Posted in: TV | Tagged: Camilla Cleese, farce satire, fawlty towers, john cleese, sitcom

John Cleese "Must Apologise" for New Fawlty Towers with Daughter

John Cleese has "apologised" for the "pain" and "distress" caused by his writing the upcoming new series of Fawlty Towers with his daughter.

John Cleese and his daughter Camilla Cleese are writing a new series of his classic sitcom Fawlty Towers. It's a sequel, not a reboot. Already, some pundits are complaining it's going to be an "anti-woke" nightmare when scripts are still being developed and not one single frame has been shot. Cleese, ever so English, has seen fit to apologise. On Twitter, no less.

"I must apologise

I had no idea that the idea of writing a new sitcom with my daughter would cause so much anger and distress

I truly meant no harm. Naively I thought it might be fun

But I feel terrible about having released this tide of negative emotion

Please forgive me" he tweeted.

This is an apology made in absolute, sincere sarcasm. It is satire in itself, a pre-emptive strike against know-it-all pundits who are predicting the new series will be an "anti-woke nightmare."  Cleese happens to own Fawlty Towers. It is his intellectual property. He can do whatever he likes with it, including leasing it out for the occasional unsuccessful Hollywood attempt to remake it for a US network over the decades.

Fawlty Towers is considered one of the greatest sitcoms ever made, a perfect twelve episodes written and made over two seasons back in the late 1970s. It is a farce and satire about the failure of fascism and trying to impose order on chaos. Basil Fawlty is a petty, cynical man who often makes things worse for himself and ends up hoist on his own petard, or series of self-inflicted wounds. That is the character that Cleese and his co-writer daughter are bringing back. The nature of sitcoms is the characters never change, so they will find new things in the modern world to torment Basil Fawlty. That is the only guarantee of the show. Cleese, as a seasoned comedy writer with over fifty years of experience, knows this.

We know that Shin Fawlty Towers, as we like to call it until told otherwise (for "shin" is Japanese for "new"), is set in a boutique hotel in the Caribbean to be run by Basil Fawlty and his long-lost daughter. There will be an international clientele that they will be dealing with. Beyond that, nothing is known about the new series.

We would prefer to wait for Shin Fawlty Towers to actually exist and be on television before we can watch it and then praise or slate it based on its content and execution. You know, like normal, rational humans and not clickbait writers who claim to predict the future.

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