TC8, 19th May 1979

What is special about the Fawlty Towers episode known variously as “Rat”, “Rats”, and nowadays as “Basil the Rat”?¹

Most obviously: the episode was delayed due to strike action at the BBC. Originally intended for broadcast on the 26th March 1979, it finally made it to air on the 25th October 1979, billed in the Radio Times as a “Fawlty Towers Special”. This is all an interesting topic in its own right, and something I’ll write about properly at some point.

Today’s subject matter is slightly more oblique. The delay the strike caused in recording the episode was much appreciated by director Bob Spiers, for a very particular reason. He talks about it on the DVD commentary for the show; I will quote it at length, because it’s all relevant.²

“As it turned out, it worked brilliantly to our advantage. because after we had read through, and I’d analysed just what was involved in this episode in terms of special effects and rats running around all over the place and just the number of scenes we had to do, it had finally become in my opinion totally and completely impossible to do this show with one day in the studio.

So I think we had to finally say the game was up, this was just too complex to achieve in one hit, and we needed to pre-record certain bits with the rat, and with other bits and pieces. Just given the amount of work that we had to do camera-rehearsing the show in general. It just would never, ever have worked.

So luckily at the last minute, with this little delay, I went cap in hand to the powers that be, and just finally had to admit defeat, really, and just say: listen, boys, this just ain’t gonna be possible. So very grudgingly, they agreed to allow me two days in the studio, and some pre-record time to do the special effects pieces. So this is an episode that had two days in the studio.

In other words: while every single other episode of Fawlty Towers had one day in the studio, “Basil the Rat” had two.³ A few years later, certain complicated sitcoms such as The Young Ones would have two days in the studio as a matter of course. But in 1979, it was not a common occurrence.

Those two recording days for “Basil the Rat” were the 19th and 20th May 1979⁴, in Studio 8 at Television Centre. On the 19th, they pre-recorded various scenes without an audience; on the 20th the rest of the episode was recorded with an audience present. Of course, the inserts recorded on the 19th would also be played into the audience sessions on the 20th⁵, in order for the audience to follow the story, and to record their reaction to the pre-recorded scenes.

So far, so good, and the story usually ends there. But, to quote a particularly troublesome guest at the hotel: “I’m not satisfied.” It’s all very well to hand-wave the pre-recorded sections as “certain bits with the rat, and with other bits and pieces”. I want to know exactly which bits they deemed complicated enough to need pre-recording. Of course, we can make some guesses from watching the episode, but that’s not good enough, is it?

What is good enough, is – waves vaguely – a scrap of paper I have here, which lists every single section of the show pre-recorded on the 19th May. And while it doesn’t give time codes for each pre-recorded section, it does list the actors involved, and the exact duration of each insert, which makes it all relatively easy to work out. And some scenes which turn out to have been pre-recorded are ones you really wouldn’t expect… at least, at first glance.

Let’s take a look. For each pre-recorded section, I’ve made a video which labels exactly when the audience recording transitions into the pre-recorded section, and then back to the audience material.

Scene 1 — John Cleese; Andrew Sachs (OOV).
Dur: 00’06”

Our first pre-recorded section is Basil’s quick trip across the landing to Manuel’s room:

All of Manuel’s singing would have been done live with the audience present, and just overlaid onto the pre-recorded shot.

Scene 2 — John Cleese; Andrew Sachs; Gilly Flower; Renee Roberts; Rat from Animal Actors.⁶
Dur: 00’43”

Basil’s encounter with Miss Gatsby and Miss Tibbs, again, on the landing set.⁷

So, why were these two scenes pre-recorded? It clearly isn’t the presence of the caged rat; that rat is present in scenes done in front of the studio audience, not least the scene in Manuel’s bedroom.

We don’t have direct word from Bob Spiers as to his thought process here, but I believe it’s easy enough to work out. These two scenes are the only scenes in the episode which take place on the upstairs landing set.⁸ Both scenes are also fairly short, and the first scene doesn’t have much true comic business, apart from an eye-roll from Basil; it’s really just a linking scene.

In other words: it clearly would have saved time during the audience recording to avoid having to set up the cameras twice for the landing scenes, and there would have been limited benefit in recording them with an audience anyway. These two scenes surely weren’t pre-recorded because they were difficult to shoot; it was purely to help speed up the main audience recording.

Incidentally, note that the cage Basil is holding switches hands once we cut back to the audience material in the lobby. This means that Fawlty Towers is rubbish and I hate it.

Scene 3 — Ballard Berkeley; Rat from Animal Actors; John Cleese; Brian Hall.
Dur: 00’45”

An obvious choice for a pre-recorded scene: the Major’s encounter with the rat.⁹

Yet even here, there is more to this sequence than meets the eye. You could quite easily guess that the bar sequence would be pre-recorded, but who knew that the following sequence with Basil walking into the kitchen and speaking to Terry would be part of that pre-record? As before, this section would have been done purely to save time during the main audience sessions.

Note that as soon as Basil enters the bar, we go back to material shot with the audience. By this point, the rat has disappeared, and with a proper dialogue sequence and BOFFO LAFFS, you really want to do that stuff with the audience present.

By the way, I particularly enjoy the audience member who clearly murmurs “Oh no…” when the Major leaves the room to get his gun.¹⁰

Scene 4 — John Cleese; Brian Hall.
Dur: 00’11”

Here is something even more unexpected. Who would have suspected that the following short scene with Terry in the kitchen was a pre-record?

