EARLY DOORS. (2003-2004) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

EARLY DOORS. (2003-2004) WRITTEN BY CRAIG CASH AND PHIL MEALEY. THEME TUNE BY RODDY FRAME. STARRING CRAIG CASH, PHIL MEALEY, JOHN HENSHAW, RITA MAY, CHRISTINE BOTTOMLEY, SUSAN COOKSON, JAMES QUINN, PETER WIGHT, RODNEY LITCHFIELD, MARK BENTON AND LORRAINE CHESHIRE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I absolutely bloody love this under-rated Manchester-based sitcom, penned by Craig Cash, aka Dave Best from THE ROYLE FAMILY, and Phil Mealey. Okay, so it never managed to scale the dizzy heights reached by THE ROYLE FAMILY, but I think it’s just as warm-hearted and nearly every bit as funny. So there, lol.

It’s based in a rather scruffy, not very successful (just ask t’brewery; they’ll tell you) Northern English pub called The Grapes, in the early years of the New Millenium. No scenes are set outside this venue, just like in THE ROYLE FAMILY, in which all the scenes are set around the family couch or kitchen table.

Ken Dixon (played by the guy who also portrays Roger in THE ROYLE FAMILY) is the cuddly, overweight, middle-aged pub landlord, an infinitely likeable character, beset by doubts as to his own attractiveness and tentatively dipping a toe back in the dating pool after his wife left him.

He fancies the arse off his mature barmaid Tanya, and she reciprocates, so why the bleedin’ heck can’t the two of them get it together? A lack of clear and direct communication is quite obviously the problem here…

Ken is a devoted dad to his pretty step-daughter Melanie, and adores her as if she were his own, so it’s really sad when he has to hide his feelings of hurt and loneliness during her search for her ‘real’ dad. If Ken knew what a pillock this so-called ‘real’ dad would turn out to be, he might not be so worried…

Craig Cash and Phil Mealey play Joe and Duffy respectively, a real pair of winners who spend all their spare time side-by-side in the pub, sniggering about sex like a couple of schoolboys. Neither of them are particularly good husbands to their wives, especially the serial-cheating Duffy, and yet they’re both so likeable.

Duffy goes to pieces completely after his missus leaves him for a bloke who makes forty grand a year, but will a few weeks of eating nothing but tinned Fray Bentos pies and having no-one to wash and iron his work shirts for him put manners on him…?

I love the character of Tommy, an ancient widower who’s old enough to have lived through the war. Tight with money, he’ll accept free drinks gladly, unless they involve him in the buying of a round, his worst fear.

He’s been a regular at the Grapes for forty-two years, and, as long as he can stay on his own and not be inveigled into paying for a round, he might just make it to his fiftieth anniversary. He gives as good as he gets, slagging-wise, and might just have a kind heart underneath that gruff, crusty exterior.

Phil and Nige, the two coppers who pay Ken a visit every day while supposedly ‘on duty,’ are my favourite characters by far. They sit in Ken’s back room and drink his booze and smoke his cigars and regale him with tales of the great stuff they looted while an electrical store was being robbed.

Phil’s wife is divorcing him, and he happily tells Ken all about how he got a mate to break the antenna off her car to get back at her and how the same mate is going to slash her tyres ‘at t’weekend.’ Ken frankly doesn’t know what to say…

These crooked cops are so funny. They use the police walkie-talkie to phone for an Indian takeaway and they light up joints with total impunity in front of Ken. They freely distribute forged bank notes.

They steal porno videos from the station’s evidence locker and they rent them out to Ken and his customers. So that’s what happened to Blockbuster and X-traVision and t’like. It were those two what put ’em out of business.

They also skip work to go on the pub’s annual day out for male punters only, also known as ‘the big boys’ beano,‘ where a strip joint to see a duo of sisters called ‘Twin Cheeks’ is the highlight of the day.

The corrupt and lazy pair talk freely about how it’s pointless calling in the police when you’ve been burgled, because of how unlikely it is that the cops can catch anyone or get your stuff back, and, by the end of the two series, they’re openly flogging drugs to the young people at Melanie’s twenty-first birthday party. What’s this they say? ‘Crime can’t crack itself!’

