Fun fact, John Cleese in the last scene picked up a real frying pan by mistake instead of the prop one and actually did hit Andrew Sachs in the head and knocked him out for real, said afterwards to have had a headache for days, between that and another incident in a few episodes from now (won’t spoil it for you) Andrew Sachs certainly didn’t have an easy time of it
April Walker, who played Jean, got the part as assistant in Doctor Who. However, the producer never asked the star Jon Pertwee for approval. Pertwee raised objections saying she was too tall and busty. He didn't want anyone that was as tall as he was or so glamorous as to take attention away from him. She was fired by the producer. Although she got paid for the whole of the season she had signed up for, she was extremely upset, and still is to this day. You couldn't get much a bigger part on TV than being Doctor Who's companion in those days. The BBC were so mean that every time she worked for them subsequently, they deducted the Doctor Who money.
Great to see you enjoying these for the first time - they never get old. You talked about them being in separate beds and I remembered that Eric & Ernie and Stan & Ollie (Laurel & Hardy) used to share a bed in their comedy yet it never seemed strange at the time, nobody read anything into it. I remember Eric reading the Beano or The Dandy in bed, giving a running commentary on Desperate Dan being on his tenth "cow pie" and still being hungry, while Ernie was busy finishing another of his play's "what he wrote", probably the 5th play that week, cause he was supposed to be quite prolific. Something I'd love to see you react to one day, or to just enjoy for yourself, is a particular episode of "The Goes Wrong Show" called 90 Degrees, because I'd be very interested in your opinion on HOW the he... they managed to do it without getting injured, (you having an interest in the acting/production side of things) - I'm sure you already know their plays are all full of deliberate catastophe's, the most famous one probably being the short one performed at a Royal Variety Performance (the play that goes wrong) - but 90 degrees is supposed to be a play about the Tennessee heat, but the premise is that the set designer misinterpreted the title as an instruction to have all the rooms at 90 degrees to one another, so in some scenes they're all sat at tables on a "floor" which is actually a wall, so it's eff-in hilarious seeing a waitress carrying a tray or serving drinks when everything appears to go sideways - and I love their attempts to do an American accent. Anyway, even if you can;t ever do a reaction to it, I imagine you;d enjoy it and might be scratching your head trying to figure out how they achieved some of the stunts. I'm sure you will sus it out with your background though. It would be great to see you on their team actually - that would be something! I've no idea how you can get to see their plays though apart from reactions by Taffe316 where he put them on OneHub so I've been keeping that tab open for months now with the intention of pointing you to it - ep 6 - it doesn't come up just searching for the title. Keep your pecker up!
Happy Bank Holiday Megan! ❤️ Nice seeing another hilarious 😂 episode of Fawlty Towers here! Nice job & have you ever seen a British TV show called Killing Eve before? 🤔
Hilarious and absurd in equal measure. Even watching the episodes as a kid - when I didn't even understand the plots - I always felt so embarrassed for Fawlty.
The wedding guests are standard-issue 70s people. Basil is like someone who was mummified in the late 1940s and suddenly woken up in the 1970s. He's a man out of time, and he despises everything about the 1970s. BTW, he assumed that the hotel guest needed a battery for a sex toy.
Cleese has been married a few times, you know. And there is an episode on the DVD commentary where he waxes lyrical about the fine specimens of womanhood on display in the course of the story. So Basil's repression is quite funny in that context. But, also, being middle-aged then wasn't the same as being middle-aged now. My parents were 45 and 38 at the time and I still struggle to understand how I came to be the third of three brothers.
Go Megan - another classic episode. Fun fact: Sybil's wheezy laugh is based on a mannerism of Connie's. I see someone's already mentioned the frying pan incident. Poor Andrew. 'Pecker' as you understand it is North American slang. In Britain ir simply means 'pep'. Another interesting 'lost in translation' classic is 'fag' - we used to get a rise out of colleagues from the wrong side of the Atlantic with 'Where's Dave?' "Oh, he just slipped out the back with his fag for a quick one.' Don't you love it when we see the wheels revving in Basil's hyperactive brain? Just as funny as any of his lines.
The pill was available to un-married women from 1967 (married from 1960) in Britain and people were having sex out of wedlock anyway in the 70s. Younger generations were rebellious. There was still some Fawltys who turned their nose up at the idea of it happening. Living together may have been frowned upon depending on whoever you socialised with. A non-sexual reference (in twin-beds 🤣) about this episode is that Basil was reading the "Jaws" book by Peter Benchley. The film came out that year (1975) and also an in-joke about Sybil always biting and barking at him.
John Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real hotel owner. The Monty Python Troupe stayed at the hotel where this highly irritating owner gave them a hard time.
