Basil Fawlty
Fawlty Towers character
First appearance	"A Touch of Class" (1975)
Created by	John Cleese Connie Booth
Based on	Donald Sinclair
Portrayed by	John Cleese
In-universe information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Hotelier
Affiliation	British Army
Spouse	Sybil Fawlty (wife)
Nationality	British

Basil Fawlty is the main character of the 1970s British sitcom Fawlty Towers, played by John Cleese. The proprietor of the hotel Fawlty Towers, he is a cynical and misanthropic snob, desperate to attract hotel guests from the British upper class. His attempts to run the hotel, however, often end in farce. Possessing a dry, sarcastic wit, Basil has become an iconic British comedy character who remains widely known to the public despite only 12 half-hour episodes ever having been made. Cleese would receive the 1980 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance.^[1] In a 2001 poll conducted by Channel 4, Basil was ranked second on their list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters.^[2][3]

Known for his quotable rants,^[4] the character was inspired by Donald Sinclair, an eccentric, inhospitable hotel owner whom Cleese had encountered when he stayed at his hotel (Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, Devonshire) along with the rest of Monty Python in May 1970.^[5]

Personality

Basil, who runs the titular hotel in Torquay, is a misanthropic, lazy, and egotistical snob. In the episode "Communication Problems," Spanish hotel waiter Manuel said Basil is from Swanage, although Manuel is prone to making mistakes.

Basil is alleged to have served in the British Army. He once claims: "I fought in the Korean War, you know. I killed four men" to which his wife sarcastically replies, "He was in the Catering Corps; he used to poison them". He often wears military ties, and sports a military-type moustache. He also claims to have sustained a shrapnel injury to his leg, which has a tendency to flare up at convenient moments – usually when Sybil asks him an awkward question. (In reality, John Cleese was only 14 years old when the Korean War ended, suggesting that Basil is either several years older than the actor playing him, or is a textbook case of stolen valour.) Basil is often seen wearing regimental ties, most frequently that of the East Lancashire Regiment, and sometimes that of the Gordon Highlanders. He is also seen wearing a Winchester College tie (in "The Kipper and the Corpse"), and a Balliol College, Oxford tie (in "The Germans"). It is likely that these regimental and old boy ties are all worn dishonestly; as yet another example of Basil's snobbery and pretentiousness.

Basil's main aspiration is to attract "respectable" hotel guests from titled members of the British upper class. He knows that the successful running of the hotel is the only means of attracting the nobility as guests, yet Basil lacks the necessary work ethic to run the hotel to the standard the aristocracy would insist upon and refuses to be pleasant to employees or hotel customers who he despises. For example, Basil often refers to his overwhelmingly working class-accented guests as "plebs" and "riff-raff". For this reason, John Cleese has described Basil Fawlty as a man who could run a top-notch hotel if he didn't have all the guests getting in the way.

In contrast, Basil's far more customer-service oriented wife Sybil often has to deal with the fallout of his horrible behaviour, with varying degrees of success. John Cleese has made the point that, on account of Basil's inner need to conflict with his wife's wishes, "Basil couldn't be Basil if he didn't have Sybil".

Basil is generally desperate to avoid his wife's wrath, and his plans often conflict with hers, but he mostly fails to stand up to her. She is often verbally abusive towards him (describing him as "an ageing, brilliantined stick insect") and though he is much taller than Sybil, he often finds himself on the receiving end of her temper, expressed both verbally and physically.^[6] Basil does occasionally manage to gain the upper hand. In "The Kipper and the Corpse", Sybil refuses to help Basil dispose of the body of recently deceased guest Mr. Leeman. Basil gets his revenge towards the end of the episode, when he asks a number of disgruntled guests to direct their complaints towards Sybil. In "The Psychiatrist", he has a row with Sybil during which he calls his wife a "rancorous, coiffured old sow". He often addresses her (in a faux-romantic way) with insults such as "my little nest of vipers".^[7]

Basil Fawlty routinely expresses staunch Extreme nationalist and High Tory ideology. For example, in "The Wedding Party", Basil shows open disgust towards a young couple having premarital sex, even though he is never shown reading the Christian Bible or attending religious services. This is because, similarly to other narcissists, Basil refuses to live up to his own ideals, such as Christian morality or the traditional values and etiquette demanded of an English gentleman. Instead , Basil always insists that everyone else follow them. He, on the other hand, treats everyone around him with a shocking barrage of insults and a chilling level of disrespect.