There are so many great characters in EARLY DOORS. There’s also Ken’s lazy and manipulative but ultimately loving mother Jean, and her cleaning lady Winnie, with whom she enjoys a good old gossip, despite the fact that Jean’ll tell you to your face that she’s not one to gossip. My eye she’s not…

Eddie and Joan Bell are a mind-blowingly boring but happily married couple. Debbie is a friend of Tanya’s who’s always kind enough to purchase coke and crisps for her two kids, whom she leaves outside the pub in the car while she’s in for a pint. Janice is looking for a Baby-Daddy for the child she may have conceived during a knee-trembler in Ladbrokes’ doorway with Duffy, but will Duffy step up to the plate?

The humour in this show is so dry and witty and the characters so loveable that I can’t understand why this sitcom isn’t more popular wi’ folks. Okay, so some lines are a bit clunky and you can see ’em coming a mile off, but overall the writing here is top-notch. Craig Cash from THE ROYLE FAMILY was one of the two co-writers, after all, and Craig Cash knows funny.

I recommend EARLY DOORS for anyone who wants to remember an England when you could still smoke your charred and tarry lungs out in t’pub, mobile phones were only just beginning to be popular and there were still people alive who could clearly remember Winston Churchill, ration cards and VE Day.

There’s no online shopping, children still looked like children and not like little mini-clones of Kim Kardashian, and reality television was only in its infancy. That’s the England I want to remember. EARLY DOORS encapsulates this period perfectly. Now, close them curtains, Ken, like a good lad, and who’s for a lock-in…?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

PORRIDGE. (1974-1977) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

PORRIDGE. (1974-1977) WRITTEN BY DICK CLEMENT AND IAN LA FRENAIS (WRITERS OF AUF WIEDERSEHEN PET, THE LIKELY LADS, LOVEJOY). STARRING RONNIE BARKER, RICHARD BECKINSALE, BRIAN WILDE AND FULTON MACKAY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence… You are an habitual criminal who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner. We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the maximum term allowed for these offences. You will go to prison for five years.’

‘Ronnie Barker will be remembered for Fletcher in PORRIDGE long after everything else he was in has faded from memory.’ DAILY EXPRESS.

This comedy series set in an English prison is just so good, I’m genuinely gutted that I can never again watch it for the first time with new, excited eyes. I’ll be re-watching it, however, hopefully many times, and I’ll remember it till my dying day as possibly the best, funniest and also the most warm-hearted and true-to-life sitcom I’ve ever seen. Gorblimey, I’m tearing up here. Whatever would Fletch say…?

Norman Stanley Fletcher, better known as Fletch, is a petty criminal whom the Beak is sick and tired of having up in front of him, charged with yet another offence involving thieving or fraud. This time, Fletch is hit with a good stiff sentence… five years in Her Majesty’s Slade Prison, a fictional nick up North somewhere, Cumberland I think, surrounded by moors and suchlike, so escape won’t exactly be an easy option.

Fletch is a hard-as-nails, tough-as-old-boots old lag from the big smoke. Muswell Hill in London, to be precise. Every sentence ends with ‘intcha?,’ as in, aren’t you? and ‘an’ all,’ as in, as well, too, also.

He’s perpetually chewing gum, he doesn’t react with any surprise to the things he hears and sees in the nick because he’s seen and heard it all before, and he’s got his own rather skewed sense of morality. It’s okay, for example, for Fletch to nick a tin of pineapple chunks from the kitchen, but the lag who in turn steals the tin from Fletch is the lowest of the low, innit?

This time round, Fletch has a new young cellmate called Lenny Godber, played by the dreamily handsome Richard Beckinsale who was tragically dead of heart failure by the age of thirty-one.

Fletch, rather grudgingly at first, takes Lenny under his wing, but the two soon find themselves to be friends for life, partly cemented by the confidences they exchange in the wonderful two-handed episode in Series One called ‘A NIGHT IN.’

