Surely everyone has heard of Fawlty Towers? One of the best British sitcoms if not the best starring John Cleese se as the hilarious Basil Fawlty, Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty and of course who could forget Andrew Sachs as Manuel! One of the biggest questions that people have for Cleese and Booth (polly) is why did they set the thing in Torquay??
Experience
With programmes like this you will find the writing to be brilliant and this is because they come from personal experiences. In fact Cleese based his own character on a hotel owner that he had spotted when staying in a hotel on Torquay when filming with the people from the Monty Python team.
Well in May of 1970 it would seem that the team booked in to the Gleneagles hotel and it is during this stay that Cleese noticed the strange behaviour the owner had with the guests at his hotel. John Cleese actually quotes much later on as “the most marvellously rude man I’ve ever met”. Some of the things Cleese is talking about is the owner throwing a timetable at a guest asking about bus times and also taking Eric Idles briefcase out into the garden because he thought it was a bomb. (There was a ticking alarm clock in it). In case you did not realise, this is the real life Basil Fawlty and after the pythons left Cleese and Booth stayed behind to further research into the character.
In the end there is no way that you are going to be visiting a hotel like this when it comes to Torquay, in fact they have some fantastic hotels there nowadays. It is worth thinking about one of those spa breaks or Torquay holidays when it comes to this as it is something that people enjoy. Is it too early to think about Christmas hotels Torquay?
Have a great time when you are there!