Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: bbc, Camila Cleese, Connie Booth, fawlty towers, john cleese, sitcom

Fawlty Towers: John Cleese Offers Sequel Series Update, Talks Process

John Cleese shared an update on how far along he and his daughter Camilla Cleese are on writing the new Fawlty Towers sequel series.

Fawlty Towers is coming back. Co-creator, co-writer & star John Cleese announced it earlier in 2023. It's not a reboot but a sequel and a sort of refresh where an older and definitely not wiser (where would be the comedy in that?) Basil Fawlty, played by Cleese himself – now managing a hotel in the West Indies with his daughter. We like to call the new show Shin Fawlty Towers ("shin" means "new" in Japanese) until Cleese says otherwise. The sequel series is set in the present, more than forty years after the end of the second and last season of the series on the BBC, and will star Cleese and his daughter Camilla Cleese, who is co-writing the scripts with him. A fan asked him on Twitter, "Any update on the newest faulty towers roll out? I literally live in a tent, did i miss it?"

Cleese answered, "Nice of you to inquire… Camilla and I are still plotting the first few episodes We don't start to write any dialogue till we've worked out the story of each episode in great detail It takes a long time. Connie Booth and I used to take 6 weeks to write one show!"

The new series will feature the eternally awful Basil Fawlty, who is almost certainly hating on the modern world more than ever. Smartphones and the internet will probably be the new and even bigger banes of his existence. But the bigger issue is his discovery that he has a daughter, and the two of them will have to team up to run a boutique hotel together. Because he did such a great job running the original Fawlty Towers forty years ago with his long-suffering wife Sybil (the late Prunella Scales) and even more long-suffering staff Manual (Andrew Sachs) and chambermaid Polly (series co-creator and co-writer Connie Booth who has since retired from showbusiness to become a psychotherapist).

Cleese Senior and Cleese Fille are developing Shin Fawlty Towers, with Reiner, Michele Reiner, Derrick Rossi, and Matthew George executive producing. Cleese praised George's "understanding of the 'creative process'" and described their first meeting as "one of the best creative sessions I can remember." "John Cleese is a comedy legend," said Reiner, but then who wouldn't? "Just the idea of working with him makes me laugh," while George described meeting John and Camilla Cleese as "one of the great thrills of my life."

Cleese has vowed he would never offer Shin Fawlty Towers to the BBC because he really hates them now. It will almost certainly end up on a US streamer or network.

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