As well as being drop-dead gorgeous, Lenny is surprisingly thoughtful, insightful and sensitive for a house-breaker serving his first sentence. He’s got an unusually wide vocabulary for a con and a philosophical turn of mind, and he uses the prison’s training programmes and courses of study to better himself.

When Fletch kindly arranges to steal the History O Level Exam papers for a nervous Lenny, Lenny has no trouble deciding that he wants to pass the exam the honest way. Which is just as well because Fletch’s man Warren, dope that he is, has only gone and nicked the wrong bleedin’ paper, ‘asn’t he? Much good the Biology papers will be in this instance.

Fletch doesn’t understand Lenny’s constant quest for self-improvement. He personally just wants to do his time in peace and quiet, if anyone will ever let him. He particularly just wants to lie on his top bunk with the Page Three Stunna of the day and have himself a nice time, nudge nudge, wink wink. Let’s just hope the visiting party from the Home Office have the manners to knock before they enter his bloomin’ cell, lol.

Mister Mackay, or ‘Scotland the Brave,’ is Fletcher’s nemesis, a screw who’s firm but fair. In his own words, he holds all the lags in equal contempt…! Getting one over on Mr. Mackay, whose exaggerated accent and gestures are almost criminally funny, is probably the thing that brings Fletch the most pleasure in life inside.

You see, the little victories Fletch manages to wring from Mackay in particular and the prison system in general are what makes life behind bars bearable. Look out for Fletch’s hilarious description of how the terminally regimented Mr. Mackay has sex with his wife. Bellows: ‘Stand by your bed…! One, two, three… knickers down… NOW…!’

Mr. Mackay has a foil, of course (for every bad cop there’s a good cop), in the form of the nervous, rather jittery but undoubtedly kind-hearted Mr. Barrowclough. He’s a progressive thinker who believes that the men in his care are there to be rehabilitated and treated as human beings rather than lowlives for whom there’s no hope. Mr. Mackay thinks Barrowclough is for the birds because of such forward-thinking and modern ideas.

Of course, Barrowclough’s lovely good nature means that he can be easily taken advantage by Fletch and the other lags, but it’s nice to see as well that not every screw thinks that the prisoners are irredeemable scum who should all be locked up and the key thrown away for ever.

Poor Mr. Barrowclough has a miserable home life courtesy of his domineering wife Alice, so much so that he often wishes, as he tells Fletch, ‘that I were in here wi’ you lot…!’ Fletch’s skills as a marriage guidance counsellor are in great demand, not just with Mr. Barrowclough but also with the other lags, so much so that everyone’s in shock when it transpires that Fletch’s own wife has left him for another man… or has she…?

Other characters include: Ingrid (Patricia Brake), Fletch’s sexy blonde daughter who comes in on visiting days with ‘unfettered knockers,’ much to the other prisoners’ interest; and Mr. Geoffrey Venables, the posh prison governor whose ivory tower existence away from the crims of Slade Prison renders him ineffectual at dealing with most crises; after all, when Jim McLaren (Tony Osoba), the black angry Scottish bloke, is up on the prison roof after a scrap at the footy match, it’s down to Fletch to talk him down. McLaren, an orphan, was found as a baby ‘up a side-alley wrapped in the Glasgow Herald.’ Just like a bag of chips, the poor lad. No wonder he couldn’t go straight.

Then there’s the ‘genial’ Harry Grout (Peter Vaughan), the most powerful prisoner in Slade prison and the least genial bloke you’re likely to meet. He even gives Fletch the willies. He never goes anywhere without his muscle man for back-up and, if Grouty wants a favour, you’d damn well better do it, or else you might just get your face re-arranged… and all for free an’ all…!

Alun Armstrong (THIS IS PERSONAL: THE HUNT FOR THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER, DAVID COPPERFIELD, BLEAK HOUSE) has a cameo as a Geordie con called Spraggon, a former illiterate who’s now writing his first book. Maybe a tin of snout will release his Muse? Dudley Sutton from LOVEJOY plays Reg Urwin, a prison trustee who wants a helicopter out of Slade and ten grand in used notes. Hang on a minute, Reg, and we’ll see what we can do…!

