“Fawlty Towers” Hotel Gets Makeover
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.25.06 | 6:36 AM ET
The Gleneagles Hotel, the real-life inspiration for the John Cleese television comedy Fawlty Towers, reopened last week in Torbay, England after a £1 million makeover. The Gleneagles, which faced demolition a few years back, now plans to embrace its legacy as the birthplace of crotchety hotelier Basil Fawlty.
“It is quite bizarre,” Manager Sue Pine told Reuters. “Every day you sit in reception and they come in by the coachload from America, Germany and Holland to see you. We have a big poster in reception and they all have their photo taken. We might as well take this situation and use it. The shows are always being repeated somewhere around the world.” Cleese began writing “Fawlty Towers” while staying in the hotel in 1971 with his wife and his Monty Python cohorts, and while being “berated for their table manners and [having] a timetable thrown at them when they asked the time of the next bus to town,” Cleese says.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
