“There Are Herrings on the Roof Again!”

Doing a parody of Fawlty Towers would, at first glance, seem a most inadvisable thing. Parodies of comedy are always a tricky proposition; parodies of one of the funniest comedies ever made is even more so.

This hasn’t stopped many of the great and the good attempting it over the decades. So to celebrate 50 years of Basil and the gang, let’s take a look at all the different take-offs of Fawlty Towers over the years. The good, the bad, and The Laughter Show.¹

The Mike Yarwood Christmas Show

TX: 27th December 1976 • BBC1

Mike Yarwood went through a spate of Basil Fawlty impressions, but this sketch from his 1976 Christmas show is the one to focus on. Partly because it’s so early; just a year after Series 1 of Fawlty Towers first aired, it’s by far the earliest parody of the show I could find.

Oh, and partly because the sketch clearly uses parts of the actual Fawlty Towers set, albeit rejigged to take less space in the studio:

Note that in the above, the window in the door to the office has been blanked out, so you can’t see that they haven’t erected the office set. And saving space in the studio is the clear rationale behind combining the lobby and the dining room, which gives a peculiar sense of visiting Fawlty Towers in an alternate universe:

Sadly, all the set nonsense above is pretty much the most interesting thing about the sketch, which is one of the the least effective parts of Yarwood’s 1976 show. I guess the ventriloquist stuff is making the point that Cleese occasionally talks through clenched teeth? Precious little of it is anything like Fawlty Towers at all; rather, it’s just an excuse for Yarwood to do his own material in a slightly different setting.

Nice to see Ballard Berkeley and Renee Roberts, though.²

Les & Dustin’s Laughter Show

TX: 15th February 1986 • BBC1

Well, this was definitely a show starring Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, so the title is three-quarters right.

I usually refrain from making comments like the above; I don’t make a habit of sneering at old comedy. But this really is dire. Dustin Gee’s Basil is absolutely bloody awful, and the sketch seems to be an extended excuse to make jokes against the French. And not even good jokes against the French. Oh, but Basil likes the Germans apparently. Did they forget about a certain famous episode?

The weirdness extends even to the basic setup – we never saw Basil and Sybil go out for a meal together in Fawlty Towers, it’s just not the kind of thing that the show did. Rubbish. Next!

Now – Something Else

TX: 8th May 1987 • BBC2

Now this is more like it. These days it’s easy to think of Rory Bremner and remember his Channel 4 material, but he did loads of programmes on the Beeb – two series of Now – Something Else in 1986-87, and five series of the imaginatively-titled Rory Bremner between 1988-92. Of course, most of this material is now lost in the ether, snarled up in the same “topical” quagmire which gives TV channels an excuse not to repeat something interesting.

Luckily, somebody has uploaded to YouTube a copy of the 1989 commercial VHS release The Best of Rory Bremner, which at least gives us a taster of these shows, and included in that is this great Fawlty Towers sketch. Based on Cleese’s support for the SDP-Liberal Alliance, it still contains enough recognisable references to Fawlty Towers which makes it loads of fun.³ My favourite bit:

BASIL: No, the SDP! My party!
MANUEL: Is Fawlty party!
BASIL: Yes! No, no, no it’s not, it’s superb…

“Superb” being, of course, the way Basil described the moose’s head in “The Germans”. Brilliant.

It’s also worth mentioning the set. The last time Fawlty Towers was recorded was in 1979; this is 1987, a full eight years later, and yet certain parts of the dining room set used here are clearly the original, particularly the door to the kitchen. A picture from the first series gives us the best comparison:

Now there’s something to ponder: when was that part of the original Fawlty Towers set finally dumped?

KYTV

TX: 21st March 1992 • BBC2

Warning: some mild nudity near the end of this video.

The Fawlty Towers link here is really just a moment, rather than the full sketch, but any excuse for some KYTV. “It’s over ‘ere, mate…”

Incidentally, the Russian Blind Date bit contains the funniest lighting a comedy show has ever had.

Goodness Gracious Me

TX: 19th February 2001 • BBC Two

Taken from the “Back Where They Came From” 2001 special, this is great, although Meera Syal steals the sketch with her brilliant Sybil impression. Bonus points too for the version of the theme tune at the beginning.

