KEY POINTS:
In a poll of the TV industry conducted in 2000 to determine Britain's best television programmes, Fawlty Towers came at the top of a very distinguished list. Yet it astonishes even hardened fans to be reminded that this quintessentially English farce ran to only 12 half-hour episodes. So deeply embedded in our memories - and so often replayed - it has parlayed its short-lived origins into something close to cultural immortality.
This trainspottingly comprehensive but only fitfully interesting volume probably contains nothing not recorded elsewhere - the bibliography, after all, lists an English-language Swedish publication called Fawlty Towers: A Worshipper's Companion which suggests the field is pretty crowded.
Much of the text is padded out with episode synopsis in which one long exchange of dialogue is reproduced twice. Some of the writing is pretty naff as well: John Cleese's father changed the family name from Cheese, we are told, because he was "well and truly cheesed-off at being teased".
But there are moments of sublime insight into the man McCann describes as having "clenched fists, clenched hair and a clenched heart" and the book goes some way to explaining why the series was so good: the obsessive perfectionism of everyone involved, but in particular of writers Cleese and Connie Booth.
The scripts had twice as many pages and the finished episodes contained twice as many shots as the average sitcom. That, we inevitably conclude, is why it was not an average sitcom.
Hodder and Stoughton, $48
- Detours, HoS