Christopher Biggins plays the cuddly kitchen trustee Lukewarm, surely the first openly gay character on British television? David Jason (OPEN ALL HOURS, ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES, A TOUCH OF FROST), brilliantly made up as an auld fella, plays crafty old Blanco, Lukewarm’s cellmate, who’s been inside seventeen years for topping his wife.

He swears he’s innocent, however, does old Blanco, and so Fletch and the lads set up a campaign to prove said innocence. Shame they’re wasting their time. He may not have offed the wife, but he’s definitely guilty of summat, all right, the cunning old lag…!

The box-set I own has all three series of the show on it, plus two cracking little Christmas specials and an hour-long documentary, presented by Johnny Vaughan, about how great the show is and why it just might be Britain’s Best Ever Sitcom. I have no problem with any of that, lol.

I’ll leave you with Fletch’s invaluable three-pronged piece of advice for any new inmates to Slade Prison, with which, by the way, Mr. Mackay doesn’t altogether agree: One, bide your time; Two, keep your nose clean and your head down; and Three… (altogether now!)… DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

FAWLTY TOWERS. (1975-1979) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

FAWLTY TOWERS. (1975-1979) WRITTEN BY JOHN CLEESE AND CONSTANCE BOOTH. STARRING JOHN CLEESE, CONSTANCE BOOTH, PRUNELLA SCALES, ANDREW SACHS, BRIAN HALL, BALLARD BERKELEY, GILLY FLOWER AND RENEE ROBERTS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Hello, Fawlty Titties…!’

‘Papers arrived yet, Fawlty?’

‘However did they win?’ (WW2)

‘I know English. I learn it from a book…!’

‘That’s Brahms, dear. Brahms’ third racket…!’

‘He try to see girl in room! She make him crazy.’

‘Do you by any chance wear A HEARING AID…?’

‘This is exactly how Nazi Germany got started…!’

‘Celery, apples, walnuts, grapes. In a mayonnaise sauce.’

‘A gin and orange, a lemon squash and A SCOTCH AND WATER PLEASE…!’

‘Right, well I’ll go and have a lie-down then. No I won’t; I’ll go and hit some guests.’

This is one of Britain’s best ever situation comedies. Consisting of two series’ each comprising six thirty-minute episodes, it originally aired on the BBC in 1975 and 1979. Set in a Torquay hotel, the concept was based on a real-life experience John Cleese had while staying in a real-life hotel as part of the Monty Python crew.

He and his then wife Constance Booth were so enchanted by the rude behaviour and hostile attitude of hotelier Donald Sinclair towards his guests that, when the chance came to write and star in their own sitcom, they knew exactly what they wanted to write about. That’s right, an animal preservation centre in North Africa, lol. No, silly, a badly-run hotel owned and managed by the rudest hotel manager in Britain. Welcome to Fawlty Towers…

John Cleese plays Basil Fawlty, owner of a small hotel in Torquay. A man with pretensions of grandeur who’s obsessed with the notion of social climbing, he’s been sadly disappointed by his life and his marriage to the efficient but bossy and annoying Sybil (Prunella Scales). He takes his frustrations out on the hotel guests and the long-suffering staff, Polly, played by his then-wife Connie Booth, and Manuel, played by the late Andrew Sachs.

Basil is forever sniping at Sybil- ‘You’re always refurbishing yourself!’– but Sybil is well able for him. ‘Do you really think that a beautiful young lady like this would be interested in an ageing, brilliantined stick insect like you?’ Theirs is a marriage based on nagging and resentment. Each of them wishes they’d done better but, for better or worse, they’re stuck with each other.

Sybil gets things done quietly and efficiently, even if she is ‘always refurbishing herself,’ while Basil complicates things in a manner worthy of a Frank Spencer, a Father Ted or a Victor Meldrew.

He covers up his many cock-ups by telling ever more elaborate lies, and then the lies grow legs and spiral out of control until Basil is in a hopeless muddle. He usually drags his staff Polly and Manuel down into the mire with him.

