When Pru and me eventually do fall off our perches, one or two obituaries might appear in some of the newspapers. In my own case, I’m not quite sure what they’ll open with. ‘Actor, best known for …’ It could be a number of things, I suppose. ‘… his work on the stage’, or Brass or Edward the Seventh. It could even be Gentleman Jack or EastEnders, if the obituary is being written either by, or for, a journalist or audience who have yet to reach middle age. Indeed, a friend called Mark was quizzed years ago by his daughter about what I had appeared in. After reeling off the traditional list of roles Mark eventually said, ‘Hang on, he also played Stan Carter in EastEnders.’
‘You’re driving Stan Carter from EastEnders,’ his daughter exclaimed. ‘Mick Carter’s dad? Wow, that’s amazing!’
Fame at last.
In Pru’s case, it is different. Although she too has appeared in a multitude of productions striding all of the major mediums, one role in particular, that she first interpreted for the small screen way back in 1975, gave her international recognition. I am referring, of course, to Sybil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers.
When I first informed Pru that I would soon be attempting to write something about Sybil and the series, she issued me with one simple instruction. ‘You will do a good job, won’t you, darling? Everybody loves Sybil.’
‘I’ll certainly try my best,’ I said.
From a professional point of view, 1975 was a very special year for Pru and me. In fact, it’s arguably been our best year to date, at least jointly. With regards to the theatre, we’d kind of cracked it, in that we’d each been gainfully employed within the medium on an almost constant basis for a good two decades or so and to this day it remains our professional home. Film appearances had remained sporadic at best but that didn’t worry us too much. Neither of us has ever enjoyed making films very much but the odd job here and there, which is good for your profile and often pays good money, worked well enough for us. Prior to 1975, the only work that Pru and me would happily have accepted more of was in television. She had enjoyed the odd leading role, such as in Marriage Lines, but generally our skills had been called upon to play either supporting parts in a series, or major roles in one-off plays. When the initial scripts for Fawlty Towers first landed on our doorstep at the start of 1975, Pru didn’t see that changing any time soon.
‘I don’t really know what to make of this thing,’ she said after reading the scripts. ‘Here, you have a look.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Fawlty Towers.’
‘Fawlty Towers? What on earth is it about?’
‘It’s a sitcom set in a hotel in Torquay. They’re interested in me playing the wife of the owner. She’s called Sybil Fawlty.’
‘Ah, hence the name Fawlty Towers. Who’s behind it?’
‘John Cleese.’
‘John Cleese from Monty Python? The tall fellow?’
‘That’s right. He’s written it with his wife, Connie Booth. I must say, it’s quite funny. Very visual, though, I think.’
The scripts had been sent to Pru by a chap called John Howard Davies, who would be directing the show. He’d already worked with John Cleese on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and we later learned that it had been his idea to approach Pru about playing Sybil.
‘I’m not sure either,’ I said after reading the first script. ‘I mean, how on earth did two people like that ever get married in the first place? They quite clearly hate each other.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Pru. ‘I’d like to find out, though, before I say yes or no.’
Later that day Pru called John Howard Davies and arranged to go and meet him at the BBC.
‘What’s your gut feeling?’ I asked her before she left.
‘Well, I like the scripts,’ said Pru. ‘It’s the best TV I’ve been offered in a long time. It’ll depend on the answers I get to my questions. I need to know more about her. And about him. I need to know more about everything really.’
This was nothing new, by the way. Whether it’s an advert she’s appearing in or a play, if Pru isn’t able to achieve, either through herself or via somebody else, a rounded view of the character and their background, she will not take the job, and for the simple reason that in her mind, she will not be able to do it justice.
The meeting with John Howard Davies went well, in as much as he was able to explain to Pru why he had chosen her and how enthusiastic John Cleese had been about the idea.
‘John Cleese is a big fan of Marriage Lines, apparently,’ Pru said on her return.
‘Really?’ I replied. ‘I’m surprised. It’s not very surreal or subversive.’
‘He likes the way Richard Briers and I play off each other, apparently. Anyway, he wants me to go and see him at his flat tomorrow. I wasn’t keen at first as he’s in bed with flu, but John Howard Davies persuaded me.’
