It’s well known that comedy genius John Cleese was inspired to write the classic sit-com Fawlty Towers after he and his fellow Pythons stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, England, during the filming of the series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was here Cleese met the man who inspired Basil Fawlty:

The “wonderfully rude” hotel owner (Donald Sinclair) endeared himself to the Monty Python team by throwing Eric Idle’s briefcase out of the hotel “in case it contained a bomb,” complaining about Terry Gilliam’s table manners, and chucking a bus timetable at another guest after the guest dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.

“He seemed to view us as a colossal inconvenience right from the start.” — Michael Palin on Donald Sinclair.

Another Python, Graham Chapman, described Mr Sinclair as —“completely round the twist, off his chump, out of his tree.”

Little did this hotelier realise that John Cleese was making mental notes of all this madcap behaviour and he might well have seen himself a few years later on TV, transformed into Basil Fawlty—the most infamous British hotelier ever—broadcast to the British nation and ultimately most of the world! Donald Sinclair died in 1981, apparently he emigrated to Florida in the 1970s where he was once tracked down by a British newspaper after Cleese unfortunately named him in an interview. Mr Sinclair and his relatives have never been too happy about the way he has been portrayed!

Recently, Cleese revealed the BBC originally thought the idea for Fawlty Towers was “dire”, as producers couldn’t see the value in the show.

“There is a famous note which I have a copy of, I think it’s framed. What happened was, Connie and I wrote that first episode and we sent it in to Jimmy Gilbert (Head of Comedy at the BBC). And first of all the fellow whose job it was to assess the quality of the writing said, and I can quote it fairly accurately, ‘This is full of cliched situations and stereotypical characters and I cannot see it as being anything other than a disaster’.

“And Jimmy himself said ‘You’re going to have to get them out of the hotel, John, you can’t do the whole thing in the hotel’.

“Whereas, of course, it’s in the hotel that the whole pressure cooker builds up.”

Thankfully Cleese and Booth were proved right; though it was still hard graft, as each script took six weeks to write and Cleese had to subsidize his writing time with Connie Booth by appearing in adverts:

“I have to thank the advertising industry for making this possible. Connie and I used to spend six weeks writing each episode and we didn’t make a lot of money out of it.

“This will amuse you but in 1975 when I did Fawlty Towers for the first time we made six shows. Well, it took six weeks to make each show, so that’s 36 weeks, one week to film them - 37 weeks - and six weeks to actually tape them in the studio so that’s 43 weeks’ work, for which I was paid for writing and performing and filming, £6,000.

“So that meant that I was able to subsidise my writing time by doing commercials. If it hadn’t been for the commercials, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to spend so much time on the script.”

Fawlty Towers is rightly recognized as one of the greatest sit-coms ever made, and one whose story has now gone full-cycle as the Hadley Park House Hotel, in Telford, England, is offering a Faulty Towers dining experience next month between 17-19 February, as the Australian Sunday Mercury explains”

Midland hotel is promising guests the dinner from hell next month. Diners will enjoy poor service, a goose-stepping maitre d’, a bungling Spanish waiter and a Waldorf salad – without the Waldorf. And if it all sounds like Fawlty Towers, then that’s because it is.

Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience – misnamed after John Cleese’s classic comedy series – will be entertaining guests at the Hadley Park Hotel in Telford for a couple of nights.

Diners will come face-to-face with Basil Fawlty, his shrieking wife Sybil and hapless waiter Manuel. The three-course meal, promise organisers, will be carnage rather than cordon bleu.

The interactive experience involves characters made famous in the hit BBC show moving amongst the tables, treating people as if they are guests of the Fawlty Towers restaurant.

The original programme was screened in the 1970s and starred John Cleese as Basil, Prunella Scales as Sybil and Andrew Sachs as Manuel. Only two series were made, but it remains one of Britain’s most popular comedies.

The show spawned famous catchphrases such as “Don’t mention the war!”, Sybil’s shriek “Basil!” and Manuel’s imploring “Que?”

Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience was created in 1997 by the Interactive Theatre Australia, which is based in Brisbane. It has received rave reviews all over the world.

Karen Hamilton, 46, who plays Sybil in the show, said: “It’s a really fun show which is only one third scripted. The rest of the time we work off the diners and each other.

“We will say things to them, or encourage them to take part in the play. One person even came along dressed as the Queen because she’d heard about what we do.

“Of course we never left her alone that night. I think she might have regretted it.”

However, not everyone knows what to expect. Karen, who has worked on the show for 11 years, added: “Some guests who come along are really surprised that we are standing right next to them. They expect a stage where we should be performing.

“We tend to ease them into it by wandering in one at a time. Then we get into the swing of things.

“The British crowd are great and they understand implied humour. They link things up very quickly, although they can sometimes be a little reserved.”

