BEST EPISODE! (IMO)

I remember hearing Cleese talk about how they got the idea for this one. Apparently in Britain in the 70s people would check into hotels just to commit suicide or just die during the night, and it would be up to the staff to get rid of the bodies without the other guests seeing them. That was something that he had read about really happening and he and Booth decided to make it a farce-based comedy episode.

Also, the old dude with the young woman at the beginning, probably the only reason she was with him was because he was loaded. After all, as it has been said elsewhere, money is a great aphrodisiac.

And the annoying woman with the biting dog, I wonder why she would think that Manuel was from India. That was a weird line, I thought. And we never found out if the dog really did die after being "poisoned" from Polly putting pepper and tabasco sauce on the sausages. That seemed to be just a tad bit out of character for her to do, I thought. But like I said before, the humor in the second series was a bit more cruel and mean-spirited in nature. Rather unfortunate, really!

Also, another thing I find unbelievable is that the hotel could ever be full at any given time. Surely because of Basil's erratic and unprofessional behavior to the guests in the first series, the hotel would have gotten a reputation for being not really a very nice place to stay, and it would have spread. It just doesn't seem likely that they would have too many other people staying there after all the things Basil subjected his guests to.

At least that's how I see it!

One more thing, regarding Mr. Ingrams and his plastic blow-up doll. In 1975, there was a critic with the same name for either the BBC or the Times newspaper who gave the debut episode "A Touch Of Class" a pretty bad review. Cleese and Booth decided to get back at him by portraying him in this manner, albeit four years later in the second series. I read this somewhere at one point.

Sounds like a real petty thing to do, but like I said before, it was the 70s, and the two creators apparently were not fond of the idea of anyone saying anything bad about their comedy creation! Oh well.

This was before the internet, and it was more difficult to spread the word whether a hotel was bad. Probably most people staying there would be holidaymakers who found the name of the hotel in a brochure for the area - perhaps one that didn't give ratings - and to be honest a hotel with the word "Towers" in its name does sound rather posh!

I don't know whether they ever say in the series how long Basil and Sybil have been running the hotel, but maybe it's not long enough for its terrible reputation to have reached the ears of the publishers of the Torquay holiday brochures.

In an early draft Mr. Ingrams was the name of Mr. Leaman, but John & Connie thought that was a step too far.

Leaman is the surname of a friend of John Cleese who worked in the hotel & restaurant trade & advised them about some of the storylines, including about getting bodies out of rooms.

Yeah, I read about that on this episode's Wikipedia page.

I'm glad that there are other fans of this show besides me around here, that's for sure.

And nice to hear from you again, Callie! Are you staying as far away as possible from the Ratliffverse? I sure hope so, hee hee!

Poor Dr Price! "Are you seriously telling me you didn't realise this man was dead?!"