to me that it was going to get bigger viewing figures than Monty Python.

"Before the pilot was put out as a first episode [on 19 September 1975] a couple of small scenes were re-recorded, which were to do with Connie’s character – we made her an arts student rather than a philosophy student – and then they were cut into the pilot that we recorded."

Cleese admits that, such were the time restrictions, studio recordings could be stressful. "In those days you had to record the half-hour in two hours. And if you’re changing sets and costumes and also going back because the camera missed this or the actor got that line wrong, trying to get that done in two hours is pretty hair-raising.

"I began to realise after a time that even completing a show was an accomplishment, even if it wasn’t a very good show. So what you’re up against is the clock, and when you’re up against the clock and always looking at your watch – as I was, thinking, yes that’s fine we’re on schedule but we’ve dropped behind a bit, maybe we won’t be able to re-record that thing I got wrong in the first scene – when all that’s going on, you’re not really relaxing and playing. Most of that happens in rehearsal."

However, recalling various casting triumphs among both regular cast and guest stars does give Cleese a sense of satisfaction: "There were moments when I looked at people and I thought, 'How perfectly cast is this?'

"My abiding memory was dear Ballard Berkeley [who played the Major], who was cast by John Howard Davies [the original producer and director]. We had John doing the first six shows. He was an extraordinarily good child actor; he was a big star and went off and joined the navy. Although he was never as good on his cameras as some people, he was wonderful on casting and had extraordinary instincts.

"He came up with Ballard Berkeley and he also came up with Pru Scales [as Sybil Fawlty]. I had already marked Andrew [Sachs, as waiter Manuel] down because I’d seen him in an Alan Bennett play with Alec Guinness, Habeas Corpus.

"In The Psychiatrist episode, we had Basil Henson and the wonderful woman who was Brian Rix’s wife – Elspet Gray, I thought she was really fabulous – and you just think, 'How lucky we were to have these people.'

"Bernard Cribbins was up there at the very, very top, I think his performance was quite extraordinarily good [as pedantic Mr Hutchinson in The Hotel Inspectors], but I don’t remember anyone being weak... there was one actor who had a lot of trouble with his lines, and we got him through by sometimes recording one line at a time [laughs] and nobody’s ever noticed it because we did a lot of editing on those shows.

"I used to spend 20 hours editing each show because if you just tighten this up and you just say, 'No we don’t need those two lines' and then that transition is a little clumsy so let’s do it this way... if you do that lovingly, with literally every minute of the show, you finish up with Fawlty Towers!"

A TV sequel written with his daughter, Camilla Cleese, is still in development, “but it’s been slowed down because we’ve got so many other things going on.” Future projects include a musical of A Fish Called Wanda (the 1988 comedy film Cleese wrote) and a movie about Hollywood lookalikes. "We’ve had problems there because people in Hollywood, the good ones, get booked up about three years in advance."

With all that going on, what does Cleese do to unwind? "My guilty pleasure is watching live sport on television. I just love it. I love cricket: I love Somerset and I love England."

With the play, Cleese is happy to be part of a group creating laughter – he agrees we need it more than ever, and it's something he realised while watching the opening night of The Play from his box. "Afterwards the atmosphere in the theatre was so lovely, everybody was happy, people were smiling at each other, nobody was pretending that they were more important than someone else...

"I think humour is a very democratic thing, it’s very hard to be stuck up and superior if people are laughing, in fact it’s impossible, which is why a lot of very pompous, stuck-up people mistrust laughter because they can’t keep their pomposity up."

This particular Fawlty fan thanks Cleese for all the laughs over the years. "Oh, what a nice thing to say. I’m always happy when people say that to me. Thanks very much, bye-bye!"

Fawlty Towers – The Play is at the Apollo Theatre in London until 1 March 2025. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster and Love Theatre, as well as fawltytowerswestend.com.

The UK tour begins September 2025. Tickets go on sale from Monday 2nd December on ATG Tickets.

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