New couples / partners arriving at hotel - "Double Room, please"! World weary couples partners arriving at hotel "Singles will be fine, thanks". Experience is everything (nearly) LOLOLOL
Many people don't bother to ask their dates if they're single. Weeks, months or even years later they're horrified to discover that they're the side piece.
Love it that Canadians are so much more similar to the British than the Yanks. The Yanks have such less understanding of British humour. Yanks are totally foreign.
Oh, how wrong you are. I’m American and I totally get British humor. I’ve always loved British comedy. I watched shows like ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘Are You Being Served’ growing up. There a cleverness and sarcasm in British humor that I enjoy; it’s very sophisticated. The closest comedy I can think of in America are the shows ‘Cheers’ and ‘Frasier.’
@@Poliss95 Reactors try different methods. Speeding it up or slowing it down, writing or lines across the screen, bending the picture, playing music etc.
Fun fact, John Cleese in the last scene picked up a real frying pan by mistake instead of the prop one and actually did hit Andrew Sachs in the head and knocked him out for real, said afterwards to have had a headache for days, between that and another incident in a few episodes from now (won’t spoil it for you) Andrew Sachs certainly didn’t have an easy time of it
because of course, a real frying pan happened to be floating around a tv studio set.
@@philjones45 it's a kitchen set what do you think they fill it with, herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically?
April Walker, who played Jean, got the part as assistant in Doctor Who. However, the producer never asked the star Jon Pertwee for approval. Pertwee raised objections saying she was too tall and busty. He didn't want anyone that was as tall as he was or so glamorous as to take attention away from him. She was fired by the producer. Although she got paid for the whole of the season she had signed up for, she was extremely upset, and still is to this day. You couldn't get much a bigger part on TV than being Doctor Who's companion in those days. The BBC were so mean that every time she worked for them subsequently, they deducted the Doctor Who money.
and a stark contrast to todays Doctor Who, talk about a bad career move, being a companion these days lol
2:44 - This means that Basil is considerably older than John Cleese was at the time. He was born in 1939; the Korean War was from 1950-1953.
Great to see you enjoying these for the first time - they never get old. You talked about them being in separate beds and I remembered that Eric & Ernie and Stan & Ollie (Laurel & Hardy) used to share a bed in their comedy yet it never seemed strange at the time, nobody read anything into it. I remember Eric reading the Beano or The Dandy in bed, giving a running commentary on Desperate Dan being on his tenth "cow pie" and still being hungry, while Ernie was busy finishing another of his play's "what he wrote", probably the 5th play that week, cause he was supposed to be quite prolific.
Something I'd love to see you react to one day, or to just enjoy for yourself, is a particular episode of "The Goes Wrong Show" called 90 Degrees, because I'd be very interested in your opinion on HOW the he... they managed to do it without getting injured, (you having an interest in the acting/production side of things) -
I'm sure you already know their plays are all full of deliberate catastophe's, the most famous one probably being the short one performed at a Royal Variety Performance (the play that goes wrong) - but 90 degrees is supposed to be a play about the Tennessee heat, but the premise is that the set designer misinterpreted the title as an instruction to have all the rooms at 90 degrees to one another, so in some scenes they're all sat at tables on a "floor" which is actually a wall, so it's eff-in hilarious seeing a waitress carrying a tray or serving drinks when everything appears to go sideways - and I love their attempts to do an American accent.
Anyway, even if you can;t ever do a reaction to it, I imagine you;d enjoy it and might be scratching your head trying to figure out how they achieved some of the stunts. I'm sure you will sus it out with your background though. It would be great to see you on their team actually - that would be something!
I've no idea how you can get to see their plays though apart from reactions by Taffe316 where he put them on OneHub so I've been keeping that tab open for months now with the intention of pointing you to it - ep 6 - it doesn't come up just searching for the title.
Keep your pecker up!
Love Megan's laugh.
1:23 Yes, but it used to also mean nose, especially in the expression 'keep your pecker up'.
Ah I didn’t know that! Thanks! 😊
@@MeganRuth ...as in birds with beaks that 'peck'...e.g. woodpeckers
I've never seen you laugh so hard. 🤣🤣
Pecker, in the courage sense, is said to be a reference to a birds beak. i.e.. it keep its head up.
The scene where Basil whacks Manuel across the head with a frying pan, it was not a rubber prop.
It was a real frying pan.
SAW JOHN CLEESE IN ONE MAN SHOW...HE WAS HILARIOUS!!!! MY SON LOVED HIM, THEN WATCHED ALL MONTY PYTHONS EPISODES, THIS AND MOVIES!😂😂😂😂😂👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
'Keep your pecker up!' - 'Stay positive' ('though I know pecker has other connotations in North America)!
