Welcome to Fawlty Towers — not the real one of course, this is a tribute to the classic 1970s BBC comedy series set in the fictional Fawlty Towers hotel in Torquay on the English Riviera. Enjoy your visit.
Fawlty Towers Book Reviews
Fawlty Towers Fully Booked
The Complete Story of the Nation’s Favourite Sitcom
By Morris Bright and Robert Ross
192 page hardback book released in Nov 2001. A tribute to six hours of hilarious TV comedy. There are rare photographs and exclusive contributions from John Cleese and Connie Booth, which help to form a guide for fans of the series. The book details each character’s individual traits, comedy highlights and the positions in the Fawlty dynamic. There are also biographies of the principle actor’s previous and subsequent careers, as well as details of the shows conception and development, and the guest stars that appeared on the show.
Introduction
Quality Book—this has to be the definitive guide to Fawlty Towers. This 192 page book is a medium-size format (pages are 19 x 25cm size) and is approximately a 50:50 split of text and photographs — which isn’t a criticism — flicking through it and seeing all the familiar faces brings back all the memories of the classic scenes.
Contents
After an introduction to the book itself there is a 40-page background and history of Fawlty Towers full of interesting facts about the real Torquay hotel and its owner who was the inspiration for Basil as well as loads about the making of the programme of course. The next section consists of articles of varying lengths (naturally slightly more about John, then Prunella, Connie etc) detailing their life and their work both before and after Fawlty Towers. Then the guest stars, many of whom played hotel guests, get the same treatment although as you would expect this is shorter than the main stars, most get a couple of paragraphs. The two series of Fawlty Towers then get a section each which is four pages per episode with a full cast listing plus production crew. Final page is a list of all the books, DVDs, videos, records, cassettes etc that have been made about Fawlty Towers. There is no index although I don’t think it really needs one.
Conclusion
If you are a fan of the greatest British comedy that is Fawlty Towers then the two things you must have in your collection are the DVD box set and this book. This is a quality hardback printed on glossy paper with great photographs throughout, many of which are screen shots from the episodes. Highly recommended. The classic accompaniment to the all-time classic comedy series.
Rating: 5 out of 5
