Despite the high production standards of Fawlty Towers, one or two errors did slip through. Some were caught and ended up on the cutting room floor, and thankfully have been preserved for posterity on video.
The video tape 'Aunties Bloomers' contains three out-takes, one from 'Communication Problem' where Polly mixes up the guests names, another from 'Basil the Rat' where Manuel accidentally calls his rat a pigeon. The third out-take is from 'The Psychiatrist' and shows one of several wobbly walls in the series .
More wobbly walls can be seen in 'The Builders', where Manuel has his head banged against the wall where the dining room door should be, (watch Manuels foot trying to stop the wall move) or is it just O'Reillys poor workmanship!. In 'Gourmet Night' watch how the kitchen wall wobbles when Basil tries to take the first duck into the dining room.
Look closly at that scene again, who is that crouching behind the dining room door? It's a BBC Employee pushing the door to make Basil drop the duck, and then trying to get out of shot, but failing dismally.
The next set of mistakes are continuity errors, the majority of which are due to the outside secnes being filmed seperately to those indoors.
In 'A Touch of Class' Basil picks up's Lord Melburys cases outside the hotel, but when he brings them inside they have swapped hands.
In 'The Builders' when Basil goes outside to meet Sybil, who has returned back early, he has one more shirt button undone than when inside.
At the beginning of 'Gourmet Night' when Manuel gets Basil from the car park to answer the phone, Basil enters the building first but Manuel is seen entering the reception first from inside.
A the beginning of 'The Kipper and the Corpse' a couple are seen leaving the bar, and a short while after Basil leaves the bar, in reseption however Basil appears first, a short while later followed by the couple, how obviously has trouble passing through the passage between the bar and reception.
Not strictly a error, more a case of spot the difference, on the postcard showing Basil about to hit Manuel with a frying pan, Basil is wearing what looks like a pair of Y-Fronts, but in the actual episode he is wearing yellowish boxers.
Another mistake occurs on the 1998 Calendar , with one of the photographs the wrong way round.
There are a couple of possible errors on the new UK releases of the videos. The first is that all the videos contain adverts on the inside of the sleeve for the old style video. Secondly the tape 'Basil The Rat' has the word stereo on the spine, but none of the others have. What is going on at the BBC?
The biggest continuity error of all is in the numbering of the upstairs rooms, which changed very nearly every episode.
Spotted by Jonathan Gibbs in 'The Germans' when Basil is being chased by the doctor into the kitchen from the dinning room, their appears to a monitor visible through the reception door.
Spotted by Paul Marshell in 'The Kipper and the Corpse' watch bathroom door in the scene in the White's bedroom, when Mr Leeman is in the cupboard.
Spotted by Danny Evenwel in 'A Touch of Class' when Basil walks to the office with his breakfast what appears to be a microphone boom appears in the picture above the entrance to the drawing room.
Spotted by Robert Serr in 'Gourmet Night' in the sceen at Mentmore Close when Basil turns the corner the road surface is dry, but when he backs out it is wet.
Glen Marinella points out the difference in lighting in some of the exterior film sequences in 'Gourmet Night'. The difference between the wet and dry road at Mentmore Close has already been noted, but perhaps the biggest error is that the Gourmet Night seem to be taking place during the middle of the day.
Nic Charlton points out that in 'A Touch of Class' Lord Melbury runs from the reception desk towards the camera then reappears from the bar despite their being no obvious doorway between the two, or at least it is never seen.
Jeffrey Vagg has pointed out a mistake in our episode guide and in 'The Complete Fawlty Tower' book. The sister in 'The Germans' was played by Brenda Cowling and not Brenda Collins.