So you thought Basil Fawlty was beyond belief? At the Torquay hotel that inspired the famous British comedy, truth really can be stranger than fiction
On September 19 1975 - 25 years ago this week - a sitcom, written by and starring John Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth, started without fanfare on BBC2.
In a small, semi-detached house in Southport, Lancashire, a 13-year-old boy watched it with his father. The boy sat on the living-room sofa (in those days, strictly speaking, it was the lounge couch), the man in his favourite Parker Knoll armchair. By the end of episode one of Fawlty Towers - the one about the bogus Lord Melbury, who turns out to be a con man - both of them were weeping with laughter. When they watched the final episode of that series, the one about the Germans, the man howled so much that the boy laughed just watching his dad.
One evening less than five months later, two police constables brought the devastating news that his father had died of a heart attack on the train to London.
One lunchtime some 20 years later, I sat with John Cleese in a tiny Greek restaurant in Camden Town, north London. I was interviewing him for a national newspaper. He was in good cheer and we got along famously.
He even reminisced about Fawlty Towers, which he is generally reluctant to do - in fact, he gamely recorded a message in Basil Fawlty's voice for my answering machine. But I didn't know whether to thank him for indirectly supplying the happiest, most vivid memories I had of my dad.
It seemed rather soppy, although I needn't have worried. Cleese, as perhaps Britain's most celebrated psychotherapee, is used to emotional candour. When I thanked him and explained why, his eyes filled with tears. He reached across the table towards me, but I wasn't sure whether he was closing in for a handshake or a hug. We ended up performing rather awkward high-fives over the table. I got a little dollop of taramasalata on the elbow of my jacket.
Last week I spoke to Cleese again. He phoned me from his home in Santa Barbara, California, in response to a fax I had sent him. He apologised profusely, but said he really didn't want to talk about Basil any more, even though he was deeply touched that television-industry folk had just voted Fawlty Towers the greatest programme of all time, in a poll conducted by the British Film Institute.
I persevered. Could he remember anything about Donald Sinclair, the irascible Torquay hotelier on whom Basil was based? "Was his name really Donald?" asked Cleese. "I only knew him as Mr Sinclair. And I am now making a film called Rat Race, in which I play a casino owner whose name is Donald Sinclair. Extraordinary."
Extraordinary indeed. As for the real Donald Sinclair, he ran, with his domineering - one might even say Sybilline - wife Betty, the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, where the Monty Python team stayed in 1970 while they were filming in nearby Paignton.
Having failed to jog Cleese's memory, I called the ever-obliging Michael Palin. "Oh yes, I remember the Gleneagles," he recalled, chuckling. "That man Sinclair ran it like a high-security prison. I remember asking for a wake-up call and his eyebrows went skywards. 'Why?' he said.
"We also had a meal there, and Terry Gilliam (who is American) left his knife and fork at an angle. Sinclair leant over him while Terry was in full flow, put his knife and fork together, and muttered 'this is how we do it in England'.
"It's funny now, but it really did seem like the worst hotel in the world. Everything we asked for seemed to be the most unforgivable imposition - in fact Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and myself checked out after just one night.
"But John and Eric Idle stayed, which I couldn't understand at the time, especially as Sinclair had taken Eric's suitcase and put it outside, by the gate, apparently because he thought it might contain a bomb.
"John is not really a tolerant person either. I suppose this is good example of tolerance being rewarded."
Cleese subsequently quit the Pythons, and did not tell his erstwhile colleagues that the Torquay experience had inspired him to write a sitcom.
These days, I am hugely disappointed to report, the Gleneagles Hotel (restyled the Hotel Gleneagles after pressure from its grander Scottish namesake) is much more welcoming.
The current proprietor, Ray Marks, even met me at Torquay station last Thursday, and helped me trace Trixie, a jolly northerner who worked for the Sinclairs - as Connie Booth's Polly worked for the Fawltys - as a waitress and chambermaid.
"John Cleese only scraped the top of the iceberg as far as Torquay hotel-owners are concerned," she told me. "And Sinclair was worse than Basil, much worse. Betty used to lock him in their flat because he upset the staff so much. If he went into the kitchens in the morning, she'd sometimes be three staff short by the evening. She'd lock him in, and say to us 'If Donald starts knocking, girls, don't let him out'.
"The funny thing is that he didn't like the guests being unpleasant to the staff - that was his job. I remember a humungous woman checking in one evening, with a weedy little husband, and they complained that we were giving them nasty looks, which we were, because we had to stay on to give them a late supper.
"Mr Sinclair said: 'How dare you criticise my staff! Get out of my hotel!' He actually threw them into the street, poor things."
The Sinclairs sold the Gleneagles in the mid-1970s and Donald died not long afterwards. The formidable Betty, however, is still very much alive. Thought to be well into her eighties, she is frequently spotted driving round Torquay in an elderly Mercedes convertible. But I was warned that she gives short shrift to anyone who dredges up the Fawlty connection, thundering that Cleese is a "geek" and that her late husband was once a respected lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy. "She didn't have much time for him while he was alive, but she is very loyal to his memory," Marks told me.
Otherwise, the spirit of Fawlty Towers is barely in evidence, although guests Shirley and Dennis Cooper, from Bedfordshire, did mention their encounter the previous evening with "a little waiter, too fast for himself, flying about and forgetting what we'd ordered".
Moreover, Marks is now thinking of organising a Fawlty Towers theme weekend. "I've found a Basil impersonator called Ed Wells, who is 6ft 7in. He's got a Sybil and a Manuel too."
And so, down in Torquay, in a hotel with a nice view of the sea - "it's over there, between the land and the sky" as Basil once told a dissatisfied guest - life prepares to imitate art imitating life.
Seemingly, art got the imitation spot-on.