F-F-F-"Fawlty Towers" - and Beyond! Quiz

Answer: English cricketers

For non-Commonwealth readers, cricket is like baseball in that the aim of the game, depending on which side you're on, is either to try to kill an enemy team member using a bat and ball and then to run like hell, or to break your wrist by holding it in front of a ball travelling fast and accurately enough to punch a hole through a largish asteroid. The difference is that in baseball you see someone run once every few seconds, whereas in cricket it's more like one a week. This explains why at least four cricket games that started not long after the game was first invented in the 14th century are still going on today.

In "Basil the Rat" the Major is reading the newspaper and remarks to the person sitting at the next table "[Geoff] Boycott made the century!" before realising with astonishment that the "person" is in fact the eponymous rat.

When Polly tries to tell Basil in "The Builders" that the devastation wrought by O'Reilly's incompetent workmen on his hotel wasn't Manuel's fault, or her fault, he yells at her: "Whose fault is it then, you cloth-eared bint - Dennis Compton's?" (She tells him what he doesn't want to hear: it was his fault for hiring a nincompoop like O'Reilly in the first place.)

And in "A Touch of Class" the Major refers to "D'Olivera" (according to "The Complete Fawlty Towers" scripts; the correct spelling is D'Oliveira) making the hundred (i.e. a hundred runs), to which Basil replies "Good old Dolly".

This last character is truly interesting. "Dolly" was D'Oliveira's nickname. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but because he was classed as "coloured" under the apartheid laws of his time he couldn't play cricket for his country. In 1960 he emigrated to England. His talent was so evident that by 1966 he was selected for its national team. His performances against Australia, India, Pakistan and the West Indies ranged from solid to spectacular. So he was all set to be selected for the England team to tour South Africa in 1969 - but it was not to be, at least not at first. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) named the touring team, and it didn't include him. The behind-the-scenes machinations involving the Club and both the British and South African governments, including blustering by South African President BJ Vorster, to keep the coloured man out of the apartheid country, as well as betrayals by his supposed friends and colleagues, have subsequently been revealed, and a sorry tale it is. Nevertheless, the furor caused by the incident led in a direct line, through the publicity it engendered and South Africa's subsequent isolation from the sporting world, to the end of the apartheid regime.

A personal note: I well remember a similar furor caused by the touring South African rugby team, the Springboks, in my homeland of New Zealand. The then Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, defended the tour on the grounds that sport and politics shouldn't be mixed (this from the man who defended Cambodia's Pol Pot regime because the North Vietnamese-imposed Hun Sen regime which threw it out and stopped the genocide was illegitimate), but the level of protest, including violent protest, was simply too great, and the tour was cancelled. This was part of the growing sporting isolation of South Africa begun by Dolly's actions. Interestingly, he kept insisting the same as Muldoon: that sport and politics shouldn't mix. What seems to have given his argument such force was that, whatever the theory, it was so obviously wrong in practice, a state of affairs from which he quite blatantly suffered badly.

Answer: Half a cup of dark coffee mixed with half a cup of scalded (not steamed) milk

Coffee with milk froth is cafe latte; coffee made with water under pressure is espresso; and coffee with a layer of cream on top is floater coffee.

Mud with dandruff for sugar and spit for milk, all pretending to be sweet white coffee, is a speciality of Private Baldrick (in 'Blackadder'), but that's another quiz...

(The delightful Mrs Peignoir asks for cafe au lait in "The Wedding Party", but Basil, decidedly not being au fait with his français (or his Deutsch, for that matter), thinks it's a joke and joins in with "Olé!")

Answer: First movement (Allegro con brio)

Brahms was a big, hairy man who wrote big, hairy music, but not as big and hairy as Bruckner - who, curiously, was clean-shaven and practically bald. Music historians, frustrated by their inability to reconcile this discrepancy, have circumvented the issue by declaring that the Beatles are better than both Brahms and Bruckner, which can easily be proved by the fact that they managed to combine a state of hairiness above eye level with clean-shavenness below.

(Sybil, after frustrating Basil by repeatedly pressing him to hang the picture AND do the menu at the same time, infuriates him by snarking in "A Touch of Class" that "you could have had them both done by now if you hadn't spent the whole morning skulking in there listening to that racket." "That's Brahms!" shouts an exasperated Basil. "Brahms Third Racket!")