And it’s usually Sybil over whose eyes he’s trying to pull the wool. She rules Basil with an iron fist inside an iron glove- yes, I said iron twice!- and she has strict rules about gambling and looking at other women. Or should I say, about not doing either of these two things, lol, under any circumstances.

Polly is the sensible waitress and chambermaid. She saves Basil’s arse more than once. She’s good at her job and is fond of the hapless Manuel, the waiter, and tries to shield him, not always successfully, from Mr. Fawlty’s wrath.

Manuel is from Barcelona in Spain, speaks only limited English and misunderstands even the most basic of instructions. Basil gives him a terrible time, excusing Manuel’s shortcomings to the guests by saying: ‘I’m sorry, he’s from Barcelona…!’

Permanent guests at the hotel include the marvellous old British Major Gowen, a delightful relic of World War Two who at times still thinks he’s fighting the Germans. Whatever you tell him, he’ll have forgotten in seconds. It’s guaranteed. Miss Ursula Gatsby and Miss Abitha Tibbs are two lovely elderly ladies whom Basil thinks are completely dotty.

In the episode entitled A TOUCH OF CLASS, Basil’s crashing snobbery comes to the fore as he lavishly welcomes to the hotel a certain Lord Melbury, played by Michael Gwynn (VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED).

He fawns over the toff in the usual sycophantic manner he reserves for doctors and the aristocrats of the world, everyone he considers to be a cut above the usual ‘rubbish we get in here.’ When Lord Melbury turns out to be not quite whom he says he is, Basil will only have himself to blame…

In THE BUILDERS, we see Basil using Mr. O’Reilly’s cut-price but vastly inferior construction company to carry out repairs to the hotel while he and Sybil take a short break away. This is strictly in contravention to Sybil’s direct instructions. Sybil wants Basil to use Mr. Stubbs’s outfit, because even though they cost a little more, they’ll do the job properly.

But as usual, Basil thinks he knows best. He’s a cheapskate as well as a snob, so he goes with O’Reilly, played by Irish actor David Kelly. Let’s just hope they’re using an iron girder and not a wooden one, eh?

Basil has a curiously closed-minded but maybe typically British attitude to, ahem, sex. In THE WEDDING PARTY, he flees the attentions of a flirtatious Frenchwoman and mistakes an innocent family get-together at the hotel for a sexual free-for-all. Naturally, he makes a total arse of himself and grudgingly complies when Sybil tells him he has to put right his mistake.

Although when a young man is looking for a chemist that’s still open for business in the late evening, maybe one can’t help but make the same mistake that the uptight, strangely moralistic Basil Fawlty makes, lol.

In THE HOTEL INSPECTORS, Basil makes another series of near-fatal faux pas when he mistakes both a humble but extremely fussy spoon salesman (Bernard Cribbins) and an outboard motors salesman (James Cossins) for the hotel inspectors that have been spotted plying their trade in the various hotels around town.

Basil wastes valuable time licking these two gentlemen’s boots when, as Sybil could have told him, just a little common courtesy to every guest, regardless of social status, would have seen him right. This episode has some brilliant quotes:

‘The wine has reacted with the cork and gone bad!’

‘I thought Boff was a locale…!’

‘You were RUDE, Mr. Fawlty, I say RUDE…!’ 

‘No, it would NOT be possible to reserve the BBC2 channel from the commencement of its (the TV programme’s) beginning to the termination of its ending, thank you so much…!’

GOURMET NIGHT sees Basil’s lovely specialist evening of classy gourmet dining ruined by a drunken chef. ‘He’s soused… the herrings! He’s potted… the shrimps! He’s smashed… the eggs… in his cups… under the table…!’

Basil’s ham-fisted attempts to put things right see his unreliable old jalopy getting ‘a damned good thrashing’ (SpecSavers, anyone?), Manuel wearing a cooked duck as a slipper and a quartet of local aristocracy being forcefully treated to an impromptu variety show courtesy of Manuel, Polly and Sybil. ‘Fancy putting no riff-raff…!’

THE GERMANS is a classic episode that’s actually given rise to the phrase ‘Don’t mention the war!’ A party of Germans arrive at the hotel only to be baited horribly about their country’s part in World War Two by a concussed Basil.