By the time Pru arrived at John Cleese’s abode the following afternoon she had all but decided to take the part if offered, providing he could answer one simple question: How on earth did Basil and Sybil ever get together?
‘Oh God, I knew you were going to ask me that,’ said John, putting a pillow over his head. ‘To be honest with you, I don’t really know. Do you have any ideas?’
‘Well, sort of,’ said Pru. ‘In as much as I’ve come up with a theory as to how I think two people like that could get together and how they’ve come to own and run a hotel.’
‘Fire away,’ said Mr Cleese.
Pru’s theory, which she told me later that day, was that Sybil’s family had been in catering and had a pub on the south coast. ‘Somewhere like Eastbourne,’ she said. Sybil worked behind the bar in this pub and one day in walked a chap called Basil who had just been demobbed from National Service. What attracted her to him was the fact that he was posh, basically, and what attracted him to her was the fact that she was blowsy and flirtatious. Her theory about their current situation was that, because of Sybil’s background in catering, after getting together they had decided to run a hotel together and the grim reality of the undertaking had now begun to catch up with them. ‘She’s been fooled by Basil’s flannel,’ supposed Pru, ‘and too late, she realizes that she is landed with an upper-class twit. Whereupon the rot sets in because he has all these posh and potty ideas about how to run a hotel, and she has a great deal more practical experience and know-how. But behind all her apparent disenchantment with Basil, there is some real affection for him.’
It sounded plausible to me. More importantly, it sounded plausible to John, too.
The most exciting news Pru returned with that day, apart from the fact that she’d been offered the role officially by John Cleese and that she had accepted it, was that one of the other main characters, Manuel the waiter, was to be played by Andrew Sachs. ‘Isn’t that the most marvellous news?’ Pru said. ‘I really couldn’t be happier.’
Andy Sachs had been the ASM at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing early on in Pru’s career and in the early 1960s he’d appeared alongside me on tour in Simple Spymen. Knowing there’s a former colleague or two in the cast of a new show you’re appearing in is always good news. To have an old friend on hand is even better.
Because John had never managed to elucidate to Pru much about Sybil’s character or background, she had been left pretty much to her own devices with regards to her creation and it’s fair to say that after the first day of rehearsal Pru’s interpretation was at odds slightly with what John and Connie Booth had in mind, however vague that might have been.
‘I think they thought she was more on Basil’s level socially,’ said Pru. ‘So, at the end of the first day, I got one or two funny looks.’
I later discussed this with John, and he agreed. ‘We’d written Sybil differently from how Pru played her,’ he said to me. ‘Not too much, but enough to make Connie and me feel a bit uneasy after the first day’s rehearsal.’
Fortunately, neither John nor Connie let on to Pru fully that they were harbouring any great concerns, and by the end of the second day they had begun to realize that Pru’s blowsy and aspirational working-class interpretation of Sybil worked better than their own.
‘Out of interest, what exactly did you and Connie have in mind when you wrote Sybil?’ I remember asking him.
‘I honestly can’t remember now,’ he said. ‘I think we had an idea at the very beginning, but by the time it came to writing the scripts we’d forgotten. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Pru’s done it for us.’
Pru’s characterization of Sybil Fawlty is based partly on somebody she used to know and it made her feel rather guilty.
‘There was a woman who ran a hotel that my mum used to stay in from time to time,’ she said. ‘And although she was terribly nice to everyone, she had a habit of leaning over people while they were eating and saying, ‘Do you find that tasty, sir?’ or, ‘Is that all right for you, madam?’ She wasn’t anywhere near as demonstrative or menacing as Sybil, but as soon as I started reading her, this poor woman came to mind. She’s definitely in there somewhere.’
The story of how John created Basil, and how he came up with the idea for the show, is equally fascinating. He told me this first-hand many years ago, but I think I remember most of it.
Fawlty Towers is based on an establishment that is no longer in existence called the Gleneagles Hotel. Also situated in Torquay, it had been used by the cast and crew of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970 for a three-week stay while they were filming in nearby Paignton. Legend has it that the owner of the hotel, Lieutenant Commander Donald Sinclair, was dead against the ‘Circus’ staying, primarily because they were television types. His wife Betty, however, managed to persuade him simply because of the amount of money involved.