With the obvious parallel between the dispossessed Maharaja and Basil Fawlty – both have an inferiority complex, and think they deserve something greater – it’s perhaps worth noting that none of the sketches we’ve looked at so far have actually criticised Fawlty Towers itself. Instead, they’ve all used the show as a means of talking about something else. Will anybody be brave enough to actually poke the damn show for real?

Shooting Stars

TX: 22nd December 2002 • BBC Choice⁴

A sketch chiefly notable, as pointed out in this Reddit post, for the amount of work put into the recreation of the lobby set. A quick comparison shows that it’s a genuine recreation, rather than using any of the original elements, but for a short one-off sketch never to be used again, it really is quite extraordinary:

As for the sketch itself, I find the first half very funny – Johnny Vegas as the Major is a highlight – but the second half goes rather too much into the opaque side of Vic and Bob for my taste. It is, however, the first sketch in this article where I detect some real criticism of Fawlty Towers itself – there is definitely a general dim view of farce expressed here.

Incidentally, this sketch isn’t the funniest part of this Shooting Stars episode. The award for that goes to Vic Reeves asking Robin Gibb: “You worked with Dolly Parton – what was it like working with them?”⁵

The Friday Night Project

TX: 12th January 2007 • Channel 4

No thank you.⁶

The Peter Serafinowicz Show

TX: 11th October 2007 • BBC Two

My absolute favourite sketch in this article, from a show that I think – at least among a certain strata of comedy nerds – has grown and grown in stature over the years.⁷ And forget about Serafinowicz, for once – Alex Lowe does a quite extraordinary Basil Fawlty impersonation. “I beg your pardon?

The only problem is that as this particular sketch aired in the second episode, the rest of the chatline sketches in the series were inevitably a disappointment. I would have put it in the final episode of the run.

Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos

TX: 25th May 2014 • BBC Two

I’ve always struggled a bit with Story of the Twos. For every funny joke is another that doesn’t land quite right, and for every nice production decision, there are ones which I find utterly incomprehensible. Take a look at the supposed parody of Monty Python above – it doesn’t in any way look like the show in the slightest, with absolutely no attempt to try to capture the vibe of 70s studio VT at all. The show has always felt like an inferior cousin of End of an Era to me in many regards, but I feel it most of all in its lack of attention to detail in the parodies.

The small Fawlty Towers section is at least a slightly more credible representation of a Fawlty Towers film sequence. (The choice of a good location helps.) But my favourite part of this sketch isn’t really the Fawlty Towers bit, which really doesn’t do an awful lot that Vic and Bob didn’t already achieve. No, my favourite part is something that no other sketch in this article goes anywhere near: an attempt to capture the real John Cleese⁸, in late-era interview mode. And Enfield absolutely nails it, with an impression which feels like he’s been intently watching Cleese for years. “The arrogance of these people…”

Turns out it’s very difficult to land a real punch on one of the funniest comedy shows ever made. But landing a punch on one of the funniest men who ever lived? That’s perhaps a little easier.

With thanks to Tanya Jones, Darrell Maclaine and Mike Scott for suggestions, all of who have a far better memory for comedy over the years than I have. Thanks also to Gary Rodger for some spectacular archive research.

1. Look, I allow myself one cheap shot per year on this site. ↩

2. Speaking of Ballard Berkeley, I saw him in The Playbirds the other day. Sadly, he didn’t get to have sex with Mary Millington. Pity, it would have livened the film up a bit. ↩

3. Though you can tell that Bremner isn’t comfortable enough with being able to safely do the violence. ↩

4. Repeated a week later on BBC Two, on the 29th December. ↩

5. A joke which has provided something akin to scowls when I’ve told it to people in real life on at least two occasions. I am the new Jim Davidson. ↩

6. OK, fine, two cheap shots. ↩

7. All the people who still remember the show are those who love it, so it’s probably worth remembering it felt quite divisive at the time. I distinctly remember a conversation with my sister where she absolutely loathed the show and was bemused in what the hell I saw in it. ↩

8. Well, John Cheese-Shop-Sketch. Very Renwick/Marshall, that gag. ↩

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best of, fawlty towers, the peter serafinowicz show