Answer: No

Fawlty Towers' chef used to work in Dorchester, says Sybil in "Waldorf Salad". No, not at the world-class hotel in London, but in the town of Dorchester, about 40 miles away from Torquay. It's near, but not on, the sea. Weymouth is the nearest town with a beach front.

Dorchester's most famous for... let me see... yes, well, moving swiftly on...

Answer: False

She makes this assertion in "Gourmet Night".

Van Gogh only sold one in his lifetime, the painting "Red Vineyard at Arles", now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

He didn't slice off his ear out of frustration at his lack of commercial success, however, but because of a row he had with Gaugin. The number of Google results you get from a search on "Gogh's ear" that don't refer directly to this unusual episode is truly staggering.

Answer: He unexpectedly resigned in 1976, being succeeded by James Callaghan

Perhaps if Basil hadn't been semi-concussed in "The Germans", he wouldn't have been quite so irrational as to attribute the fire extinguisher "blowing his head off" to the state of the country under Wilson.

Answer: Thailand

When one of the hotel's guests dies in "The Kipper and the Corpse", Basil desperately asserts that "this is a hotel, not the Burma Railway".

The factual bit: The Japanese military wanted to build this railway post-haste to supply their troops in Burma through a supply line running through Thailand back to Japan. The ultimate goal was an invasion of British India. Nearly a quarter of a million Burmese, Javans and Malayans worked on the railway, as well as about 60,000 Allied POWs. The line was built from both the Burmese and Thai ends, and met in October 1943. Once operational it performed well below expectations, but even its actual capacity of six trains daily was a material aid to the Japanese front in Burma. It continued to operate, increasingly intermittently, run by Asian workers, even after the British advance through Burma, until the final Japanese surrender in August 1945.

The other factual bit: It's called the "Death Railway" because perhaps 100,000 (according to the most reliable estimates) Asian workers and 13,000 Allied POWs died during the construction period, especially during the final four months when the authorities in Tokyo pressed for a speedy completion. Deaths were from disease epidemics, starvation, overwork (62 hours out of 72 was recorded during the final period), poor accomodation and sanitation, and guard brutality. All this from the http://www.tbrconline.com/default.asp?PageID=1, the website of the Railway museum, which contains a page on the Railway's history. You'll find similar figures quoted elsewhere, with some variations, but I guess the Museum's statistics ought to be the most reliable.

The film "Bridge Over the River Kwai" concerns one bridge of about 600 on the line. There was nothing remarkable about it, apart from the film made about it, which was loosely based on a real incident. Engineers seem to agree that, the brutality and appalling human cost aside, the railway was a remarkable engineering achievement. Pre-war time estimates were in the order of five years; the British at the beginning of the century thought the task impossible. In the event, it took about 17 months.

Answer: Neuter

The incident in which one of the German guests asks: "Wir wollen ein Auto mieten" ("We want to hire a car") quite obviously comes from the episode "The Moroccans".

The other common German word for "car" is "der Wagen", which is masculine. In Germany you use the neuter "das Auto" for dull, nondescript cars that you'd only deign to notice if they were coming straight at you down the middle of a motorway in the concrete of which your feet had been set, but "der Wagen" is reserved for big, gas-guzzling he-man-type cars that go VROOOOOM! and SNAAARRRRRRLLLL! and ROOOOOOAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR! when you unlock the door remotely from 30 feet away, never mind when you switch on the ignition. (Girly, feminine, sissy cars obviously don't exist in Germany except as an underclass which is too oppressed and downtrodden to show itself above the linguistic parapet.)

Answer: Marcel Proust

Robbins was born Harold Rubin and EM Forster was given the name of his uncle Henry Morgan at birth, but was accidentally baptised with his father's name, Edward Morgan. According to whichever website you read, he may have been born Frank Kane, or is also known by that name.

Marcel Proust was born a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and he wrote his most famous work, "À la recherche du wôókïè perdu", as a recollection of those glorious times and places. He wrote of metal robots that spoke like humans, marvellous apelike creatures, spaceships that travelled between galaxies as easily as you go to the shops, swords made of light, and all manner of other things that we can hardly imagine, and which we most certainly won't see in our lifetime.

