Torquay it ain't

The Fawlty Towers reboot is likely to be set on an elite Caribbean island, John Cleese has revealed.

The 83-year-old said that in the surprise revival, Basil now be running a ‘small bijou hotel’ which welcomes ‘very rich’ guests.

‘Much more fun and much more different if it’s say, a Caribbean island or something like that with a small, bijou hotel but with a few very rich people coming to stay.

He said: ‘If you put it in the Caribbean, it becomes very multi-racial. People in the hotel business come from everywhere, so you can bring lots of different people together. The characteristic of Fawlty Towers was the pressure cooker atmosphere created in the hotel.’

The premise appears to have some parallels with the HBO and Sky Atlantic White Lotus, set in high-end resorts in Hawaii and Sicily. Some commentators previously commentated that Armond, the manager in series one, shared some similarities with Basil Fawlty.

In the Fawlty Towers reboot, Basil will be running the establishment hotel with a daughter he has just discovered he had – to be played by his real-life daughter Camilla, who is also writing the show with him.

The project is in development at Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock Entertainment but no broadcaster has yet been announced.

However, speaking to right-leaning GB News last night, he said he would not work with the BBC ‘because you wouldn’t get the freedom’.

‘I was terribly lucky,’ he added. ‘I was working for the BBC in the late 60s, 70s, beginning of the 80s and that was the best time because the BBC was run by people with personality.’

It is also unlikely the public broadcaster would have deep enough pockets to match the budget a streamer or a US network could throw at the  project.

GB News host Dan Wootton showed Cleese a Guardian headline describing the  reboot as ‘an anti-woke nightmare’, which the comic dismissed.

He said: ‘They obviously know better than I do what’s going to be in it. Maybe they should write an episode for me that they would find acceptable. Might not be very funny, but I’m sure it would really please some of their readers.

‘The idea that it’s all going to be about wokery hadn’t particularly occurred to me. They are assuming, with no evidence at all, that they know what the show’s going to be like and condemning it for that.’

Cleese is also working on a new discussion show for GB News, which will tackle ‘subjects that get people upset’, adding: ‘There is a huge argument about wokery and some of it stems from a very good idea, which is: let’s try to be kind to people. But I believe it has become far too dominated by people who are frightened of offending people. I think you have to allow offence.’

» Fawlty reboots: Four previous attempts to remake Fawlty Towers

Published: 10 Feb 2023