F-F-F-"Fawlty Towers": Individual Episodes Quiz

Answer: A hideous orangutan

Lurphy promptly smashes Manuel's face in. His face must be made of titanium, because you can't see any damage for the rest of the episode. Nevertheless, conning the witless Manuel into insulting Lurphy is arguably the meanest thing Basil ever does to him.

Answer: A lot of the English cars have steering wheels

...to which Mr Hamilton's retort is: "You wouldn't think they have room for them inside".

Answer: MI5

This is Basil at his self-destructive best, so desperate to suck up to the fake Lord Melbury that he contemptuously dismisses Polly's account of how Mr Brown of the police's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was investigating the fraudster, referring to Brown as "that Cockney git whose ulterior motive will soon no doubt become apparent to you, poor innocent misguided child that you are."

Answer: Over there, between the land and the sky

That's Basil's sarcastic reply to the hard-of-hearing Mrs Richards' complaint that she can't see the sea. The sarcasm is lost on Mrs Richards, who retorts: "You'd need a telescope to see that."

"Between the two big..." is a reference to another of my comic heroes, Victor Borge. It's taken from his description of an opera: "And then she stabs herself, right between the two big...trees, there on stage."

Answer: They invaded Poland

Basil's concussed, so he's even worse than usual. His gratuitous attempt to prevent anyone mentioning the war to the German guests ends with him accusing them of starting the argument about the war by invading Poland, and then doing an impersonation of Hitler in front of them - in order to cheer them up, because "everybody keeps mentioning the War!"

Answer: He makes the Major go up the stairs to Manuel's bedroom

This is one of several oddities in FT. In "Basil the Rat" you see Basil climbing the same stairs to Manuel's room to get him to take the pigeons out of the water tank on the roof. There's nothing else up there - certainly no more rooms.

Answer: He must therefore have died before Basil brought him his breakfast, which included the out-of-date kippers for which Basil could have got 20 years in prison

Basil had earlier brought Mr Leeman his breakfast, had yaked to him for a couple of minutes about car strikes while doing some housekeeping on his room, and had finally left in a huff because Mr Leeman didn't reply to his comments - all without noticing that he was dead.

Basil's joy isn't a million miles removed from Rowan Atkinson's character Mr Bean. The comedy arises from their highly inappropriate reactions to situations. For instance, when Mr Bean accidentally knocks out his dentist, he ignores the prostrate man and proceeds to fill his own teeth - all 32 of them!

Answer: That both Alan and Basil haven't shaved

Alan asks Basil whether a chemist/druggist is still open this late in the evening. Basil the prude naturally jumps to the conclusion that he wants to buy naughties, and hectors him about his "disgusting" behaviour. Alan then reveals that he only wanted a chemist to get some batteries for his electric razor, because he hadn't shaved that day. Basil is suitably mortified, and tries to cover up his remarks as above.

Next day in the dining room, Basil attempts to pick up a seriously hung over Manuel, who has finally collapsed, and ends up rolling around on the floor with him. "Disgusting" comments Alan's girlfriend sarcastically, in an obvious reference to Alan's experience with Basil the night before.

When Basil finally manages to pick up the prostrate Manuel, sling him over his shoulder and stagger out to the kitchen with him, watch for Polly running along behind with a bowl to catch Manuel's incipient puke!

Answer: A tea cosy for his pepper pot

Sybil's warning to Basil not to take his misunderstanding about the hotel inspector out on Mr Hutchinson is lost on him, and he subsequently tells Mr Hutchinson to shutup, rudely answers his complaint about all the "erroneous dishes" appearing on his table by telling him to run the hotel himself, and finally chokes him and knocks him out.

Answer: Kick him in the guts while he's down

An outraged Sybil slaps Basil's face and bans him from their bedroom for (as she thinks) climbing up a ladder outside the hotel to see into the young and pretty Raylene Miles' room. A thoroughly nonplussed Basil has actually been trying to catch Mr Johnson in flagrante dilecto with the girl he's convinced Mr Johnson has smuggled into HIS room - it's just that Basil wound up at the wrong window. Manuel explains the origin of the mixup to him: "I tell Mrs Fawlty Mr Fawlty crazy about this girl, OK? So he climb ladder to see in girl's room because she make him crazy." Basil's reaction is to pick Manuel up around the middle, hold him horizontally and vigorously shake him.

He's just dropped him on the floor when the Abbotts come into view, at which point Basil covers his behaviour by saying to Manuel: "Now, that's how an Englishman would do it.

A German would..." and he makes as if to kick Manuel in the aforementioned guts, but looks at his watch and says: "No, we'll go on with your training in the morning".

Answer: Nothing

Nothing indeed. He did, however, win a Pulitzer Prize for the tin opener, according to Basil. (Sorry, trick question, but I couldn't help myself!)

Answer: The Major firing a shotgun in the bar

Just when everything needs to look "shipshape for old snoopy-drawers", the health inspector, all hell breaks loose as Manuel's pet rat, called Basil, is discovered to have escaped into the hotel... somewhere! The health inspector arrives at reception to be greeted by Major Gowen shooting at the rat in the bar, Polly dashing out with a net and Manuel running around screaming that the Major tried to kill Basil.

