It was during the filming of Monty Python's Flying Circus in 1971 that John Cleese and the rest of the team had the misfortune of staying in the Torquay hotel that was later to inspire him to create Fawlty Towers. The hotel in question was the Gleneagles Hotel (later to be mentioned in The Builders), run by a man called Donald Sinclair and his domineering wife.
John Cleese remembers Sinclair as being 'the rudest man I ever met.' When a guest asked Sinclair for the time of the next bus to town the manager threw the timetable at him, telling him to look it up himself. At one point his Eric Idle left his briefcase by the front door and on returning that evening found it had disappeared. He questioned the manager about it, who gestured towards a wall outside the entrance and replied that the briefcase was on the far side of it. When Eric Idle asked why, Sinclair explained, 'Well we thought it might be a bomb', later admitting, 'We've had some staff problems'. In the evening at dinner he criticised the way Terry Gilliam used his knife and fork, exclaiming in disbelief, 'We don't eat like that in this country!'
'He seemed to view us from the start as a colossal inconvenience', Michael Palin later remarked. After one night all the Pythons except John Cleese transferred to the nearby Imperial Hotel, but Cleese stayed on and was later joined by his wife, Connie Booth.
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The Gleneagles Hotel |
In 1973 John Cleese wrote the hotelier and his wife into an episode of Doctor in Charge, part of the long-running Doctor series based on the books of Richard Gordon. The episode, entitled Ill Feelings, was first screened on 3 February 1973.
Two years later when Cleese and his wife Connie Booth were trying to come up with ideas for a new series it took them only about twenty minutes to remember their experience in Torquay and come up with Fawlty Towers. The original hotelier was much smaller than his wife so the sizes had to be reversed in order to allow Cleese to star alongside Prunella Scales as Sybil.
Two series (twelve episodes) of Fawlty Towers were recorded in all, the first being broadcast in 1975 and the second in 1979. Although Cleese and Booth separated after the first six shows, the series lived on regardless.
After Fawlty Towers was made, John Cleese went back to see whether the original hotelier was still around but discovered that he had moved to Canada to join his daughter. Indeed the Gleneagles Hotel today seems to retain few links with the series, ironically proclaiming 'we stand by our reputation'.
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Sign outside the Gleneagles Hotel |
As well as the Gleneagles Hotel being the inspiration for the series, many of the shows were based on real life. For example, the idea of someone dying in the hotel was given to John Cleese by his friend Andrew Leeman (hence the name of the dead man in The Kipper and the Corpse), and the idea behing Mrs Richards was given to Cleese and Booth by a lady they met whilst on holiday in Monte Carlo.