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How Fawlty Towers Came About
Fawlty Towers was inspired by the Monty Python team's stay in the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay in May 1970. Cleese and Booth stayed on at the hotel after filming for the Python show had finished. The owner, Donald Sinclair, was very rude, throwing a bus timetable at a guest who asked when the next bus to town would arrive, and placing Eric Idle's suitcase behind a wall in the garden on the suspicion that it contained a bomb (it actually contained a ticking alarm clock). He also criticised the American-born Terry Gilliam's table manners for being too American (he had the fork in "the wrong hand" while eating), possibly inspiring Basil's treatment of an American visitor in the episode "Waldorf Salad."Bill Cotton, the BBC's Head of Light Entertainment in the mid-1970s, said after the first series was produced that the show was a prime example of the BBC's relaxed attitude to trying out new entertainment formats and encouraging new ideas. He said that when he read the first scripts he could see nothing funny in them, but trusting that Cleese knew what he was doing, he gave the go-ahead for the series. He said that the commercial channels, with their emphasis on audience ratings, would never have let the show get to the production stage on the basis of the scripts.The writers, Cleese and Booth, were married at the time of the first series (1975). By the second series (1979), Cleese and Booth had divorced after ten years of marriage (1968–78 [wiki]

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