Approaching its 50th anniversary, Fawlty Towers is back in the news, due to the announcement of a reboot where Basil Fawlty is now running a boutique hotel in the Caribbean with his daughter – to be played by Cleese’s real-life daughter, stand-up comedian Camilla Cleese. One question this raises is how on earth did Basil Fawlty, the cantankerous parochial hotelier in the English seaside, somehow end up in the Caribbean? A second question is why are they bringing the show back at all?
Stylistically Fawlty Towers is a farce, which is a genre of comedy built around a series of increasingly absurd, exaggerated and improbable situations.
Sitcom wise, the last great farce was Frasier. But despite the extraordinary stage farce Noises Off being revived for a 40th-anniversary production, rebooting Fawlty Towers as a farce in the 21st century would be a mistake.