Yes up until the 90s it did refer to what you thought it be replaced by hows its hanging
Happy Bank Holiday Megan! ❤️ Nice seeing another hilarious 😂 episode of Fawlty Towers here! Nice job & have you ever seen a British TV show called Killing Eve before? 🤔
Thanks Falcom! Yes I watched the first series of Killing Eve when it came out. It was really good!
Fabulous episode thankyou for sharing
Glad you enjoyed it!
Hilarious and absurd in equal measure. Even watching the episodes as a kid - when I didn't even understand the plots - I always felt so embarrassed for Fawlty.
The zenith of situation comedy..
I can watch these over and over again your right about Basil he's frustrated and angry and a snob John Cleese is perfect for the role.
The wedding guests are standard-issue 70s people. Basil is like someone who was mummified in the late 1940s and suddenly woken up in the 1970s. He's a man out of time, and he despises everything about the 1970s. BTW, he assumed that the hotel guest needed a battery for a sex toy.
Cleese has been married a few times, you know. And there is an episode on the DVD commentary where he waxes lyrical about the fine specimens of womanhood on display in the course of the story. So Basil's repression is quite funny in that context. But, also, being middle-aged then wasn't the same as being middle-aged now. My parents were 45 and 38 at the time and I still struggle to understand how I came to be the third of three brothers.
Go Megan - another classic episode. Fun fact: Sybil's wheezy laugh is based on a mannerism of Connie's. I see someone's already mentioned the frying pan incident. Poor Andrew. 'Pecker' as you understand it is North American slang. In Britain ir simply means 'pep'.
Another interesting 'lost in translation' classic is 'fag' - we used to get a rise out of colleagues from the wrong side of the Atlantic with 'Where's Dave?' "Oh, he just slipped out the back with his fag for a quick one.' Don't you love it when we see the wheels revving in Basil's hyperactive brain? Just as funny as any of his lines.
The pill was available to un-married women from 1967 (married from 1960) in Britain and people were having sex out of wedlock anyway in the 70s. Younger generations were rebellious. There was still some Fawltys who turned their nose up at the idea of it happening. Living together may have been frowned upon depending on whoever you socialised with. A non-sexual reference (in twin-beds 🤣) about this episode is that Basil was reading the "Jaws" book by Peter Benchley. The film came out that year (1975) and also an in-joke about Sybil always biting and barking at him.
John Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real hotel owner. The Monty Python Troupe stayed at the hotel where this highly irritating owner gave them a hard time.
A good banging LOL. Thanks Megan! 😂
No masters, no strings by Blissful Haven Productions (thanks Shazam). Gets me everytime at the end of your videos. Loud! 🙂
@5:48 She said cafe au lait but Fawlty said “olè”.
New couples / partners arriving at hotel - "Double Room, please"!
World weary couples partners arriving at hotel "Singles will be fine, thanks".
Experience is everything (nearly) LOLOLOL
"Pecker" could mean beak or mouth!
Pecker in the UK means nose.
Many people don't bother to ask their dates if they're single. Weeks, months or even years later they're horrified to discover that they're the side piece.
Please stick with it. I’ll subscribe if you complete the full 12 episodes.
There is massage and there is massage.. They both seem to result in pleasure..
thanks Megan enjoy the rest of your bank holiday Monday.
Thank you! Hope you enjoyed yours :)
2:55 You can tell if a couple is married if they're sniping at each other.
Loads of unmarried couples also do so.
Love it that Canadians are so much more similar to the British than the Yanks. The Yanks have such less understanding of British humour.
Yanks are totally foreign.
Oh, how wrong you are.
I’m American and I totally get British humor. I’ve always loved British comedy. I watched shows like ‘Fawlty Towers’ and ‘Are You Being Served’ growing up. There a cleverness and sarcasm in British humor that I enjoy; it’s very sophisticated. The closest comedy I can think of in America are the shows ‘Cheers’ and ‘Frasier.’
@richardpowell1772 Fair comment although I think you will find you are the exception,not the rule. I agree that Cheers and Frasier were excellent too.
9:36 This makes no sense. How can he confuse Sybil's voice for Mrs Peignoir's? They're very different.
@DavidZ4-gg3dm Simples. It's Basil.
And of course co written by Canadian Connie Booth.
She's American.
@@andrewq159 My mistake thinking of Megan Ruth.
Funny video 😂😂
horrible annoying edit, seriously really put me off.
It's difficult to edit BBC sitcoms in a way that prevents them being taken down.
@philjones45 It's either that or COPYRIGHT blanking out the picture.
@@Poliss95 Reactors try different methods. Speeding it up or slowing it down, writing or lines across the screen, bending the picture, playing music etc.