‘He really was an absolute bloody nightmare,’ John said to me. ‘But I found him fascinating.’
Lieutenant Commander Sinclair bore no physical resemblance to John’s later creation (apparently, he was rather short in stature), yet when it came to his behaviour there was little to tell between them. Donald Sinclair was an eccentric, and someone for whom everything to do with his guests was always too much trouble. The kind of man who, if a customer approached the bar wanting a drink, would slam the shutters down.
‘He once removed Eric Idle’s bag from his room and put it on a wall on the far side of the hotel grounds,’ John told me.
‘Whatever for?’ I asked.
‘He thought there was a bomb inside. Eric told him it was his alarm clock, but he refused to believe him.’
According to John, the member of the Monty Python team against whom Lieutenant Commander Sinclair took the most was Terry Gilliam. He did not care much for our American cousins and would look for excuses to berate Terry. ‘He once bollocked him for cutting up his meat and then eating it only with his fork,’ said John. ‘He told him it was bad manners. I later learned that one of the waiters became so traumatized by Sinclair’s behaviour that he fled the hotel one evening and ran away to London. It didn’t at all surprise me.’ Not surprisingly, by the time their three-week stay at the Gleneagles Hotel came to an end, only John remained from the Circus. ‘Everybody else had scarpered,’ he told me.
The inspiration for Manuel’s character came from the influx of foreign workers in the early 1970s whose first language wasn’t English. I remember this all too well as for a time ordering the right food in a restaurant became extremely difficult. This, I assume, is why John, who had also worked with Andy Sachs before on some of his management films, made Manuel Spanish. Andy later told me that, like Pru, he’d been in two minds about accepting the role initially, but for different reasons.
‘I wasn’t sure if I could do a Spanish accent,’ he told me. ‘And so I asked John if he’d object to him being German instead.’
‘Why German?’ John said.
‘Because that’s my first language,’ replied Andy.
‘Absolutely not,’ John told him. ‘Manuel is supposed to be inefficient and incompetent. Not very German, is it?’
The moustache, however, was Andy’s idea. Not only did he think it right for the character, but he hoped it might help to disguise him from the general public. ‘It didn’t always work,’ he told us. ‘I was once accosted by an American woman outside a shop on Oxford Street and, assuming that I was actually a waiter, she asked me, very earnestly, how I’d managed to cope since the series had ended. “Oh, I get by,” I said.’
Just like Marriage Lines, each episode of Fawlty Towers was rehearsed for just under a week before being recorded and sometime during the second week I asked Pru how it was going.
‘I’m thoroughly enjoying it,’ she said. ‘It’s very hard work, though. John has an enormous amount of energy and can be quite frightening at times. It’s like working with a live machine-gun; you have to try and keep it pointing away from you.’
The other point Pru made was that John was extremely rigorous when it came to the script. ‘I don’t know anybody in the business who works harder,’ she said. If the cast didn’t know their lines by Wednesday (the show was recorded on a Sunday) John would be on the warpath. With two sons under ten in the house, not to mention a nanny, an eighteen-year-old stepdaughter and a forty-one-year-old husband, Pru really had her work cut out.
‘I must admit I’m finding it a bit hard, darling,’ she confided in me one day. ‘There are just far too many distractions. John literally locks himself away for hours and hours on end.’
‘Then why not do the same?’ I suggested.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Check into a hotel for a couple of nights. That should do the trick.’
Ever the homebody, it took me an hour or so to persuade Pru that this was a necessary course of action, but I eventually prevailed.
‘OK, I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘You will be all right with the boys, won’t you?’
‘What – you mean me, Juliet and the nanny? Yes, I think we’ll manage between the three of us. You go and learn your lines. Otherwise, you’ll have Mr Cleese to contend with.’
Pru checked into the hotel on the Monday and by the Wednesday she was word perfect.
‘I didn’t enjoy it one bit,’ she said. ‘I kept waking up every couple of hours worrying. It was awful.’
