Fawlty Towers

by Graham McCann

Fawlty Towers was only on television screens for 12 half-hour episodes, but it has stayed in viewer's lives ever since. The Major; "Don't mention the war!;" "He's from Barcelona;" Basil the Rat—everyone has a favorite line, moment, or character. In the first biography of the show, Graham McCann holds up to the light each of the unpredictable elements—the demented brilliance of John Cleese, his creative partnership with Connie Booth—that added up to an immortal sitcom, beloved all over the world, even in Barcelona.

Genres: Nonfiction, Comedy, Humor, Biography, Plays

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Kieran McAndrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twelve episodes of a comedy focussing on a hotel manager who is not only inept, but completely unlikeable, does not sound like a recipe for success, but 'Fawlty Towers' stands as the quintessential British situation comedy.

McCann's 'Fawlty Towers' puts the series in its context, both historically and creatively and the writing is well researched and consistently interesting.

[Benedict Reid]

A very slack book, put together with very little new information and using old newspaper clipping and the Voice over on the DVDs as the main source of information.

A pity really, because "Spike and Co." by the same author is very good... this one however was very paint-by-numbers. If it wasn't for interest in the topic, I probably wouldn't have got to the end... and I'm someone who finishes ever book I start.

[John Pearce · Rating 1 out of 5]

Faulty Towers was a masterpiece. It took a supremely unpromising premise - a damaged man in completely the wrong job - undergoing a nervous breakdown and turned it unto six hours of sometimes literally painfully funny comedy. It worked so well because it assembled a huge range of ideas based on an enormous variety of human experience and condensed all of them into intricately plotted, beautifully written scripts expertly acted by a cast conspicuously without a weak link. Mr McCann's book on the other hand spins out enough material for a long magazine article into a sixty thousand word book. The result is a book that tells us little that we didn't know or might have guessed, and almost nothing that we ply needed to know. It is, in the end, an unnecessary book.

That is not altogether Mr McCann's fault. Brilliant comedy, like great music, speaks for itself and any attempt to explain it simply gets in the way of the original. The late Frank Zappa said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture; Mr McCann's book suggests that the same stricture also applies to comedy - at least to comedy as great as Faulty Towers.

[Barkingstars · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is what you can expect from this book: quotes from the main people involved taken from pre-existing interviews (but no original interviews), synopsis of the episodes, some overview of the characters.

It’s all quite solid stuff. While the quotes are from pre-existing sources, I would say McCann does an excellent job of finding a wide variety of sources and pulls them together coherently.

On the downside, if you’ve watched the show as many times as I have, the synopsis are unavoidably dull and the character overviews don’t entirely work for me.

Overall this is a good effort at bringing together what is already out there, but it’s unlikely to satisfy hardcore fans who know all of this already.

[Kealan O'ver · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not a story that warrants an entire book especially when it amounts to just "John Cleese and Connie Booth made a sitcom and everybody liked it" without any really interesting back story behind it that everyone didn't already know. I also found myself skimming through a lot of it especially when he gave a very detailed breakdown of each episode, which anyone reading this will NOT need, along with a hefty amount of quotes from the show that I already knew off by heart. Very heavily padded.

[Tim Pieraccini · Rating 3 out of 5]

I see many staunch fans are complaining that this is cobbled together from extant sources and says nothing new, but as a more casual fan (I think FT is probably the best sitcom ever made, but I don't care so much about being made to laugh, per se) I knew pretty much none of the information, so this book worked well for me. I might have given it four stars had I not been made aware of the sources of most of it. And the Sunday Times gave it Humour Book of the Year. Hardcore fans are never satisfied; we know that by now!

[Timo · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a strange thing.... a biography where apparently the author has not interviewed or talked with anyone of the cast. Instead he has collected stuff from DVD extras, other books and newspapers. And to fill up the pages, there are detailed renditions of all the episodes.
At least there were some nice photos.

[Ian Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A light, breezy read that deals up a lot of information - some from well-known sources, some from fresh interviews just for the book - about the well-loved sitcom. There’s not a lot of new ground to be covered here, simply because it has been trodden over so many times before but Mr McCann beats a path that feels fresh.

[Andy Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant account on how the show was conceived, written and produced.

[Ian Wood · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Biography of a TV series is quite an unusual idea, a bit like the history of the India Tea Company except somewhat shorter lived. Some years ago I read a biography of John Cleese’s other great collaboration, Monty Python, not surprisingly called ‘Life of Python’ which succeeded as a biography due to the length of Python as well as the collaborations which it was born out of. ‘Fawlty Towers’ could have worked as a biography by concentration on the marriage of its writing team, John Cleese and Connie Booth, but this was sidelined in favour of lists of acting engagements of the shows principle actors.

This is not to say the book isn’t a pleasure to read,
I enjoyed reading the book but I don’t think any credit can go to Graham McCann as it was reading the priceless dialogue from the Fawlty Towers scripts, which are liberally quoted throughout the book, that I enjoyed. Of the background and production detail that the book quotes it really adds very little to my own knowledge of the background gleaned from newspaper articles and TV features throughout the years. McCann has interviewed all the surviving cast except John Cleese and Connie Booth, which gives the book the feel of watching the Manchester United reserves.

All in all I think that Graham McCann is cashing in on the saleable title ‘Fawlty Towers’ and that anyone whishing to consume this formidable sit-com in book form would be better served by buying the scripts.

[Richard Barnes · Rating 2 out of 5]

A paint by numbers book - very little depth here. As someone reading a book called "Fawlty Towers", do I need a detailed run-down of each episode? Especially since so much of that rundown is padded out by excerpts from the scripts (which on, at least one occasion, get repeated elsewhere in the book).

There's no great insight into how Cleese and Booth developed the scripts, just a bald description of dates really. The biographies of the main players are largely lists of what they've been in rather than any discussion of how their previous work may have contributed to this work.

No depth, no insight. Entertaining enough as a reminder of why we love the show so much, but it could have been so much more.

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only part I could've done without was the elaborations upon the characters.