(When, after deriding Robbins in "Waldorf Salad" as "pornographic muzak" and "awful American - well, not American, but trans-Atlantic tripe", Basil discovers that the American Mr Hamilton and his wife both like him, he suddenly "realises" that he actually thought they meant that other author, "Harold Robinson" - painful"! This is just after he's taunted Sybil with her lack of literary taste by "guessing" the author of the book she's reading: Proust? EM Forster?)

Answer: By Egypt and Syria on Israel

Another tease, disastrously misjudged, by Basil to Sybil in "The Anniversary", when he pretends to have forgotten theirs, and then "remembers" that today's date refers to the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt - or was it Crécy? Or Poitiers? Or Yom Kippur?

On October 6th 1973 the Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed their respective Israeli borders. Egypt achieved unexpected initial successes but then did nothing, allowing Israel a week to deal with Syria before turning back and driving behind Egyptian forces which had crossed the Suez Canal, forcing their surrender.

This isn't funny.

Answer: Bwindi National Park, Uganda

Bwindi is a very rugged forest park, totally unsuitable for the plains- and bush-dwelling wildebeeste. In fact the park's full name is "Bwindi Impenetrable [or, according to the website, "Inpenetrable"] National Park". The only way herds of these animals could sweep majestically here would be to run up the trees. (Mind you, if they did, they could get away from the mountain gorillas, half of the world's population of which lives here.)

(The infuriating, overbearing and deaf Mrs Richards cuts Basil's sarcasm off midstream in "Communication Problems", when she complains about the lack of a view from her window, is told "That's Torquay" and replies "Well, it's not good enough". Basil asks what she expected to see: Sydney Opera House, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, herds of wildebeeste sweeping majestically.... "Don't be silly" she interrupts.)

Answer: Amphetamine

In "The Psychiatrist", Sybil has finally had it with Basil either fawning over the guests or spitting at them "like some benzadrine puff adder".

The class of stimulants collectively called amphetamines consists of Laevoamphetamine (Benzedrine), Dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine) and Methamphetamine (Methedrine). Effects of Amphetamine ingestion or assimilation include pupil dilation, increased blood pressure and heart rate and reduced fatigue as well as euphoric sensations; the chemical causes of this are one or more of the following: the release of dopamine from the axon terminals, the blockage of dopamine reuptake, the inhibition of the storage of dopamine in vesicles, and the destruction of dopamine by enzymes. In any case, these stimulative effects can be counteracted by re-reading this paragraph.

MDMA is more commonly known as "ecstasy".

Answer: He never did use that line

Nor did Humphrey Bogart say "Play it again, Sam", Clint Eastwood say "Do you feel lucky, punk?", anyone in Star Trek say "Beam me up, Scotty", Tarzan say "Me Tarzan, you Jane", Sherlock Holmes say "Elementary, my dear Watson", Julius Caesar say "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" or Geoffrey Chaucer say: "Show me the colorectomy of your aunt Bob".

(Polly vainly tries to prevent Basil again "not mentioning the war" by doing his Hitler impersonation in front of four German guests. This is quite obviously from the episode "The Pitcairn Islanders".)

Answer: Neurosis

This from Reuben Fine's "A History of Psychoanalysis", as given on the website http://www.freudfile.org/work.html. His work on neurosis lasted from the beginning of his practice in 1886 until the "Studies of Hysteria" in 1895; the self-analysis period lasted till 1899; the Id period, the time when he first elaborated psychoanalytic psychology) until 1914; and the Ego period until his death in 1939.

Mind you, when you read some of the literature aiming to debunk Freud, you might come to the conclusion that all of this stuff about psychoanalysis, ego, id, sid and superlego is all a bunch of dingo's kidneys (that's an Australianism, by the way. For some reason the New Zealand equivalent, "kotuku-ngutupapa's colorectomy", doesn't seem to have caught on). For a list of Freud-rubbishing literature, see the Wikipedia article on him.

(It's Dr Abbott (the female one), in "The Psychiatrist", who replies to Sybil's gormless statement that psychiatry is a relatively recent profession, by informing her that Freud started about 1880 - to which Sybil knowledgeably replies "Yes, but it's only now we're seeing them on the television".)

Answer: Oklahoma! (Rodgers & Hammerstein)

Polly, valiantly attempting to entertain the guests waiting for their duck, sings this number as an impromptu solo in "Gourmet Night".

