“I never really felt ready to go on Fawlty Towers,” Prunella Scales said way back in 1995. “Do you think I’m still lumbered with that show?”
Another 30 years have passed and, yes, it does seem that Scales, who has died in London at the age of 93, was doomed to be “lumbered” with a situation comedy that first emerged when Harold Wilson was the British prime minister.
This is not to suggest the obituarists have little else to celebrate. Her distinguished theatre career began as long ago as 1951 when she took a job as stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic (a common first step for hopeful actors). She had a strong early film role opposite Charles Laughton in David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice. She toured in Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1950s.
Mainstream success came when she was cast opposite Richard Briers in the sitcom The Marriage Lines. In the 1990s she received acclaim – and a Bafta nomination – for playing Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett’s sly A Question of Attribution at the British National Theatre and in a BBC adaptation.
RM Block
More recently Great Canal Journeys, in which she travelled the waterways with husband and fellow actor Timothy West, was a delight on Channel 4. “She was … a stage actor of vast experience whose career was defined by a natural gift for comedy,” Michael Billington, the Guardian’s veteran theatre critic, noted on her death.
But, as Scales predicted, there was no getting away from Sybil Fawlty. First seen almost exactly 50 years ago in A Touch of Class – the episode that has hotelier Basil Fawlty fawning over a toff who turns out to be a con man – she immediately emerged as a harridan for the ages.
When John Cleese, who wrote the series with Connie Booth, first told his old chums in Monty Python he was writing a sitcom set in a hotel, a few were snitty about the project. It sounded a bit too clichéd. Indeed, the marriage between the hopeless Basil, played by Cleese in a state of permanent fury, and the fearsome Sybil, forever rolling her eyes in dismay, played out tropes common to dozens of contemporaneous comedies. Those couples, like the Fawltys, almost never have children. The husband makes the most of his tiny professional authority. The wife is an uncompromising nag. Scales was a little puzzled. “Why did they get married?” she asked Cleese on reading the first scripts. “Oh God, I knew you’d ask that,” he replied. She can “kill a man at 10 paces with one blow of her tongue” Basil claims in The Builders. She is “my little Kommandant”. She is “my little piranha fish”. She is “my little nest of vipers”.
Yet the sceptical Pythons were proven wrong. Fawlty Towers may have the shape of a traditional sitcom, but it had the invention and emotional truth of a farce by Molière. There was nothing lazy about the spiky energy Scales brought to Sybil. Cleese and Booth were careful never to sentimentalise, but they did allow a degree of sympathy for Sybil in her despairing efforts to manage a monster. Recall her sadness when she thinks Basil has forgotten their wedding anniversary.
It is no great stretch to suggest that Fawlty Towers – crumbling, inefficient, suspicious of strangers – is a metaphor for England (if not quite the UK) as an economic and social basket case. Basil is the romantic imperialist. Sybil, who disdains his snobbery – see Gourmet Night in particular – in favour of cold commercialism is considerably more hard headed. Dare we mention that Margaret Thatcher became leader of the opposition a few months before the first episode? Sybil, who seems to be from a more humble background than her husband, stands in for the provincial strivers the future prime minister claimed to represent. She also shared some of Thatcher’s abrasiveness (though Sybil had a better sense of humour).
[ Fawlty Towers actor Prunella Scales dies aged 93Opens in new window ]
Scales, born in Surrey to a mother who had attended Rada, remained a much-loved personality for the rest of her busy career. She and West, whom she married in 1963 and who predeceased her by a year, became something of an institution. Their son, Sam West, grew to be a successful actor in his own right. The couple’s later appearances on Great Canal Journeys allowed them to engage with Scales’s developing dementia in a fashion that was helpful to those facing similar difficulties.
“I am famous for playing unfortunate wives, but I have been a very lucky wife,” she told the Guardian in 2013.
