Rating: 
Summary: COMEDY AT ITS ABSOLUTE BEST!
Review: There is no love quite like Basil's love for Sybil - truly something to behold. As a fan of John Cleese (are there any who are not?) you will be blessed with his manic, wicked sense of humor. Aside from all the obvious compliments I could bestow on this show the thing that strikes me the most is how un-PC it is - and that's a good thing. It's not quite as overt and toe-curling as the old I Love Lucy shows or even the Fawlty Tower contemporary, All in the Family, but definitely using sex and race issues to mine humor. For example, no more would you see humor at the expense of an immigrant's struggle with the language in any current show. It's all about balance, which makes Fawlty Towers cutting edge and ahead of its time.
Bottom Line: If you really enjoy watching masters perform their craft, and John Cleese ranks right up there with Steve Martin as one of the absolute best, you'll find yourself laughing uncontrollably at this show.
Rating:
Summary: Very good!
Review: If you like classic British humour, then this is great! I'd watched
most of the episodes before, but it's nice to have all of them in one
place.
Rating:
Summary: Desert Island
Review: If I had to go to the proverbial desrt island and was only allowed one comedy programme to take with me, it would be "Basil the Rat". Just the funniest half hour of comedy ever. EVER! The rest of this series is brilliant. An absolute must see. Comedy just doesn't get any better than this series.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastically hilarious!!!!
Review: John Cleese is Basil Fawlty, a cranky English innkeeper who finds misery in his job and is determined to help everyone else find it as well. The trials and tribulations of Mr. Fawlty are widely recognized as some of the best comedy TV ever made, and for good reason. For better or worse, the series didn't have to stand up to the test of 100+ episodes, but the 12 they did make are absolutely priceless.It usually starts out with a simple problem, usually a result of Basil's contempt for his customers (a recurring theme is his desire to attract a "higher class" of boarder) or his tight-fistedness. The problem is then exacerbated by the help or the customers or by Basil's wife, resulting in total disaster and Fawlty's inevitable descent into hysterics. If there's one thing that John Cleese can do well it's pitch a fit, and he does this with hilarious efficiency throughout the series. Whether it be because his car has broken down or there's a dead man in the hotel, Cleese's gift for physical comedy is on display in all its glory. The supporting cast is also excellent. There's the bellhop Manuel, whose failure to grasp the English language (along with his pet rat) makes for some interesting situations. Then there's Basil's wife, who recognizes Basil's knack for heaving himself headlong off the ship of reasonable behavior, and has long since stopped throwing him a rope. Finally, there's Polly, the maid, who is the most reasonable person at the hotel, but always gets involved as an accomplice in someone's shenanigans. And let's not forget the patrons of Fawlty Towers, who run the gamut from perfectly reasonable to psychotic (the Waldorf Salad guy comes to mind) to dead. All these elements, along with the talent of the cast, combine to make for great situational comedy This is truly an original TV classic, and the humor and writing is so well done that it deserves to be seen over and over again.
Rating:
Summary: Fawlty Towers. What more can one say?
Review: This DVD set is a superb collection of repressed anger and skewed psychology, all wound up into one single person--that is, Basil Fawlty. The twelve episodes contained herein are, of course, the entire collection. The small number of episodes is certainly a breath of fresh air, especially when compared against many other long-running shows which deteriorate over time. The premise of Fawlty Towers makes one understand why Cleese made merely two seasons and then stopped. While all the episodes they did make are fantastic, the show would most likely have gone downhill eventually, and become stale. But enough about the episodes. Practically the entire civilized world has seen them in one form or another. And if they haven't, then they certainly should. What makes this DVD one of the best is the amount of material included here. On each disc, there is an interview with John Cleese, and interspersed over all three discs are outtakes, "A Visit To Torquay," a short featurette which interviews various people who stayed in the infamous Gleneagles Hotel, and interviews with Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs. The only real problem with this DVD is the Director's Commentary. John Howard Davies and Bob Spiers both sound as if they are eating a meal of some kind while they talk (their silence tends to drag on interminably), which leads to some interesting throat and phlegm problems, which the microphone picks up clearly. However, don't let this discourage you from buying this otherwise fine DVD set.
Rating:
Summary: Often mimicked, never successfully
Review: "Fawlty Towers" is a brilliant sitcom created by Monty Python funnyman John Cleese, centering around a most unusual hotel in the British seaside town of Torquay. It's also one of those British shows which American TV has often attempted to copy, with no success whatsoever. Based on a real-life hotel manager whom he once met while filming "Monty Python's Flying Circus," Cleese's Basil Fawlty is the manic owner of Fawlty Towers, a chaotic English hotel. His view of the job, one applauded by customer-service workers the world over, is that everything would run perfectly well if it weren't for the actual customers mucking everything up. Along with his shrewish wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), inept Spanish waiter Manuel (the very non-Spanish Andrew Sachs) and sensible waitress Polly (co-writer Connie Booth, to whom Cleese was married when the show first appeared), the deranged Basil just barely manages to keep Fawlty Towers operating. The show ran for only twelve episodes, and thus dodges the bullet which has felled so many good series -- they stay on the air long after passing their creative peak. While the plots may seem somewhat conventional by American standards (incompetent builders, weird guests, health inspectors, and so on), the show has not aged a day thanks to its timeless topics. As with most good British shows, American TV has made several attempts to copy "Fawlty Towers" for a stateside audience, and has failed miserably each time. "Amanda's," starring Beatrice Arthur, lasted just eight episodes in 1983, while another four were filmed but never aired. John Larroquette had his turn aping Basil in 1999's "Payne," which also lasted eight episodes before the plug was pulled. Neither show even came close to the manic genius of the original. So please don't try copying "Fawlty Towers" again. It's been tried, and it just can't be done.