In "The Germans", Basil blames the failure of the hotel's fire extinguisher on "bloody Wilson", meaning the-then Labour Party Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. He is also frequently furious about labour unions and strike action – in "A Touch of Class", he launches into a tirade against dustmen and postmen going on strike, and in "The Kipper and the Corpse" he is so enraged by news of a car strike that he fails to notice that one of his guests is dead.

John Cleese has also described Basil Fawlty as "buried in the past",^[8][9][10] as he utterly despises living in the England of the 1970s and instead pines for the "good old days" when the British Empire still existed, when the Federal Republic of Germany was still Nazi Germany, and when Great Britain was still a Great Power and the main center of world geopolitics. Basil also often mentions British military history, but usually just battles in which the British armed forces were victorious.

For this reason, Basil Fawlty is particularly unwilling to move on from the era of the Second World War, particularly because the aftermath witnessed West Germany's reconciliation and Cold War alliance with Great Britain and, even worse from Basil's perspective, the rapid global collapse of the British Empire.

This is why, in the 1975 episode "The Germans", which John Cleese has explained was intended, "to make fun of the British obsession with the Second World War",^[11][12][13] Basil Fawlty expects hotel guests visiting from West Germany and orders everyone about with the panic-stricken catchphrase, "They're Germans! Don't mention the war!" But after receiving a severe concussion from a falling moose head, Fawlty obliviously waits on the German guests with a highly insulting barrage of anti-German sentiment, German-equals-Nazi jokes, a goose stepping Adolf Hitler impression, and tasteless references to Royal Air Force's firebombing attacks against German cities.

At first, the German tourists are heartsick and one of the German women, who is just the right age to have PTSD from childhood memories of Allied bombing raids, is visibly weeping. But then, Fawlty, and racist and senile British World War I veteran Major Gowen, proceed to make such complete fools of themselves that the German tourists are left shaking their heads in shocked and speechless disbelief. One of the German men finally wonders out loud, "How ever did they win?"

Basil takes many of his frustrations out on the hapless waiter Manuel, physically abusing and bullying him in a variety of ways. The relationship between Basil Fawlty and Manuel has been the subject of academic discourse.^[14] On occasions he also assaults others, such as choking a guest in "The Hotel Inspectors", kneeing Major Gowen in "Basil the Rat", "accidentally" elbowing a young boy in the head in "Gourmet Night" and, in the same episode, famously beating his "vicious bastard" of a car with a tree branch when it breaks down.^[6]

Another eccentricity affecting Basil is that of occasionally swapping words around in a sentence while propounding a falsehood, for instance in "The Anniversary" when he announces to the party guests that it's "perfectly Sybil! Simple's not well. She's lost her throat and her voice hurts", and – less obviously – reassuring himself as much as his wife in "The Wedding Party" that the sound of knocking on his bedroom door was "probably some key who forgot the guest for their door". He also has difficulty disconnecting his thought-process from unrelated events, as in "The Wedding Party", when he is looking through Polly's sketchbook of life-drawing pictures and answers the telephone with, "Hello, Fawlty Titties?" or in "The Psychiatrist", where, after inadvertently staining a female guest with paint, he realises that Sybil has noticed, and in panic puts his hands on the guest's breasts as a means of stopping her from seeing it.

His desire to elevate his class status is exemplified in the unusual care and respect he affords upper class guests, such as Lord Melbury (who turned out to be a con man and an impostor), Mrs Peignoir (a wealthy French antique dealer) and Major Gowen, an elderly ex-soldier and recurring character – although Basil is sometimes scathing towards him, frequently alluding to his senility and his frequenting of the hotel bar ("drunken old sod"). He has particular respect for doctors, having once aspired to be one himself, and shows a reverential attitude to Dr. Abbott in "The Psychiatrist" (until he learns that Dr Abbott is a psychiatrist), and Dr Price in "The Kipper and the Corpse" (until Dr Price begins to ask awkward questions about the death of Mr. Leeman, and inconveniently requests sausages for breakfast).

