Various Cutaways of Rat

(You’ll need to have read this piece on the Fawlty Towers episode “Basil the Rat” and its two-day recording schedule, along with this short follow-up, in order to get anything out of this post. Also, fair warning: we get deep into the weeds with this one.)

Somebody recently emailed me with a reasonable enough question: where do I get all the old television scripts I use in my writing here on Dirty Feed?

You may perhaps expect me to be hanging around various libraries and archives, but for boring practical reasons, that isn’t usually the case.¹ Instead, I have various other sources. Some of them are already published in books, like the Absolutely Fabulous pilot.² Some of them are just sitting online if you know where to search, such as the pilot for Mary Tyler Moore. Some of them I simply get sent by friendly people every now and again. (Yes, I will write about that Love Thy Neighbour script one day, promise.)

Then there’s auction houses. And while I occasionally buy scripts from eBay and the like, I can’t afford to do that too often.³ But just occasionally, you get lucky. As I was when it came to Fawlty Towers, and – you’ve guessed it – “Basil the Rat”, or just “Rat”.

*   *   *

Last month at Ewbank’s Auctioneers, a rather special set of items came up, titled The Andrew Sachs Collection. It will not surprise you to learn that a huge part of these lots were Andrew’s original copies of Fawlty Towers scripts. It will also not surprise you to learn that they all went for sums I could not even begin to afford.

The script for “Rat” ended up going for £1,430, and if I had that kind of disposable income, I would have better hobbies than writing Dirty Feed, probably involving threesomes in the Bahamas. But while it would be incredibly useful to be able to read the whole thing, one of the pages of the script was photographed for the auction listing… and it just happens to be a rather interesting one.

I’ll give you a moment to recover. Actually, who needs threesomes in the Bahamas, anyway?

So the first thing which strikes me is the schedule for the Saturday and Sunday recordings is broadly what we expected it to be. Considering how many videos I had in my first article specifically stating that the insert recordings were on the 19th May, and the main records were on the 20th May, it’s nice to see that confirmed here.

And yet something about the schedule for the 20th gives me pause. I just want to quote what Bob Spiers says in the commentary for the episode again:

“I think we were able to actually get it together by something like 4 o’clock on the second day, and consequently we showed this I think to two audiences, which gave the actors to really play two separate performances, which they were delighted to do. So I think mainly this is the second performance, but again we used bits of both performances.

I don’t think any actor would turn that down. They know the first performance is like a proper dress rehearsal with an audience, so they can sense the timing and can sense where the laughs are coming.”

Now let’s look at the schedule for the Sunday:

There is no mention of an audience being present for the first recording of the show in the afternoon – the warm-up is only mentioned for the second session, in the evening. More to the point, the camera script differentiates between the two recordings, with the first only being called the dress run, and the second being the “real” recording.

Does this mean there wasn’t an audience present for the first recording, at odds with what Bob Spiers recalled? I’d be wary of saying that per se. It’s possible the camera script is just inaccurate – recording the show twice was unusual, and maybe it just wasn’t put down clearly on the page. It’s also possible that the decision to have an audience during the first recording was a last-minute decision, and that’s why it isn’t reflected in the camera script.

At this point, it’s going to be virtually impossible to prove it either way… unless someone comes up with an audience ticket which mentions the afternoon recording times.

*   *   *

And that’s still not all. Because this script page also tells us something I instinctively knew, but couldn’t prove: exactly which shots of the rat were to be pre-recorded as inserts was in flux, even at this late stage.

What can we glean from the above?

• Without the full script, the page numbers need a bit of working out. On the auction listing, there is another image featuring part of the scene in Manuel’s bedroom. This is Page 14; we can therefore figure out that the Miss Gatsby/Tibbs scene in the hall was probably Pages 18 through to 20.
• Page 43 is presumably the material with the Major in the bar, but even with the small amount of dialogue, the section would surely spill over more than one page. I suspect that only the initial sequence with the Major in the bar with the rat was intended to be pre-recorded; the adjoining material in the lobby and kitchen was decided later.
• Interestingly, none of the pre-recorded material with Basil confronting Terry, and later dropping the meat in the kitchen, is mentioned here. It’s possible that these were listed on the next page, but “+ Anything else necessary” does rather indicate that all the planned inserts at this point were listed here.
• In the final episode, we do indeed get cutaways of the rat in the dining room, and in Quentina’s handbag. What we don’t get is a shot of it in her handbag in the lobby, and even more crucially: we certainly don’t get a shot of the real rat in the biscuit tin! And thank God for that; replacing the brilliant puppet with a real rat would kill the joke.
• And finally, we get “Poss. Visual FX Rat scurrying” – or, in other words, they originally thought they might pre-record the shot of the rat-on-a-wire going from the lobby to the dining room. In the end, this was done in front of the audience. Possibly because they felt it would get a better reaction – or possibly because all the extras in the dining room weren’t present on the first day when they shot the inserts?

It may, of course, be possible to figure out more if I had access to the full script. (If you have a copy, I’d love to hear from you.) But one thing is for sure: they clearly planned to have more pre-recorded rat material than ended up in the final episode. The production obviously decided less was more.

I feel like I know both less and more after writing this damn post. That’s research for you.

With thanks to Anthony Dhanendran for pointing me towards the auction. But he didn’t give me a grand and a half to buy the script, did he? Selfish bastard.

1. Oh, you want a longer explanation? Fine. I believe I’m very careful here on Dirty Feed when it comes to copyright and fair dealing. I only use extracts of copyrighted works for the purposes of criticism or review – and the stuff I do here definitely counts as that.

   However, archives are generally a bit stricter than this when you’re actually quoting material they hold, and demand that you get permission from the copyright holder. It’s a) a faff, b) you might not get permission, and c) I seriously want to make sure I don’t upset anyone and make myself persona non grata by disobeying the rules. So with a lot of my stuff, it’s ironically easier to avoid official avenues. ↩

2. Though you have to be careful to figure out you’re not working from transcripts, or scripts which have been edited to take all the fun stuff out of them. ↩

3. I recently had to stop myself from buying the script for an episode of long-lost Bob Monkhouse sitcom The Big Noise. I still slightly regret controlling myself. ↩

4. Clearly, the numbers for exactly which VT machines would be available weren’t known when this script was printed. ↩

Read more about...

fawlty towers