My favourite musical is "Der Ring des Nibelungen" (Wagner & Wagner), but it doesn't chime with a lot of people. Chime....Ring....geddit?

Next please! (rings bell)

Answer: Ten seconds

At the beginning of "The Psychiatrist" Basil is attempting to ring the speaking clock, which is engaged.

Here's a speaking clock joke from http://www.superlaugh.com/jokes/speakingclock.php:

Following a night out with a few friends, a man brought them back to show off his new flat. After the grand tour, the visitors were rather perplexed by the large gong taking pride of place in the lounge.
"What's that big brass gong for?" one of the guests asked.
"Why, that's my Speaking Clock" the man replied.
"How does it work?"
"I'll show you", the man said, giving the gong an ear-shattering blow with an unpadded hammer.
Suddenly, a voice from the other side of the wall screamed, "For Pete's sake, you moron, it's twenty to two in the morning!"

Answer: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"

Sybil stalks in during "The Builders" to find her hotel wrecked. Later, having arranged for Mr Stubbs to come and put it right, she stalks in again, to the incongruous strains of the "Sugar Plum Fairy", to find it already magically restored.

(H-h-hard to imagine her stalking a reindeer, what? Especially to that music!)

Answer: Kuala Lumpur

Maxim's de Paris is such an exclusive, swanky hotel that you have to make a reservation a year in advance, supported by three referrals from approved hotel clientele, just to murmur the name quietly in informal conversation. The conditions for actually looking at the website are simply impossible to fulfil for anyone who isn't at least a minor deity.

The hotel was bought by Pierre Cardin in 1981. He designed the bottle containing the hotel's own brand of unisex fragrance, Orphée, as a work of art. The hotel contains a 12-room museum created by Cardin to show the apartment of a courtesan at the turn of the twentieth century, the height of Art Nouveau. Maxim's has a store containing more than 500 exclusive products including food, water, a specially-produced CD, cigars, and ammunition for a .50 calibre Browning machine gun. The restaurant runs boat tours and exotic murder mystery weekends in deepest equatorial Montmartre. Like Harrods in London, it claims there is no order it can't fill. Someone asked for the Titanic once, so the hotel arranged to have it raised. Like Dave Barry, I did not make up at least some of this.

(Fawlty Towers has received a 24-hour health warning and Basil has just found out that a rat is running loose in the hotel in "Basil the Lesser Spotted Dogfish". Terry attempts to fob him off with some rubbish about the quality of hotels being in inverse proportion to their state of filthiness, and refers to George Orwell's experiences in Maxim's in Paris. I assume, without actually having read it, that these experiences are contained in his "Down and Out in Paris and London".)

Answer: No

I work in a law library. You wouldn't believe how easy it is to find a law that you know exists. You also wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find a law that doesn't, and never did, exist. It didn't, and such liaisons were legal at that time.

There is one exception, however: if you're a man, and the woman in the hotel room with you is the King of England's "Companion, or the King's eldest Daughter unmarried, or the Wife [of] the King's eldest Son and Heir", you're for the chop. It's still treason to "violate" any of these people (UK Statute 1351 chapter 2 section 2, passed during the reign of Edward III and still in force), and I believe that at the time this series was broadcast, treason was still nominally a capital crime. So it always pays to ask for your intended bedfellow's ancestry!

(In "The Wedding Party", Fawlty refuses Jean and Alan a double room because he thinks they're not married, and when they challenge him on this he comes up with what I think is one of the classic Fawlty lines: "It's the law of England. Nothing to do with me." And in "The Psychiatrist" the plot revolves around him trying to find the girl he's (rightly) convinced that Johnson's smuggled into his room. This isn't to do with the law of England, but the law of Fawlty - it's apparently an in-house rule that no visitor of the opposite...um...sex is allowed in guests' rooms after 10pm. So how do the man and his redhead girlfriend get nothing more than Basil's snide aside at the beginning of "The Kipper and the Corpse", as they're heading off up to bed?)

Answer: adj. A preventative against disease; n. a medicine intended to achieve this (and by extension a preservative, or precautionary)

The Whites have had a terrible experience with a corpse in "The Kipper and the...." - oh, I've forgotten the last word in the title! Anyway, they look for another hotel, even being prepared to move to one "next to the prophylactic emporium".

