KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

By: Adam McGovern
May 16, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

FAWLTY TOWERS | 1975; 1979

When I think about it, which I’d rather not, it’s surprising how much closer to panic we were in the anaesthetized, inert 1970s than we are in the alertly imperiled 2020s. The West’s suburban doldrum at the century’s midlife was a thin skin over roiling tensions, and not for nothing were tranquilizers the most popular drug; here at the seeming brink of extinction, the antagonisms are all on the surface and strangely much easier to absorb. We’re out of surprises, but with Basil Fawlty you never knew what was coming next.

Neither did he — marooned at the farthest midpoint between both Britain’s bygone upper crust and its revolutionary counterculture, devoid of ambition but feeling cheated and ignored anyway, his fuse, like the major powers’ nuclear stockpiles, could be lit at any minute. Possessing no social authority, he made his home a dictatorship. It was a phenomenon fully familiar to many kids of midcentury parents in our own domestic sphere, but if you kept facing the TV, Fawlty’s version was one you could laugh at.

The nightly tirades, the ambushes over slights that were imagined to begin with and then embellished to a boiling point, the fixation on financial gain by exploited error or mild fraud, the pitched combat with inanimate objects, all of which we were used to at home, were there in Fawlty’s explosive anger at his staff, and spouse, and life; his recriminations against guests who turned out not to be the aristocrats or inspectors he thought he had to feign respect for; his exultant and ephemeral acquisitions of someone else’s lost money; his sound thrashing of a stalled car with the nearest tree-branch.

Created by John Cleese and Connie Booth, one of two psychotherapists Cleese has, ironically, been married to, Fawlty’s indiscriminate animus was turned both inward and out: He tyrannizes straight-up stereotypes of the clueless immigrant (Manuel) and the conniving Irishman (Mr. O’Reilly), while being bullied by an Ugly American guest in one episode and tormented in all of them by the embodiment of fossilized, fatuous Britannic hauteur, the Major (who a highschool friend of mine very plausibly assumed to be Fawlty’s unidentified, amnesiac dad). He freaks out at both the descendants of England’s ancient enemies (the German guests) and the vanguard of its multicultural future (Sybil’s West African doctor).

Fawlty himself is the ultimate butt of the entire series’ joke, his character a kind of indulgence and immolation of Cleese’s hostilities, in the same way that watching the climactic moments of Fawlty losing his shit was both a catharsis of our anxieties about the despots in our lives, and a communion with someone who felt just as helpless. Comedy is Basil Fawlty dying for his sins and us watching over and over. His rages are the scary slapstick of the realization — his and ours — that no one is in charge. And he’s got no one altogether; but we’ve got him.

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KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

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