John Cleese Claims That Young People ‘Won’t Understand’ the New ‘Fawlty Towers’

Monty Python legend/old man yelling out cloud John Cleese recently appeared on BBC One’s Morning Live to promote the stage revival of Fawlty Towers that’s currently playing in London. Cleese doesn’t act in the play, but he scripted the adaptation, hence why it’s billed as “John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers” (an unforgivable act of Connie Booth erasure).

Cleese also took the opportunity to discuss the production of the original series, specifically how it was as stressful and chaotic as Basil Fawlty’s hotel. “There wasn’t time to hang around — we had two hours to record that show,” Cleese recalled. “We started at 8 and finished at 10, and if it wasn’t in the can, there wasn’t an ending to the show.”

Cleese also claimed that the hurried schedule frequently led him to worry that episodes wouldn’t be completed: “Whenever there was a break, I was looking at my watch and thinking, ‘Oh my god are we going to get this done?’ Two hours and we used to record 140 pages. The average sitcom has 65 pages so we used to do double the amount, because it was so fast-paced.”

Incidentally, Cleese may be exaggerating slightly about the script lengths. One copy of an original Fawlty Towers script, originally owned by a BBC cameraman, sold at auction for a record £12,000 last year — and it was only 98 pages.

What about the new Fawlty Towers? The reboot, which will supposedly star Cleese, his daughter Camilla and absolutely nobody else from the original show? Cleese previously revealed that the show will take place, not in the English coastal town of Torquay, but in the Caribbean. “There’s no point in setting it in Torquay, we’ve done that,” Cleese reasoned. And Basil’s wife, Sybil Fawlty (originally played by retired actress Prunella Scales) will be dead during the events of the new show.

Camilla Cleese will play Basil’s child, who was apparently conceived during an affair with a guest. “She’s going to be my illegitimate daughter,” John Cleese explained, “because one pretty lady one day came to stay at Fawlty Towers when Sybil wasn’t there and she seduced Basil for a bet." 

In addition to concocting elaborate sexual backstories in order to sweatily explain the new show’s nepo baby-friendly premise, Cleese has said that the new show will be so anti-woke that the youth of today won’t even be able to comprehend it. Earlier this year, Cleese bragged that Fawlty Towers 2.0 won’t be updated to cater to modern sensitivities, and condescendingly suggested that “people probably won’t understand it at the beginning if they’re young, but they’ll pick it up."

During his Morning Live chat, Cleese also suggested that Fawlty Towers is actually more popular than Monty Python ever was. “I never thought it would match Python in terms of audience popularity and actually in a funny kind of way it has an even bigger audience, especially in the U.K.,” Cleese declared. 

We’ll keep our eyes peeled for the inevitable Eric Idle social media rebuttal.

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