Karen and the rest of the cast spend hours studying their characters by re-watching DVDs of the show.
“We want to make sure that we get all the mannerisms just right,” she added. “I’m Australian but I do Sybil’s English accent very well. The only trouble is that whenever I do an English accent now, I sound like Sybil.”

If you’re in the UK and fancy a Faulty Towers night out then check details here.

John Cleese talks about the background to Fawlty Towers on the Guardian website, which can be viewed here.
 

 
More from ‘Fawlty Towers’ and bonus John Cleese interviews, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Tara McGinley
 

Four On The Floor in the studio.
 
In 2006 Jayne County, Ginger Coyote, Cherry Vanilla and Holly Woodlawn, under the name of Four On The Floor, gave The Shirelles 1960 record “Boys” the Superstar treatment. Trashy good fun from pop culture immortals.

The notorious Ginger Coyote of Punk Globe Magazine and The White Trash Debutantes  was nice enough to share with me a bit of info about the recording session that spawned “Boys.”

Jayne and I wanted to do a joint recording project so when Jayne came to Los Angeles we went into rehearsals with the band Jasten King on Guitar, Brian Hill on drums and the late Willy Graves on bass. The White Trash Debutantes had written and recorded a song called Punk Rak RepubliKKKan. I played it for Jayne and she liked it but felt punk rock was to limiting so she re-wrote the lyrics and we decided that Rock n Roll RepubliKKKan would work.. She also had another song she really wanted to record and that was “Transgeneration” about how Transgender people have been put in very high regard in many cultures in history. Sadly, they have not gotten the fair shake from Christianity.. It is a call to let people know that Transgender people will not take the Bullshit anymore… The third song we recorded we enlisted the fabulous Cherry Vanilla and Holly Woodlawn to record a cover of “Boys”.. It become such a fun song to record we added Constance Cooper and Don Bolles (Germs) on the recording… Making an extended version of the song…. There was a Video made of the last days recording….. It was a great recording session and we got alot done in just a few days…”

Here’s Four On The Floor’s “Boys” with lots of boys.
 

 
Intimate 1920s-era portraits of Australian criminals from the archives of the Sydney Police. It’s almost like these dark and moody mug shots came straight out of a Vogue fashion spread. Wonderful!

 
See more photos after the jump…

 
A simple and lovely notion: freeze some hydrophones in various attractive water filled vessels, amplify and subtly tweak the output as the ice slowly melts. Such is the work of an outfit named Portable Acoustic Modification Laboratory. Good on ‘em.



 
With thanks again to Shannon Fields

 
Talk about your pure pop perfection, “Who Do You Think You Are?” was a 1974 hit that topped the charts in the UK for a (quasi-comedy) band called Candlewick Green, who first came to the public’s attention by winning the TV talent show, Opportunity Knocks for eight consecutive weeks. It was actually written by Des Dyer and Clive Scott of the band Jigsaw, who recorded the song, but both groups shared the same management, and Dyer and Scott allowed the song to be recorded by Candlewick Green for the UK market. (Jigsaw had their own one hit wonder with “Sky High,” one of the first 45s I ever bought). Both versions are pretty similar, and shared the same arrangement.
 

 
Americans know the version by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, who also had a hit with the maudlin 70s AM radio staple “Billy Don’t Be A Hero.” The Heywoods used to perform in amusement parks all over America in the 70s. I recall seeing them when I was a kid at either Cedar Point, or King’s Island.
 

 
I could play this song over and over again for weeks! The tune is ridiculously catchy no matter who is performing it, but I’d give the Jigsaw version the edge over both the Candlewick Green and the Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods versions. Still, the BEST version was the cover that St. Etienne did in 1993. An off-album track, it struck exactly the right tone with its mix of their “retro modernist” electro-soul sound and Sarah Cracknell’s almost spoken vocal. I saw them perform this song on two consecutive nights in Manhattan in 1994 and it was a special highlight of their live show.

Below, St. Etienne performing “Who Do You Think You Are” on TOTP in 1993, with the always gorgeous Sarah Cracknell looking especially marvelous here:
 

 
An hour of “Sausage, pork, beef, cheese, whole milk, butter, margarine, nuts” for your viewing pleasure.

(via Dooby Brain)

 
Happy birthday wishes go out today to Anita Pallenberg, the iconic 60s beauty, actress and notorious heroin addict, who was the muse for (at least) two Rolling Stones. Aside from her scandal-filled years spent with Keith Richards, Pallenberg is best known for her roles in Performance, with Mick Jagger, and as the one-eyed Great Tyrant in Barbarella, the Black Queen of Sogo, city of night.

Jo Bergman, who was the personal assistant to the Stone from 1967 to 1973 said of Pallenberg: “Anita is a Rolling Stone. She, Mick, Keith and Brian were the Rolling Stones. Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy.” Anita Pallenberg turns 67, today.
 