Who or what has concussed him? Why, it was the moose, of course. Who else? ‘You naughty moose!’ And let’s not forget: ‘Don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it alright.’

In COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS, Basil- or should that be K.C. Watt?- combines the forbidden joys of betting (‘That’s right, dear, that particular avenue of pleasure has been closed off to me.’) with trying to deal with the most disagreeable old lady guest. She’s extremely hard of hearing and dissatisfied with everything in the hotel.

‘I mean, what do you expect to see out of a Torquay bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? A herd of wildebeest sweeping majestically (across the plains)…?’

In THE PSYCHIATRIST, Basil freaks out when he discovers that the titular psychiatrist is staying at the hotel. Fiercely unwilling to be ‘analysed’ and found wanting, his attempts to remain strictly innocuous in the shrink’s eyes fail disastrously when he thinks that a heavily- medallioned and hairy-chested guest has smuggled a woman into his room, contrary to the strict rules of the hotel. ‘There’s enough material there for an entire conference.’

WALDORF SALAD is another hilarious classic episode. Basil runs afoul of a rich American businessman with an overpowering personality when he reveals he doesn’t know how to make a Waldorf salad, the businessman’s starter of choice. Erm, this letter explains everything…

By the end of the episode, the businessman has riled up the other guests into a state of mutiny against the hotel’s habitually shoddy service. When Basil huffily quits the hotel and returns as a ‘guest,’ what else would he be requiring for his breakfast-in-bed but a ‘Waldorf salad, washed down with lashings of hot screwdriver…?’

THE KIPPER AND THE CORPSE sees Basil tearing madly around the hotel trying to hide the corpse of a guest who’s died in the night. Why all the secrecy? Well, Basil thinks that the hotel’s breakfast kippers are what’s done for the rather anaemic-looking Mr. Leeman, and he’s afraid that the hotel will be ruined if word gets out. Let’s hope that Geoffrey Palmer, playing a doctor who really wants his sausages, can shed some light on the situation…

In THE ANNIVERSARY, Basil’s pitiful attempts to pretend to Sybil that he’s forgotten their fifteenth wedding anniversary lead to Sybil’s storming out of the hotel just as her surprise anniversary party is supposed to kick off. Basil tried to be too clever and now he’s got to pay the price for his little ‘joke.’

Roger the shit-stirring guest thinks that ‘they’ve had a row and she’s refused to come down,’ but Sybil’s not even in the hotel. So who’s that in Sybil’s bed then, waving and nodding and smiling like the Queen, with puffy thighs and foaming mouth and severe laryngitis? Well, to quote Roger again, ‘who wants to go to something fun when you can come to one of Basil’s dos?’ Floor-crisps, anyone? Una Stubbs co-stars in this one as Roger’s wife.

BASIL THE RAT is particularly close to my heart because we keep Syrian hamsters, which are real, genuine bona-fide hammies, unlike Manuel’s so-called ‘Siberian hamster,’ which has a tail and is clearly a giant rat, lol. Real hammies do not have tails. This fact is indisputable.

He’s cute, though, is Basil the Rat, only the Health Inspector might not think so when the furry little fella turns up in the biscuits during an extremely important inspection of the hotel… 

FLOWERY TOWELS is not at all politically correct by today’s standards. There’s blatant sexism in it, strong violence against a Spanish waiter, a slight touch of homophobia and rather a load of casual racism as well. The latter two mostly come courtesy of Major Gowen, an otherwise immensely lovable character.

He says the things he does because it was probably acceptable to do so at the time, but of course now times have changed. Nowadays, of course, you couldn’t say things like ‘you’re the rat inspector’ without being peppered full of buckshot by the PC Brigade…!

I wonder if people hold Fawlty Towers festivals the way they hold Father Ted festivals? People would pay good money, I’m sure, to stay in a mock-up version of Fawlty Towers and be grossly insulted by their hotel manager and receive poor service during their stay. That’s a good business idea for anyone with the wherewithal to set it up. I might even stay there myself sometime. I’ll bring my own batteries though…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor