The other night tucked away on Channel 5 of all places;
A talking heads treatise threatening the Cleese and Booth
Gift, which they call ‘The Cancellation of Fawlty Towers;’
Time’s test in the gaze of post teens and long past their delivery
Date Baby boomers, gratingly placed before respectively,
A bar bound mounted mobile and vintage sofa set and stale
Papered wall. Who was best? Hard to say, as both in the test
Conceded to expectation. The aged defending old choices,
Backed by Sir Trevor MacDonald’s somewhat strained gravitas,
While the young looked bemused by lines and attitudes
Far beyond them, as well as before them, as if, odour rising
There was a sell-by date on the past. But perhaps that was
The point of this trite and somewhat trivial programme,
Blessed by a Steven Berkoff voiceover, and his theatrical
Tone’s caustic rise. Different worlds colliding of course,
And off course too as I watched them, with the series
Making it through by lapping laughter as it has always been
Sit-com’s prize. The ‘sit’ as important to it as the ‘com’
As even the Hotel is funny, with its chipboard walls,
Moose and people as close to collapse as its stairs,
And its ineptness writ large, this place of falling dreams
Cartoons violence, Basil lashing out at car, wife and waiter
As a means to explicate his despair. For Fawlty Towers,
While real, transmogrifying its Donald Sinclair inspiration
Was a comment too on backwaters so often found
On dry land, in which strange and strained creatures grow,
Seeking either the light of acceptance or the form of dark
Which grants cover to the very thing that unseats us
And for which at the end of the day we can’t stand. Failure.
To grow up, or back down, or to face our commitments.
To change beside seasons, or to provide properly. Hotels
Should be homes for however long you stay in them. Or better
Than home. Fawlty Towers, will from their first storey
Always serve the soup of sense sloppily. As a form of uncare
Home for those carelessly caught within it, from Ballard Berkeley’s
Major, to Gilly Flower and Renee Roberts Mrs Tibbs and Gatsby;
To Andrew Sach’s brave Manuel, tripped and trapped, or Connie
Booth’s Princess Polly, the guiding force, who like Prunella Scales’
Sybil remained Cleese’s captives of course, never free. Perhaps
Basil’s grip was too tight as the towers toppled around them,
And it is that desperation and the then Cleeses joint writing skill
Which provides the reason why this 50 year old oak remains
The top comedy tree in the forest that these Producer Lumberjacks,
Hay, Donkin and Levi have been commissioned to find fit for felling.
Subject to scrutiny here, what’s compelling is how discernment
Remains unapplied. Everything is now about what’s preferred
By the deferred generation. Or whatever controls them.
Nothing is known, only shared now. But, I wonder how did PC
First modem the modern from the ash of the old? What has died?
At one point in this show, they echo the Cleese and Two Ronnies
Class sketch, with a Generation Z on her smart-alice-phone
As next to her the bad shirted middle aged man looks askew.
It made me feel sick, this cheap trick, a form of so called virtue
As voucher. To be traded in for opinion and for the reasons why
Each age has its view. There are lines in Fawlty Towers
Whose words are naturally of their time. Yet they’re heightened.
In a manic state of depression, or bewilderment long trod tropes
Still surmount, both reason and rhyme, not to mention ancient
Marmalade labels, but parodies about people and what
They have become our accounts, reportage, and need no ignorant
Edit. It is not the word, but its useage. Lenny Bruce died for that.
In cutting language up when we text, or bowel-like, when we pass
An emoji for emotion, speech, spiel is shat on and will stick
In the teeth to be spat. We are not progressing at all when we use
This word cancel. We preserve, protect nothing, because the debate
Has been dulled. The two times fail to talk. Lessons remain unlearned
So now students afford the culture’s teachers detentions
When comedy is corralled and brought close enough to be culled.
In the Channel 5 show pundits react to a line or scene
For fast judgement. Flowery Twats is not On the Buses,
Or Love Thy Neighbour, or Alf Garnet’s frequent overspill,
Yet he was a figure of ridiculed fun, what we might call
The best of the bigots. But look now, Kids, we elect them.
So which turn of phrase should we kill? Perhaps Johnny Speight
Wrote too well, and overegged his prose pudding. But stare
Into the screen and the mirror of where and what people are
Shimmers through. We need a branch between trees in that
Fifty year forest, which looked at the decades before it
And what they had reared and ripped down to be true
About the issues all face. And about the strains life engenders.
Basil balances bigots, whether at the Reception desk, bar
Or Stoop. Be it through Mrs Richards’ Hearing Aids, or Sybil’s
Discontent at O’Reilly, we cannot in clear conscience wipe
Everything away in one swoop. It is not all the same.
There is a fight and force to what’s truly funny. As it dares us
To question what motivates our own hearts. Not to mention
Our minds, as scorched and subject to strain as they are also
To sunlight. Charlie Chaplin loved young girls. So what do
We do with his Art? You set each day in its frame.
Call it a cage if you have to. But keep it up there and mounted
So that those to come quantify what is right, what is left
And from what source taste finds season. It is if nothing else
For this reason that Cleese and Booth brought us laughter
And craft for some future sailing, for if Basil Fawlty fails
Dodo’s fly, over a wrecked river and sea of polluted perception.
There are some who would make it extinct: that’s discernment!
Those are who we all should be judging, be they politicians,
Trendsetters, or those who want to make the bitter seem better.
So, I say to you leaves: learn together and in all weather
Know the full difference between what something is and its why.
David Erdos 1/6/25
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