Rating:
Summary: The Master of Mistaken Identity - Brit-Com Royalty!
Review: I've watched the entire run of Fawlty Towers dozens of times and it still delivers a sure-fire laugh for me! It's right up there with America's "Lucy", "Mary Tyler Moore" and "Andy Griffith" - timeless comedy entertainment. The picture and sound quality are great, considering the age of the material. Some video/DVD fanatics tend to expect miracles from material that dates back 20 or more years. It appears as though some "cosmetic" work has been done on the shows, as they look and sound better than any PBS broadcast that I've seen. This "final product" is a brilliant restoration of the original programs. The "material" itself is considered by many critics on either side of the Atlantic to be the very finest in British situation comedy. John Cleese's character "Mr. Faulty" is a wonderful take on the "middle class bloke who just won't get a break". The rest of the regular cast is equally great, especially the permanent hotel guest, an elderly gentleman who at times imagines still fighting the Germans in WWI. Always the victim of swindles, costly mistakes or embarrassing misunderstandings, it is a miracle that poor Mr. Faulty can maintain any shread of his sanity. His always-level-headed wife can become equally annoing, as she is not one to be fooled or "put in her place". The ongoing saga keeps the audience re-visiting Faulty Towers again and again. A rare gem of entertainment! The extras are great, with the exception of the first 6 commentaries by John Howard Davies. It sounds as if Davies hasn't viewed these for years and remembered very little. As a result, most of these commentaries consist of a lot of heavy breathing, sniffing, and slurping (perhaps a new kind of comedy effect?). He makes a comment about every 5 or 10 minutes on average. Still, Davies' noises can be amusing, especially at 3 in the morning! The last 6 commentaries by Bob Spiers are much better. Spiers does far more talking and actually seems to have some memory of the shows he directed. It would have been nice if the BBC had offered John Cleese a big pile of money to do commentaries for these shows. Eric Idle was once quoted as saying that Cleese would do anything for money - He once offered him a pound to shut up & Cleese took it! Cleese probably would have done a commentary...for a price. The interviews on the discs are great. Each disc contains a different interview with John Cleese, which are about 20 minutes each. Disc 2 has an interview with Andrew Sachs who was Manuel. The interview is nearly a half hour and Sachs is very witty and entertaining. Disc 3's interview with Prunella Scales (Sybil Fawlty) is good, but very short. There are also a couple of great documentaries: One about the Gleneagles Hotel & Donald Sinclair who Fawlty Towers & Basil Fawlty are based, as well as a brief featurette about the building that acted as the exterior for Fawlty Towers and the fire that destroyed the building in the 1990's. There are also about 5 minutes or so of mildly amusing outtakes. All that said, sit back have a Kipper or a Waldorf Salad and enjoy some great comedy. Just don't mention "The War"!*****
Rating:
Summary: Boo yah
Review: James Rivington... is that guy really from the UK? Something seems a bit off to me - the name, for starters: is that for real? James Rivington? And there's the way he kept referencing how he was, indeed, from the "UK". Well, in my experience, citizens from the UK usually call themselves English or Scottish, etc, and not UKish. "Here in the UK, John Cleese is regarded as a bit of a genius..." Yes, well, here in the US, many people enjoy John Cleese's work as well, but we don't generalize the entire nation as a load of John Cleese fanatics. Oh, and learn to spell: I after E, except after C. As for Fawlty Towers: brilliant, the seminal farce of television history, and really ... funny.
Rating:
Summary: Probably the Funniest TV Show Ever
Review: Just get it. That's all I can say.
I first saw Fawlty Towers several years ago and became hooked...no matter how many times you have seen the individual episodes, they never seem to lose their humor. My only complaint is that I spent the $90 on the video box set before this came out, but even that is money well spent...sometimes nothing will do to watch but Basil Fawlty (played by the hysterical, and at the risk of making the sexiness quotient of the male leads a major factor in all my reviews, enormously sexy and handsome John Cleese.)
I very much enjoyed the extra features, particularly the interviews and the clip montages ("Perfect Marriage" was my favorite, I think.) All your favorite quotes, in one place. If I had one complaint, it would be there were not enough features, but I don't think I would have enough until the cast shows up in my living room (one disappointment, though, was the outtakes: it seemed nothing more than some stuff filmed by the BBC during a "making of" special). Also, commentary by the whole cast together would have been fun, but that's not always possible.
Every one of these episodes is a comedy gem. Just do yourself a favor, and go buy it. You absolutely will not regret it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Show but Sloppy DVD Collection
Review: POSITIVES: These classic episodes are even more spectacular on crystal-clear DVDs, most of the interviews are interesting, and there are a few good special features (for example, the documentary on Torquay and the real-life nasty hotel manager who served as the model for Basil Fawlty). NEGATIVES: The people who interviewed the cast members, and the people who provided the episode commentaries, seemed to be totally unprepared for their job, and appeared to be making up their questions and comments as they went along. BIGGEST SURPRISE: Andrew Sachs is a quiet, intelligent, dignified stage actor with a British accent, completely unrecognizable as the the goofy Spanish bellman/waiter he plays in the series! MOST UNPLEASANT SURPRISE: Andrew Sachs's interviewer never once asked him to do any lines in his goofy "Manuel" voice and character, so how do we know it was really him? It's kind of like interviewing Mel Blanc and never asking him to do Bugs Bunny.
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