Fawlty Towers

Unsolved Fawlty Towers mystery #1834793

What's the most oft-told tale of a Fawlty Towers recording session going a little wrong? The answer is surely the famous anecdote concerning The Builders. John Cleese has told the tale many times, with varying levels of insults directed at Icelanders.

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"Is there anything more gratifying than the 'victim' of an 'offensive' joke turning around and saying that, actually, they found it hilarious?" brayed Telegraph columnist Celia Walden on 30 April, rejoicing over the fact that German ambassador Miguel Berger had said he found John Cleese's goose-stepping in Fawlty Towers very funny.

"Had the BBC possessed even an ounce of supposedly non-existent Germanic humour, they wouldn't have removed that iconic episode from their streaming platform, UKTV, four years ago, because of 'racial slurs'", she sniffed.

Amazingly, given that this is the fourth Telegraph column in which Walden has squeezed a reference to the brief removal and reinstatement of the programme with a warning note in June 2020, she has still not managed to grasp that the issue was not Fawlty's mentioning the war, but an exchange with the character Major Gown in which the "N" and "W" racial slurs are used repeatedly. Which does rather put a different light on Walden's chirpy advice last week that: "I'd urge schools to use the episode as a de-fragilising Gen-X resource. Why not send in Cleese, while we're at it, as a kind of offence-spreading missionary?"

Exactly three days later, at the press launch of a new stage adaptation of Fawlty Towers, Walden got her answer; because he's not up for it. "Those scenes where the Major used a couple of words you can't use now, racial slurs they would come under, we took them out," Cleese told hacks.

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