Basil is constantly spiteful and abusive to guests, and liable to pick up a tail-end of a situation (often panicking when things go wrong) and turn it into a farcical misunderstanding. Basil is known for his tight-fisted attitude to the hotel's expenses, employing completely incompetent builder O'Reilly in "The Builders" simply because he was cheap. Notoriously, he also becomes indignant whenever a guest makes a request, even if the request is quite reasonable. In "The Kipper and the Corpse", he is offended when a sickly guest politely asked for breakfast in bed, and Basil responds by sarcastically asking him which type of wood he would like his breakfast tray made out of.

Basil has been married to Sybil since 17 April 1964, although Sybil once sarcastically stated that they have been married since 1485. They very rarely show any signs of affection towards one another (in "The Wedding Party" they are shown to sleep in separate beds); in "A Touch of Class", Basil kisses Sybil but she tells him not to, and in "Gourmet Night" Sybil shows affection towards Basil while she is drunk, to which he responds telling her to "drink another vat of wine". "The Anniversary" is one of the few episodes in which Basil tries to be nice to Sybil, who misreads the situation and believes he has forgotten their anniversary.

Reprisals

John Cleese portrayed Basil in a 1980 special of the British rock band, Queen. Basil is seen at a bar and is asked what he thinks of Queen, to which he shows disgust and calls the music "rock rubbish." He asks, "What do you need that for when you got Beethoven?" ^[15]

John Cleese reprised the role of Basil in the song "Don't Mention the World Cup", an allusion to "don't mention the war" from the Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans", for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, which was played in Germany.^[16][17]

Cleese appeared as Basil in a 2016 TV advertisement for Specsavers during which, in a reference to the Fawlty Towers episode "Gourmet Night" where the character thrashes his car with a branch, Basil accidentally attacks an adjacent police car, mistaking it for his own.^[18]

In February 2023 a revival of Fawlty Towers was announced with Cleese reprising the role as an older Basil still running the hotel whilst trying to fit into the modern world.

Origins

Fawlty Towers was inspired by the Monty Python team's stay in the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay. Cleese and Booth stayed on at the hotel after filming for the Python show had finished. The owner, Mr Donald Sinclair,^[19] was very rude, throwing a bus timetable at a guest who asked when the next bus to town would arrive and placing Eric Idle's suitcase behind a wall in the garden in case it contained a bomb (actually it contained a ticking alarm clock). He also criticised the American-born Terry Gilliam's table manners for being too American (he had the fork in what Sinclair considered to be the wrong hand while eating). Cleese used the name "Donald Sinclair" for his character in the 2001 film Rat Race. In the episode "The Builders", Fawlty refers to a local hotel or restaurant called "Gleneagles" while talking to Miss Gatsby and Miss Tibbs. Cleese once lived in London's Basil Street.

Cultural references

In the British fantasy series Redwall, an extremely sarcastic and imprudent anthropomorphic hare, "Basil Stag Hare", makes an appearance. Author Brian Jacques claims to have based his name and character on Basil Fawlty.

In the 2004 film Shrek 2, John Cleese's character of King Harold references the character by using Fawlty's excuse of "war wound shrapnel" with "Just the old Crusade wound playing up a bit".

In the 2016 movie Deadpool, one of the scenes sees the titular character (played by Ryan Reynolds) asking Ajax (played by Ed Skrein) what his name is, he asks many names and one of them is Basil Fawlty.

In the 2016 expansion Blood and Wine for the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, there is a character named Barnabas-Basil Foulty who acts as Geralt's majordomo.

In the comedy-drama anthology series The White Lotus, resort manager Armand (played by Murray Bartlett) bears a strong physical resemblance to Basil Fawlty. Like Basil he frequently displays erratic and sarcastic behaviour and is highly antagonistic towards certain guests.

Adaptations

When Fawlty Towers was remade for American television, the character of Basil Fawlty was also remade. In the 1978 remake Snavely, Basil's character is recreated as loud-mouthed Henry Snavely. In Amanda's, the character was recreated somewhat as the rude Amanda Cartwright, and in Payne, the character appeared as meddlesome Royal Payne.

In Hotel de Botel (the Dutch adaptation of Fawlty Towers), the Basil character was called Koos Overwater and was played by Dutch comedian and actor Andre van Duin.