 
This actually did make me slap happy after the first couple of minutes. The video has a weird cumulative effect. Kind of like music.

Jeff S. of Mo’ Better Blogging created this and he’s going to be posting a list of the roughly 120 movies included in the video “soon.”

I’m more than a little in awe at the amount of work that goes into compiling a video like this.
 

 
Via The High Definite

 
Poppa Neutrino (William David Pearlmam) was born in San Francisco in 1933. Neutrino died on January 23, 2011 in New Orleans, LA.

Poppa Neutrino was a friend of mine and one the most fascinating men I’ve ever met.

During the mid-1980s into the 90s, I was booking bands into several music venues in New York City. Poppa had a family band called The Flying Neutrinos fronted by his daughter Ingrid Lucia and son Todd Londagin. They’d been street musicians for years, traveling all over the world, eventually landing in Manhattan. I saw the group evolve from a somewhat ragged ensemble into a world class jazz band with a heavy New Orleans influence. Poppa receded into the background as the group became increasingly in demand and successful. But his spiritual influence was very much alive in the soul of the group. He encouraged not only their art but their fierce independence. Which considering his own wild and uncompromising past was to be totally expected. He was a renegade with a streetwise philosophy and a hustler’s instincts. An American Gurdjieff.

David Pearlman, a restless and migratory soul, a mariner, a musician, a member of the Explorers Club and a friend of the San Francisco Beats, a former preacher and sign painter, a polymath, a pauper, and a football strategist for the Red Mesa Redskins of the Navajo Nation. When Pearlman was fifty, he was bitten on the hand by a dog in Mexico and for two years got so sick that he thought he would die. When he recovered, he felt so different that he decided he needed a new name. He began calling himself Poppa Neutrino, after the itinerant particle that is so small it can hardly be detected. To Neutrino, the particle represents the elements of the hidden life that assert themselves discreetly.

Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki, Neutrino is the only man ever to build a raft from garbage he found on the streets of New York and sail it across the North Atlantic. The New York Daily News described the accomplishment as “the sail of the century.” National Geographic broadcast an account of the trip as part of its series on extreme adventures.

The philosophical underpinnings of Neutrino’s existence are what he calls Triads, a concept worked out after years of reading and reflection. He believes that each person, to be truly happy, must define his or her three deepest desires and pursue them remorselessly. Freedom, Joy, and Art are Neutrino’s three.

There’s a wonderful book about Poppa written by New Yorker contributor Alec Wikinson called “Poppa the Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino” that is genuinely inspirational.

As recently as last year, Poppa was still pushing the envelope when he attempted to circumnavigate the Globe in a 37 foot raft with a crew consisting of three sailors and three dogs. But on November 9 their raft was tossed by big surf onto the rocks near Thompson’s Point, VT.

Only a few months later, Poppa died of a heart attack in the city he always seemed to return to, New Orleans. His family is having him cremated and will set his ashes afloat on the Mississippi River. In the words of his daughter Ingrid, “He’s always been free, so we’ll set him free.” 

Like many artists and musicians, Poppa had little money and no insurance. If you’d like to contribute toward his funeral expenses go here.

Victor Zimet and Stephanie Silber’s documentary Random Lunacy explores the life and philosophy of Poppa Neutrino. This your chance to meet a remarkable man.
 

 
The Monitors is a sci-fi satire made by the Bell & Howell motion picture equipment company in conjunction with Chicago’s famed comic improv group, The Second City (which has given the world top comic talent like Joan Rivers, Steve Carell, John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, much of the SCTV cast and many others). It is the only feature film that The Second City has ever made.

Not surprisingly, The Monitors comes off like longform sketch comedy, but with a (slightly) dark edge. A race of aliens wearing bowler hats, black turtlenecks and black suits—probably for reasons of budget—has taken over the White House and keeps the population in line with an Orwellian government where sex, violence, politics and display of emotions are forbidden. A group of humans decide to “take their country back,” with predicable power struggles.
 

 
The main roles are filled by Guy Stockwell (the knife-throwing father in Santa Sangre) and Susan Oliver (Peyton Place). Larry Storch (F Troop), Ed Begley Sr., and actual Second City alum Avery Schrieber (where were the others??? Stuck in the bit parts!) also have major roles.

Weirdly, Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (the one-time Republican Senate Minority leader who helped write key civil rights legislation) makes a cameo appearance, basically playing himself. Odetta sings the closing them song! It was shot by future Oscar-winner Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, McCabe and Mrs. Miller).

This used to be on late night TV all the time. I haven’t thought about this film in years, but now it’s on the Netflix VOD.

Below, the opening to The Monitors:
 

 
Thank you, Rich Lindsay!