And this is followed by…

Scene 5 — John Cleese; Brian Hall.
Dur: 00’23”

…another short scene in the kitchen, when Basil drops the meat:

While I think both of these are unexpected choices at first glance, it does become a more obvious choice when you examine them. Both scenes are, again, very plot-driven, with not an awful lot of actual comedy in there. Therefore, they’re another good choice to pre-record, in order to save time during the audience sessions.

Scene 6 — Sabina Franklyn; Rat from Animal Actors.
Dur: 00’04”¹¹

Our final two scenes aren’t really scenes; they’re just single shots. Firstly, we have the rat skulking around Quentina’s feet:¹²

Scene 7 — Sabina Franklyn; Rat from Animal Actors.
Dur: 00’05”¹³

And secondly, there’s the shot of the rat having climbed into her bag:

The reason for pre-recording these two shots is obvious; they are also the final two pieces of material in the show which were a pre-rec. Indeed, it’s striking how little of the episode was made in the studio on the 19th without the audience: just 2’13” of material, from an episode which lasts 33’42”.¹⁴ Of that material, vanishingly little of it – less than 30 seconds – actually involves live rat antics which would demand to be pre-recorded. Most of the material is simply linking sequences or plot-heavy stuff, where simply saving the number of setups required on the audience night is the real goal.

And perhaps most interesting of all: while Bob Spiers claimed that one reason to pre-record sections of this episode was because of “special effects pieces”, the brilliant shot of the prop rat being pulled on a wire from the lobby through to to the dining room was pleasingly done live in front of the audience, despite the effects work involved. But of course you want that live audience reaction for that moment – you wouldn’t get nearly such a good response if they’d pre-recorded it.¹⁵

Instead, most of the decisions with what to pre-record were boringly practical. And yet if anything, after looking at all this, I come away with an increased respect for the production. When it came to the crunch, and Fawlty Towers needed two days in the studio, they didn’t compromise and do entire funny scenes without the audience present. They carefully picked just the right scenes where the absence of the audience wouldn’t affect things too much.

It’s almost like the BBC in 1979 were really good at making comedy, or something.

With thanks to David Brunt for background in sitcom recording schedules, Pip Madeley for continuity observations, and Andrew Orton for set design insights. Thanks also to Tanya Jones for her usual editorial help.

1. The history of Fawlty Towers episode titles is too complex to go into here. Suffice to say that the episode titles as we now know them are not the ones used when the series was in production. ↩

2. Many people don’t like the Bob Spiers Fawlty Towers commentary, because he talks about boring things such as a pillar being removed from the upstairs landing set. I really enjoy the Bob Spiers Fawlty Towers commentary, because he talks about boring things such as a pillar being removed from the upstairs landing set. ↩

3. Not including reshoots made to the pilot, which is a special case, and not the kind of thing we’re talking about here. ↩

4. As per Andrew Pixley’s article on Series 2 of Fawlty Towers in TV Zone #152, and confirmed by an independent look at the production paperwork for the series. ↩

5. There were two audience sessions on the 20th, not one, but that’s a different article. ↩

6. The company Animal Actors, who supplied the rat used in the studio scenes, still exists today. That rat is used in every single shot which features a rat in the episode… except for one.

   The shot which didn’t use a rat from Animal Actors? That would be the short film sequence with Polly and Manuel walking away from the hotel early on in the episode. For this sequence, the paperwork states the rat was bought at “Ellis’s Pet Store”. This was a normal pet shop in Shepherd’s Bush, and is still there today.

   If you look carefully at the film sequence, you can tell it’s a different rat. It also looks slightly scarier and more unpleasant compared to the cultured specimen from Animal Actors. Dragged up in a rough neighbourhood, no doubt. ↩

7. There is some atypically bad staging in this scene which has always annoyed me; watch as Gilly Flower and Renee Roberts awkwardly crane their heads at an unnatural angle, purely so they only see the rat at the correct moment. ↩

8. Here’s a fun fact: the landing set only appears in “The Wedding Party” in Series 1; it doesn’t feature in any of the other five episodes of that series. As the set – in a slightly expanded form – is present in five out of the six episodes in Series 2, it makes you think it has far more presence in the first series than it actually does. ↩

9. You’ve never known pain until you’ve had to redo all your captions on multiple Fawlty Towers videos, because your original positioning obscured the view of the rat. ↩

10. Something I’ve wondered for years: at 25:53 into “The Germans”, is that an audience member shouting “Go and have a lie down”? It’s certainly somebody shouting something, and not an on-screen actor. ↩

11. The timings in the paperwork have been accurate up until this point, but this shot is closer to two seconds, not four. ↩

12. Yes, Sabina Franklyn’s character is called Quentina, which is something I never picked up on until writing this article. ↩

13. Again, this shot is closer to three seconds, not five. Even given the short duration of these two shots, it is a little peculiar that timings have been completely accurate until now. It’s possible that there was an earlier edit where these two shots were extended slightly, and that’s what the paperwork is based on, but who knows? ↩

14. Film sequences take up another 1’41”. ↩

15. You’d also have to pay for some actors present in the dining room set to do two days in the studio rather than one if you wanted to pre-record that shot. Although I am deeply amused by the fact that they seem to have got Sabina Franklyn in for two days in the studio, just for one of them to only involve recording shots of her legs. ↩

Read more about...

best of, fawlty towers