TV Comedy

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.

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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. ↩

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best of, fawlty towers

What is the most famous ending to an episode of Fawlty Towers? Surely “Gourmet Night” has to be up there, first broadcast on the 17th October 1975.

“Duck’s off, sorry.”

Great stuff, yes? Well, one of the delights with Fawlty Towers is hearing John Cleese endlessly tear apart classic moments of the show on his DVD commentary. It always bugged me that Basil doesn’t quite put the lid of the dish down correctly in the above scene, and Cleese concurs:

“When I put the dish down I should have cleanly covered the trifle. Then I should have waited longer before I leaned down and peeped…”

On the famous “Duck’s off, sorry” line, he’s happier:

“And that’s all you need at that moment – it’s almost a dying fall ending, there’s not a big laugh, but it rounds it off nicely.”

Yet there’s a mystery about this particular ending, which I first touched on a couple of years ago. And Cleese unfortunately doesn’t tackle it in the DVD commentary at all. Sitting on Getty Images is this intriguing photo, taken by Don Smith for the Radio Times, during the afternoon dress rehearsal of the episode.¹

What the bloody hell is our drunken chef Kurt doing there on the right, in Mrs Hall’s lap? At no point in the broadcast episode does he appear in that final scene. What’s going on?

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1. Note that they clearly didn’t want to waste a real trifle during the dress rehearsal. ↩

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best of, fawlty towers