I can't think of something funny to say about prophylactics that wouldn't violate the purity of this hallowed website, so I'll tell you another joke instead:

A guy in the Queensland outback is claiming compensation for injuries sustained in an accident, when his horse-drawn wagon collided with a truck. In court, counsel asked him: "When a policeman asked you how you felt, what did you reply?" "I never felt better in my life". Counsel sat down, obviously feeling he didn't need to add any more. The guy's counsel rose and asked him: "Could you tell the court the circumstances under which you made that reply?"

"Shortly after the truck hit my wagon, a policeman appeared. He went over to my horse, which had a broken leg and was threshing around in pain. He put his gun to its head and shot it. He then went to my dog, which had broken its back and was howling in agony. He shot that, too. He then went to me and asked: "How are you feeling?"

I didn't make this up, but I'm not sure whether the website I got it from did.

Answer: False

Manuel tries to make this dish in Terry's kitchen in "The Anniversary" and ends up in a physical punchup with him. In "Gourmet Night" he also offers to make the dish for the homosexual alcoholic Greek chef Kurt (that's a bit of a German name, isn't it?) and local restaurateur André.

According to the Wikipedia entry, paella is a rice dish (saffron-flavoured, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica). It is usually garnished with vegetables and either meat or seafood, but fish certainly isn't essential to the basic dish.

Manuel, of course, wouldn't know that, not being from Valencia, to which the dish is native, but from Barcelona, further up the coast. He's probably used to the common variant "paella de peix" (fish) or "paella de marisc" (seafood).

I'm on a seefood diet. I see food and I eat it. Next please! (rings bell)

Answer: The White Horse of Uffington

The feature containing the non-grassy bit is, oddly enough, named Dragon Hill. Of course, the whole story about St George and the dragon is just some stupid myth. The real reason nothing grows there is because that's where Private Baldrick once spilt his coffee.

(In "Communication Problems" Basil talks somewhat fondly of St George, who "killed a hideous fire-breathing old dragon" - looking in Sybil's direction!)

Answer: A scheme whereby a stamp company sold stamps to retailers who gave them to customers, who could then in turn trade them for products at redemption centres

A green stamp is what I do when I'm ticked off because someone's got something I want. No, wait a minute, I'm getting confused because everyone keeps mentioning the war....

According to the site http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mgreenstamps.html, the payoff for retail stores of the green stamps they bought from stamp companies and issued to customers with their purchases was customer loyalty.

(Mr Hamilton walks in thoroughly disgruntled with English rain in "Waldorf Salad". "What do you get for living in a climate like this, green stamps?" he demands.)

Answer: JM Barrie

Barrie wrote "The Admirable Crichton" in 1902; in that same year he introduced the character of Peter Pan in a novel "The Little White Bird", before writing a play two years later entitled "Peter Pan, or the Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up". The novel was adapted from the play in 1911, and entitled "Peter and Wendy".

Mitchell's one famous shot was "Gone with the Wind" (1936), Burnett's "The Secret Garden" (1909) (although you might also count "Little Lord Fauntleroy" (1886)) and Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865) and its sequel "Through the Looking Glass" (1871).

Everyone, as they say, has a novel in them. In "Blackadder", Baldrick has one which reads: "Once upon a time, there was a lovely little sausage called Baldrick, and he lived happily ever after." I think this is the perfect novel. It's got a very catchy beginning, and the ending really wraps the story up perfectly, leaving no loose ends unturned. The middle is a bit skimpy, but then, if you know the ending, what's the point of a middle, anyway? It's a waste of energy. Imagine the effort Mark Twain could have saved if he'd just written "Tom Sawyer" thus: "'TOM!' No answer. It will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of his life at present."

(Manuel is far too tardy in answering Basil's call to get him a hammer for him to put the moose's head up with in "The Germans", and Basil sarcastically refers to him as "The Admirable Crichton", before answering his "You called, sir?" with "Last week".)

Answer: The Hotel Inspectors

If you didn't get this question right, I'll visit you in the small hours and put a bat up your nightdress!

Goodnight.
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I said: "Goodnight"!
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Didn't hurt, did it? (testily, as he walks off) I mean, it isn't the Gettysburg address, after all....