Basil Fawlty would be bewildered by the country England has

We haven’t felt much need to update the script: except to cut a speech from “The Germans” in which, while describing an England v India cricket match to Basil, long-term guest Major Gowen makes reference to w--- and uses the N word. At the time, in 1979, everyone knew that it was the attitudes themselves that were the butt of the joke, but we’ve taken this bit out anyway because it’s not worth the trouble. But we haven’t changed much else and we’ve added a finale joining the three stories together.

In some respects you could argue that the sitcom was ahead of its time. For instance, Basil, who is simply not up to the job of running the hotel, is surrounded by two very competent women who are. Both Sybil and Polly can run rings around him. We didn’t see Polly as the attractive one, but as the voice of sanity. Someone once said she is Basil’s Laertes – the only character in whom he can confide.

Growing up, I was always puzzled by the fact that everything was done by men. In 1972, when I founded my production company Video Arts, I worked closely with a female producer who effectively did everything, so I got used to working with women on a daily basis.

As for the Spanish waiter Manuel, whom Basil treats disgracefully, often by kicking him up the bottom, he came out of my love for Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The point about the “slap stick” that gives that style of physical comedy its name is that it sounds as though you’ve hit someone hard but you haven’t. People might today accuse Basil of behaving badly towards Johnny Foreigner, like some sort of hangover from colonial times, but really Manuel reflects the fact that, in the 1970s, for the first time there were quite a lot of European waiters in English restaurants and, for quite a while, you’d be lucky to get what you ordered. Manuel was simply a character with whom there could be constant misunderstandings and I’ve always found misunderstandings to be very funny. Perhaps I laugh at them so much because on one level I’m frightened by a lack of communication.

In comedy, context is everything: part of the problem with humour today is that people have lost sight of that. Some people still think “The Germans” is controversial because of the scene in which Basil imitates the Nazi goose-step, but the only people who have never complained about that episode are the Germans themselves. They know the comedy is never at their expense. Those who do take exception to this episode also criticise the moment in the hospital early on when Basil jumps back on encountering a black doctor. I pinched that from WC Fields, because I thought it was funny. The point of that particular moment is that we are all frightened by whatever is unfamiliar. It’s Basil’s naivety that makes you laugh.

But when people get mired in ideas about comedy and victimhood, they stop thinking. They lose sight of those distinctions of context. I’ve recently been working on a stage show of the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian, which we’re hoping to open in London next year. When we had a read-through in America last year, some of the actors objected to a scene from the film in which Eric Idle’s character says he’s going to become a woman. They said, “We can’t include this scene!” To which I said “Why not? It has amused people for 40 years…” No one was offended until a couple of years ago.

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I’m all for trigger warnings that help people of a nervous disposition avoid comedy that they will find offensive, but I don’t think it should ever be cancelled – as UKTV (owned by the BBC) tried to do in 2020 by removing “The Germans” from their streaming service, until I complained – just because people who are too literal-minded to understand irony and sarcasm and metaphor say it should. Those people shouldn’t be allowed to dictate to those who do understand these things whether a comedy is enjoyable or not.

Another challenge facing comedy these days is that anyone determined to make something good has got to have a bit of spine. When Hugh Carleton Greene was director general of the BBC in the 1960s, he was asked about the issue of the Corporation’s comedy broadcasts offending viewers. To my delight he replied “Yes, but surely only those that one would wish to offend”.

At gay men are not put in prison and/or chemically castrated anymore. 

Do you think that's something Basil would bemoan? 

The British Empire was great and if you were an aristocrat or rich merchant/banker it was great, but for the poor and working class of England, it's always been a shithole country. 

There you go, being a hateful cunt once again.

Just saying. I live and grew up in the South and except for a few big cities now, it was and still is a shithole. That's what happens when a population is full of assholes who whine and complain, but do nothing to make things better. 

I often think people don't understand what a shit hole is. If the country was that bad I'd be dead by suicide by now. And our small towns are often lovely places to visit but I'm more of an urban type.