Incidentally, the false clue about a blackout refers to a legendary "lost episode", existing only in proof form, involving a blackout at the hotel.

Answer: He pokes him in the eye

The doctor explains to Basil that Manuel doesn't seem to understand that he, the doctor, hasn't finished his breakfast yet. Basil translates this into terms that Manuel can understand.

I've heard that this poke in the eye was accidentally real, as was Manuel actor Andrew Sachs' yelp of pain!

Answer: Checking the walls

He's trying to see and/or hear the girl he's convinced (rightly) that Mr Johnson has smuggled into his room. Every time someone catches him, he pretends to be checking the walls - and later, the window (when he falls off the ladder) and the inside of a cupboard in Raylene Miles' room.

Answer: Cement the bricks together, one on top of the other

Basil is complaining to Mr O'Reilly, the Irish builder, that the garden wall he was supposed to be building for them has only progressed as far as a dumped pile of bricks. In the next episode to be screened, "The Builders", Sybil refers to this again, saying that O'Reilly still hasn't built the wall.

Answer: ...lying on their backs on the bottoms of ponds

This is her verbal beating-up of the incompetent O'Reilly, following her physical one with an umbrella, in turn following the incompetent builder O'Reilly's wrecking of their hotel. (She has also seen better organised creatures than him running around farmyards with their heads cut off.)

Answer: Manuel's feet sticking out of the linen basket on which Basil is sitting

Manuel's drunk, and he's sleeping it off in the linen basket - as you do!

Answer: Basil tears it up

After Mr Hutchinson's umpteenth "erroneous dish", Basil in frustration tears up the offending omelette to Mr Hutchinson's words: "It's not as if I'd ordered an elephant's ear on a bun." This is just before Basil karate-chops him in the back of the head and knocks him out, pretending to the other guests that he was just giving him a slap on the back to stop him choking.

Answer: Duck without orange or cherries

Basil's special night for the cream of Torquay society comes unstuck when the chef lets the booze get the better of him. The whole menu, from which the guests are at that very moment ordering, goes in the bin, to be replaced with the only thing that Basil can beg from a local restaurant owner at the last minute: duck. Done, of course, three extremely different ways: duck with orange, duck with cherries and duck surprise - see above.

Answer: Good card players

The Major hates Germans ("Bad eggs, all of 'em"), but loves women. "What about German women?" asks Polly. Logically, the Major replies "Good card players", but walks off mumbling: "But I wouldn't give 'em time of day..."

Answer: He bangs it with his head

The other time Basil bangs his head (on purpose, that is) is in "Gourmet Night". "Perhaps it's all a dream", he says, hammering the desk several times hard with his head, as all his elaborate arrangements for a special menu for the cream of Torquay society disintegrate around his ears. Then he confirms: "No, it's not a dream - we're stuck with it."

Answer: They're just out of Waldorfs

Basil hasn't got a clue what one of these things is, and in exasperation Mr Hamilton finally has to tell him. Basil immediately assumes that they don't have the ingredients, and tries unsuccessfully to persuade Mr Hamilton to try a made-up and quite revolting-sounding "Ritz salad" (for which he knows they DO have the ingredients) before going into the elaborate concoction about the delivery guy busting his arm.

A few minutes later Sybil, having found the ingredients, brings Mr Hamilton a perfectly done Waldorf salad, making Basil look even more like an incompetent chump than normal.

Answer: Anniversary of the battle of Yom Kippur

This episode sees some face-slapping by Sybil as Basil's malicious teasing takes effect. The significance of today's date is that it's their wedding anniversary; Basil's "guesses" provoke Sybil to walk out, just before the friends that Basil had invited for a special anniversary celebration arrive.

The rest of the episode depicts Basil's attempts to persuade his guests that Sybil is ill in bed and can't see them, and culminates in Basil successfully convincing them that Polly in disguise in a suitably darkened bedroom is Sybil - just as Sybil herself walks in! That's one of the things I love about "FT": you're so often left just as the real catastrophe, from which there's no escape for Basil, is about to happen.

Answer: It's Jappo-Scandinavian imitation veal

Basil and Polly are desperate to dissuade customers from ordering the veal because one slice of it is covered in rat poison, and they don't know which one. Basil earlier tells the health inspector that it's "full of air pockets, that sort of thing", and tries unsuccessfully to convince him to order lobster instead. Polly tells a customer that the "imitation" veal is made of "soy beans and essence of cow", while Basil tells Ronald that "veal" is a misprint for "eel".

Answer: He doesn't turn the starter key in the ignition while he's counting

The well-known thrashing with a branch was administered immediately after, not before, this moment.

One of the best restaurants I've been to was in my homeland of New Zealand. It was a Fawlty Towers restaurant. The food was very good, but the main feature was a floor show in which Basil, Manuel and Sybil characters spent all evening insulting, misunderstanding and boring the guests respectively. It was one of the greatest night's entertainment I've ever had, and it started when the dining room opened fifteen minutes late. As we were all standing outside starting to grumble, up rattled the spitting image of Basil's red car and stalled right outside. Out jumped "Basil" and performed the branch-thrashing scene.

Has anyone ever come across a Fawlty Towers hotel like this anywhere else?