‘Yes, but you are word perfect, though, aren’t you, darling?’
‘Yes, of course I am.’
‘Well then?’
It wasn’t just the lines that Pru and the cast had to familiarize themselves with. In this case the devil was in the detail as, in addition to the script, John and Connie had gone to great pains in order to explain exactly what was happening in each scene and why. Indeed, a script for a thirty-minute episode of a sitcom would normally be around sixty pages long, but for Fawlty Towers they were something approaching 140.
The very first episode of Fawlty Towers, which was called ‘A Touch of Class’ and featured a conman posing as the non-existent Lord Melbury, was broadcast on BBC1 on 19 September 1975. The immediate reaction, not only from the press, but from our friends and family, was astonishing. Ordinarily, when one makes an appearance on television, one or two reviews might appear in the newspapers, and you might receive the odd telephone call. The majority of the calls will be congratulatory, which is nice, and generally it’ll be forgotten about in a day or two. When Fawlty Towers went to air, not only did the press go bananas, but so did our telephone. And it wasn’t just the first episode that got people talking. Exactly the same thing happened after the broadcast of all six, and by the time the first series was all over Pru, who dislikes attention enormously, was mightily relieved. ‘I wasn’t expecting anything like that,’ she said. ‘It seems to have gone down rather well.’
Understatement of the year.
Something I enjoyed was watching the opinions of the critics change as the series progressed. For instance, Peter Fiddick of the Guardian initially gave John Cleese the majority of the credit for the series being a success, but as the weeks went on, he began to see further than that. ‘Miss Prunella Scales,’ he wrote, ‘a smashing actress at any time, having a ball as Mrs Fawlty, adopting a fine whine, somewhere in between Henry Cooper and Twiggy and attacking Cleese at the level she finds him, which is usually just below the nipples.’
Not everybody was impressed by the new series, however. Tony Pratt from the Daily Mirror, for example, when summing up episode two, wrote simply, ‘Long John is short on jokes.’ Indeed, had the show’s legacy been carved from the overall reaction to the first three episodes then it wouldn’t even be deemed an unqualified success. Fortunately though, it didn’t take the sceptics or the naysayers long to come around and by the fourth or fifth episode it was already being hailed as one of the best.
My own favourite performance in the show, apart from Pru’s, of course, is Andy Sachs’ portrayal of Manuel. I once asked Andy whether or not he ever got hurt during the making of Fawlty Towers.
‘Only a few times,’ he said to me. ‘Once, John had to hit me over the back of the head with a frying pan and instead of using the padded prop one he used a real one by mistake. In fact, I do believe he knocked me out.’
‘Really?’ I asked incredulously. ‘He actually hit you over the head with a real frying pan?’
‘Yes, that’s right. It hurt a bit when I came to. He didn’t mean to, though. John was devastated.’
I remember standing there completely agog. ‘Then there was the time I suffered some rather painful burns,’ Andy continued. ‘There was a fire in the kitchen, and I had to leave the room quickly with my jacket smoking. The fire itself was managed with no mishaps, but the blend of chemicals that the props department used to create the smoking jacket was too strong. It soaked through to my skin and caused several burns. That was even worse than the frying pan.’
It has been suggested on several occasions that the general public’s identification of Pru with Sybil Fawlty has perhaps limited some people’s perception of her. We all know that if you’re especially good in one role, the immediate reaction from some quarters is that you might not be very good in anything else. Quite often you’ll have to prove yourself all over again, turning down roles that you would like to take but that fall into the same category. The parts Pru has been offered since Fawlty Towers have, on the whole, probably been more comedic, and what bothers her is the perception some people have of female actors in comedic roles.
‘In French comedy you can be female, intelligent, attractive and young,’ she once said. ‘In American comedy, as a female, you can be pretty and dumb and funny – or intelligent and ugly and funny. But in English comedy you are not allowed to be female and funny unless you are post-menopausal, or so eccentric as not to be a sexual threat. Partly because of Fawlty Towers, I’m no longer asked to play women who are either very attractive or very intelligent. I think it’s a shame.’
So do I.