KEY POINTS:
You have, I suppose, to give TV One full marks for attempting to be innovative, but it's hard to see how this newfangled thing on Tuesday nights is going to take off.
It's a brand new concept called, I believe, farce. The name of the show is a particularly silly one: Fawlty Towers. And you just have to hope that nobody with a juvenile sense of humour starts playing around with the title otherwise you could end up with all sorts of idiotic variations such as, say, Farty Towels or Watery Fowls. This sort of thing might have limited appeal, to 6-year-olds, say.
This Fawlty thing has come from the BBC whose Head of Light Entertainment said that the show was "a prime example of the BBC's relaxed attitude to trying out new entertainment formats and encouraging new ideas". He said that when he read the first scripts he could see nothing funny in them. Quite.
What could be funny about a show featuring a vile-tempered, xenophobic, social-climbing hotelier married to a woman he refers to as "my little nest of vipers," and who has a laugh her husband describes as "someone machine-gunning a seal". There is a waiter, from Spain, called Manuel, who is useless at waiting, can't speak English and is obviously in the thing merely as a butt of the hotelier's temper.
A typical joke: "I fought in the Korean War, you know; I killed four men," the hotelier boasts. To which his wife replies, "He was in the Catering Corps; he used to poison them."
I can't see it being a success.
Fortunately for TV One it also has the long-lived Dancing with the Stars on Tuesday nights. This has been going strong since 1975 (surely, hasn't it?) which is even longer than Paul Holmes' retirement plan. Unlike this character Basil Fawlty, who quite obviously has no lasting appeal, the show's hosts Jason Gunn and Candy Lane appear ageless in the way that waxworks never age. From one season to the next they are unchanged. As are the jokes.
A typical joke from Gunn: "He is soldiering on, putting his best foot forward. Well, his only foot forward." This was about some mayor called Michael Laws who had broken his toe rehearsing. This same Mr Laws was ticked off by one of the judges for performing his dance while looking like "an over-sexed, smutty little schoolboy".
Paul Holmes was told the ending of his dance was "cod and desperate". This was cutting stuff. I don't think you'll hear anything as funny as that on this experimental Fawlty Towers nonsense.
The great appeal of Dancing with the Stars is obvious. It's got everything. April in a very small dress, Laws in a rather larger sulk, everyone doing silly walks. There is the real risk of much soldiering on with broken egos.
Now that's riveting telly. Unlike a show which includes an episode where the Germans come to stay at a hotel called Fawlty Towers and a silly-walking, goose-stepping hotelier shouts: "Don't mention the war."
How many weeks to go until we don't have to mention a very silly show again?
