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UKTV celebrates 40th anniversary of Fawlty Towers

UKTV will screen all 12 Fawlty Towers episodes to mark the 40th anniversary of a sitcom classic.

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This month marks 40 years since Basil Fawlty unleashed his distinct style of hotel management on television viewers.

To mark the occasion UKTV will screen a seven-and-a-half-hour marathon of the entire 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.

Yes, only 12 episodes were ever made.

Written by and starring John Cleese and then wife Connie Booth, the series was first broadcast on BBC Two in the UK in 1975 and is based on a real-life hotel owner — described by John Cleese (in an interview with Parkinson) as the rudest man he’d ever met. It’s safe to say the world owes a great debt to that anonymous Torquay hotelier whose rudeness and incompetence inspired the best British television series of all time!

The series has won three BAFTAs and, perhaps uniquely in the history of television, Fawlty Towers has never received a bad press review.

Like a fine wine, Fawlty Towers seems to get better with age. When the DVD was released in 2001, over 30 years since the first transmission, it sold a staggering 37,000 copies in its first month and scooped Best Comedy on DVD at the Quality Street Awards.

A much put-upon, hard-working hotel ‘manager’, Basil’s life is plagued by dead guests, hotel inspectors and riff-raff. His biggest headache is a “nest of vipers” – his nagging wife Sibyl (Prunella Scales). Together they run their hotel, Fawlty Towers, with a little help from the unflappable Polly (Connie Booth), and hardly any help at all from Manuel (Andrew Sachs), the trainee waiter from Barcelona who is as mad as his boss and the butt of all his frustration.

12pm – 7.30pm on September 19 on UKTV.

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