On the 8th September 2001, The Unofficial Guide to Fawlty Towers was fortunate enough to be able to interview Robert Ross, comedy historian and co-author of Fawlty Towers - Fully Booked.
The interview ranged far and wide, covering not only his new book and Fawlty Towers in general, but British comedy old and new.
What follows is the first part of the interview, cleaned up, edited, run past the lawyers, checked, double checked and stirred lightly over a low heat.
TUG: Do you primarily write, or do you love comedy?
RR: I love comedy, I've loved comedy since I was a kid really, I think my dad worked out the only thing to keep me quiet was to sit me in front of the TV and put a Carry on... movie on or a bit of Benny Hill. The first one I did was the "Carry on companion", which came out in 1996, but I had written it about eight years earlier, it took a long time to get a publisher for that one. That one did reasonably well, and of the back of that one they said "Will you do another one?", I said "Yeah, can I do Monty Python please?", and they said "Yeah, OK" and then it's just gone on from there really. And the BBC ones are good, the first BBC one we did was [Last of the] Summer Wine which was '99. They're good because you can plunder their archives, "These photographs have not been seen for 20 years", fantastic.
TUG: Was there much unseen stuff on Fawlty Towers?
RR: Not a lot unfortunately, there's one or two in the book of like Connie Booth and John Cleese on the set, just relaxing, reading the paper and things. Probably the best photograph, the most unusual photograph is from The Anniversary, where Julian Holloway was cast in the role as Una Stubb's husband, because of all the business and problems because all the filming couldn't be done in time, there's actually a shot of them together. So that picture is in there for the first time, it's a black and white one but it's still quite nice. And there's just lots of nice little shots from shows as they were being made. They did say first of all "Shall we have screen grabs and things", and I said "No", the quality may be a little bit rough, but there are some nice shoots and lots of publicity shots.
TUG: There are a lot of screen grabs on people's websites aren't there? Pretty poor quality.
RR: Yeah, and ironically on the backs of the videos, you get the videos and you think "My God" they're taken off a TV, off another TV, truncated again, really blurry, like 1950's TV or something, so all the pictures are really high quality and most of them are colour actually, with a few exceptions. The design's really good, it's like a typical sort of good reference book you can plough through, each episode is done and guest star section and that sort of things.
TUG: Well we are looking forward to seeing that, when is it, the 18th October isn't it?
RR: Well apparently, then I was told it was the 25th, cause it's, one for the anoraks here, the 25th is actually the 22nd anniversary since Basil the Rat was first broadcast. It's true, it's true, but that wasn't the reason they were going to do it, it just happened to coincide, but last I heard it might be put back a little bit later, may even be that start of November now. Certainly before Christmas, to tie in with the DVD, which I warn your readers now that they are going to do season one first of all, then season two, then about a week later they are going to do a complete box set.
TUG: Yes, it's amazing it's taken this long to get the book and the DVDs
RR: I'm not sure of the reason, and I know for a fact that some shows are delayed because of like the writers don't wont it to be done yet. But the discs are really good cause they've got commentary buy John Howard Davies on series one and Bob Spiers on the second one, interview with Cleese, interview with Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and some out-take stuff as well, which is quite interesting.
TUG: You've seen it?
RR: I've seen it, but I wont give it away, it's interesting stuff actually. It's a very nice disc, because the first comedy ones they were doing were stuff like Only Fools and Blackadder which is basically just transcribed from the video recordings onto disc with nothing at all, no extras, nothing at all. I think they learnt from the League of Gentlemen one, which is like probably the best comedy disc ever. Complete series one with the four guys doing the commentary and out-takes and things, they learnt that for Fawlty Towers, we've got to do something a bit better than just stick the episodes out again for the twelfth time and hope that people are going to buy them.
TUG: They had the John Cleese interview on the videos didn't they?
RR: That's right, the plan was they were going to do the complete..., they had Cleese for about an hour and a half interview straight, and they were going to have entire run of it. I'm not sure whether they have done that now or they might have retracked so they actually just used the bit they used on the box set ones. I think they might have backtracked to that and it's the same as what was on before unfortunately, but there's new stuff with Andrew Sachs and Prunella Scales which is really good actually, the Sach's stuff particularly is fascinating.
TUG: You very rarely see or hear anything of Prunella Scales talking about it.
RR: I think she's still quite proud of it, but she's gone on to, apart from the Tesco's ads, she's gone on to do sort of great stage stuff with Timothy West. She's done a lot of theatre, which is great you know, but I mean I think she appreciates, like Andrew Sachs does, that that comedy character from 25 years ago is still up there. It's like Connie Booth has always stuck in mind as a Torquay waitress, whatever she goes on to do.
TUG: Did I read you had interviewed John Cleese for the book, and Andrew Sachs?
RR: I did for Python yes, but not for the Fawlty Towers ones. The Fawlty Towers one was actually extracts taken from a previous interview from the BBC, but we did do Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs. We fought tooth and nail to get Connie Booth to do something for the book, but it was her decision, but we stood by it, you can't help that, it's one of those things. We got a few quotes from the behind the scenes boys as well, Bob Spiers and John Howard Davies, and I say the guest stars is fun. You forget the cream of the crop of British comedy, you know, come into that, Bernard Cribbins inparticular, Geoffrey Palmer is great...
TUG: Ken Campbell?
RR: Ken Campbell, yeah, the genius that is Ken Campbell, anarchic madman. I've got some old footage, mid-eighties probably when Sylvester McCoy and Bob Hoskins was part of his road-show, stuffing ferrets down there trousers, I mean what is this stuff, you know, unbelievable. I think he brings, he came in to replace Julian Holloway and he brings a lot of, I don't know, sort of off the wall... he works well with Cleese, they are both from that old school of bizarre comedy, trying to do a straightish sitcom and it works really well I think.
