The real Fawlty Towers 'was a den of iniquity'

Crew member reveals venues shady reputation

comedy The venue used to film Fawlty Towers was a den of sex, gambling and gangsters, according to an insider who worked on the show.

Wooburn Grange Country Club – which was used for exterior shots in 1970s sitcom – was actually a casino where ‘you could rent rooms by the hour,’ floor manager Tony Guya said ‘It was basically a club where you could gamble, hire a room, and take your "secretary" for an afternoon’

He told the Chatabix podcast: ‘One guy turned up in his Jaguar and was sitting in his car when a guy stepped out of the bushes with a sawn-off shotgun and blew his head off.

‘He was a hitman hired to top someone, but he’d shot the wrong guy.’

He said he had one meeting there where the boardroom table was ‘piled 3ft high with 50s, 20s, 10s, five and 10 shilling notes. Huge pile of money.

‘I stood with my back hard against the wall because I didn’t want him to think I’d taken a couple of handfuls. It was well dodgy.’

He also said a bouncer at the hotel once saw a guest drop a gambling chip. When he handed it to him he was told to keep it. ‘It was ten grand,’ Tony told the Chatabix podcast.

Hosts Joe Wilkinson and David Earl were, however, more impressed that Guya had been involved in rearranging the letters of the Fawlty Towers sign to make the anagrams seen a the start of the show.

Wooburn Grange, in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, burned down in 1991, and the site is now a small housing estate

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Published: 12 Jan 2024