Danny K
Tuesday 24th March 2009 8:26pm [Edited]
238 posts
Quote: Gluben @ March 24 2009, 1:55 AM GMT
Or is she?
Polly speaks!
http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2009/03/23/8590/polly_speaks!
Recuperating the past few hours after having a tooth removed (well the little leaflet advises no strenuous activity for the first 24 hours and rules are rules). So just quietly browsing when something in the link Gluben has provided in his post, just jars.
In the article link, the executive producer, Ricky Kelehar says:
"We are delighted to have persuaded the towering comedy legend that is John Cleese to speak in detail about Fawlty Towers for the very first time."
'For the very first time? Rubbish! Utter rubbish. What poor research on Kelehar's part.
- I bought the BBC's complete boxed set of Fawlty Towers for a tenner from the local car boot sale either last year or the year prior to that (VHS format), which like the DVD boxed sets to come (this VHS boxed set is dated 1998), contains extras. All of the extras being called 'An interview with John Cleese', where he speaks non-stop on each video with a 17 minute or so interview at the beginning of EACH of the four videos - just over an hour there, alone.
Additionally he introduces each episode with a FURTHER 2 minute interview/monologue. All-in-all, he speaks about the minutia of Fawlty Towers for approximately one and a quarter hours in total. It appears to have been recorded on the same day, as he wears the same light coloured suit throughout and sits in the same conservatory/veranda. AND he does go into detail mostly speaking with advice to writers of sitcoms with:
"When writing some days it would just flow, the next nothing. I learnt to accept it, stop panicking and accept it as a normal part of the process."
And -
"I think the great secret is that the scripts were very good, for a start there was an awful lot in them, and they were very good for two reasons,
- One: when the average 30 minute BBC sitcom had 65 pages or so, Fawlty Towers scripts had 130 to 140 pages, twice as many. Also, when the average Camera Cuts per sitcom were 200 per episode our scripts had 400, literally double!
And Two: They were very well constructed. What Connie and I discovered worked for us was that we never started on the dialogue until we had the plot worked out in considerable detail. And that would take a long time, as much as two and a half weeks. We always had to alter them a bit as things evolved, but the plot was the key. I think anyone who starts off with Scene One and dives straight into the dialogue, well the chances of them getting to a satisfactory ending are about 1 in a 100." And so forth, ie., for the writer not the casual viewer.
If asked to reminisce again he's at an age where he'll just regurgitate what he said previously. It'll be 'new' to the above producer, and anyone who hasn't seen the boxed sets, but new? Don't think so. The only new stuff would be to hear the experiences of others from their POV. But as Cleese was the scriptwriting driving force of the series I doubt very much whether anything new will come to light.
As for Connie Booth, I'm more intrigued that the article implies she WILL be appearing; that it's a done deal. One of the incidents that give away why she may have been reluctant to give interviews is that she was once 'tricked' into being interviewed about her project, 'The Single Mothers' Support Group', yet found the article headlined, 'Don't Mention The Comedy Classic Series', so she complained to the Press Complaints Commission that it concentrated on the sitcom rather than her support group. (She lost her appeal.)
Still, if it all comes off (this May, isn't it?) I'll still be amongst the first to watch anyway.
Ahh, time's up. I can eat again. Time for munchies.
Quote: john lucas 101 @ March 24 2009, 3:15 PM GMT
On the subject of unseen footage, didn't Cleese and Sachs reprise their roles for some training videos a while ago? Or did this not happen?
Cleese set up the company with an industry pro and called it Video Arts. He sold it 5 years later for either £5 million or £20 million, can't recall which amount. Apart from the very first few sketches (for that's what the training clips were - extended sketches), he didn't appear much at all, people like James Bolam appeared regularily. Although it was many years later after the training videos were made that I actually viewed them, I never did see any with Cleese in, just actors like Bolam (lately of New Tricks fame).
