Fawlty Towers Anagrams – What is written on the sign in the title sequence?

What really rather rude phrase was the only complete anagram of Fawlty Towers as depicted in the titles of the seminal 1970s sitcom? It was used in the penultimate episode (ie eleventh: this show was about quality not quantity), The Anniversary. All anagrams used in the title sequences of other episodes were only partial anagrams; that is, they did not use all the letters. So while Flay Otters and Watery Fowls are all very well, they only use some of the letters; paraphrasing Eric Morecambe, “they have used some of the lyrics, but not necessarily in the right order”.

But what about Fawlty Towers itself? It’s reasonably well known, I suppose, that the Monty Python gang were in Torquay to shoot a movie and stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in town. Eventually, all the other cast and crew members moved out, but John Cleese was so impressed by the behavior of Gleneagles owner-manager, one Donald Sinclair, that he and his wife, Connie Booth, stayed where they were. Of course, what they witnessed there (or claimed to have witnessed) has now become legend in the 12 half-hour episodes that make up the entire Fawlty Towers canon.

In addition to writing the series, Cleese and Booth took on two of the leading roles in Fawlty Towers, Basil Fawlty (the hotel owner) and Polly Sherman (the maid and, of course, much more). Prunella Scales took on the role of Sybil, Basil’s wife, a strange mix of woman, sometimes domineering, but at the same time long-suffering. The fourth and final leading role was that of Manuel, the Spanish waiter at Fawlty’s. This was taken by German-born British actor Andrew Sachs. Using her own experience of learning English as a second language allowed Sachs to bring a real sense of Manuel’s vulnerability as a young man struggling to understand what the hell was going on in this very dysfunctional place.

But what about the episodes themselves? Well, as I have already mentioned and as you are probably well known, there were only twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers. They were shown weekly on BBC2 in two series of six episodes. The first ran from September 19 to October 24, 1975. The second ran from February 19 to March 19, 1979, and the sixth and final episode was postponed to October 25 of that year due to to a strike at the BBC. The first series gave us the delights of A Touch of Class; The builders; the wedding party; Hotel Inspectors; Gourmet Night and of course, Los Alemanes. series 2 contained communication problems; The psychiatrist; Waldorf Salad; The herring and the carcass; The Anniversary and last but not least, Basil the Rat. The best for me has to be The Germans, a bit cliche perhaps (on my part) but what the heck, they’re all brilliant and you really should have to pick a favourite.