The first preview for the West End adaptation of “Fawlty Towers — The Play,” based on the legendary British comedy series created by and starring John Cleese and Connie Booth, hits the boards later this week. The show is an amalgamation of three of the 12 episodes of the zany resort-set series, one of which is the most famous: “The Germans.”
Most remember that episode for the catchphrase “don’t mention the war,” the talking moose, and Cleese goosestepping around his humble Torquay hotel lobby. But it also included its share of envelope-pushing material. Indeed, the character The Major – an old senile drunk played by Ballard Berkeley – tells a rambling story about his time in India in which someone got their racial slurs confused. The scene includes the use of the N-word, as well as a derogatory term for Indians.
In 2020, UKTV removed it, but later reinstated it after Cleese called the move “stupid.
Most remember that episode for the catchphrase “don’t mention the war,” the talking moose, and Cleese goosestepping around his humble Torquay hotel lobby. But it also included its share of envelope-pushing material. Indeed, the character The Major – an old senile drunk played by Ballard Berkeley – tells a rambling story about his time in India in which someone got their racial slurs confused. The scene includes the use of the N-word, as well as a derogatory term for Indians.
In 2020, UKTV removed it, but later reinstated it after Cleese called the move “stupid.
- 5/2/2024
- by Jordan Hoffman
- Gold Derby
Pack your bags, friends, because we’re traveling to the seaside town of Torquay on the English Riviera for a Fawlty Towers reboot! The British television sitcom is returning with John Cleese as Basil Fawlty, and he’s bringing friends and family along for the ride. In addition to reprising his iconic role as the cynical proprietor of the hotel Fawlty Towers, Cleese is writing and starring in the series alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese.
The Fawlty Towers reboot hails from Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock Entertainment and focuses on Basil Fawlty as he navigates the modern world. Further plot details remain a mystery. However, we know the show explores Basil’s relationship with his estranged daughter as the pair attempt to buck fate and run a boutique hotel as a team. Reiner, Michele Reiner, Derrick Rossi, and Matthew George executive produce.
Cleese spoke about George’s “understanding of the...
The Fawlty Towers reboot hails from Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock Entertainment and focuses on Basil Fawlty as he navigates the modern world. Further plot details remain a mystery. However, we know the show explores Basil’s relationship with his estranged daughter as the pair attempt to buck fate and run a boutique hotel as a team. Reiner, Michele Reiner, Derrick Rossi, and Matthew George executive produce.
Cleese spoke about George’s “understanding of the...
- 2/7/2023
- by Steve Seigh
- JoBlo.com
Monty Python star John Cleese has voiced his disapproval of a decision by BBC Studios-owned broadcaster UKTV to scrub an episode of classic British comedy Fawlty Towers from its back catalog.
UKTV removed “The Germans” from its Gold Box Set of downloadable programs, citing the fact that it contained “racial slurs.” UKTV was not specific about the slur, but it is believed to have been uttered by character The Major (Ballard Berkeley), who uses the n-word when referring to Caribbean sportsmen.
“We regularly review older content to ensure it meets audience expectations and are particularly aware of the impact of outdated language,” UKTV said in a statement. “Some shows carry warnings, and others are edited. We want to take time to consider our options for this episode.”
Cleese, who co-created and starred in Fawlty Towers, which aired from 1975-79, told Australian newspaper The Age that the show was laughing...
UKTV removed “The Germans” from its Gold Box Set of downloadable programs, citing the fact that it contained “racial slurs.” UKTV was not specific about the slur, but it is believed to have been uttered by character The Major (Ballard Berkeley), who uses the n-word when referring to Caribbean sportsmen.
“We regularly review older content to ensure it meets audience expectations and are particularly aware of the impact of outdated language,” UKTV said in a statement. “Some shows carry warnings, and others are edited. We want to take time to consider our options for this episode.”
Cleese, who co-created and starred in Fawlty Towers, which aired from 1975-79, told Australian newspaper The Age that the show was laughing...
- 6/12/2020
- by Jake Kanter
- Deadline Film + TV
Rex Harrison hat on TCM: ‘My Fair Lady,’ ‘Anna and the King of Siam’ Rex Harrison is Turner Classic Movies’ final "Summer Under the Stars" star today, August 31, 2013. TCM is currently showing George Cukor’s lavish My Fair Lady (1964), an Academy Award-winning musical that has (in my humble opinion) unfairly lost quite a bit of its prestige in the last several decades. Rex Harrison, invariably a major ham whether playing Saladin, the King of Siam, Julius Caesar, the ghost of a dead sea captain, or Richard Burton’s lover, is for once flawlessly cast as Professor Henry Higgins, who on stage transformed Julie Andrews from cockney duckling to diction-master swan and who in the movie version does the same for Audrey Hepburn. Harrison, by the way, was the year’s Best Actor Oscar winner. (See also: "Audrey Hepburn vs. Julie Andrews: Biggest Oscar Snubs.") Following My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison...
- 8/31/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
LONDON -- Writer-director Stephen Fry's "Bright Young Things" is a Jazz Age English period comedy full of frightfully keen chaps and their ever-so-dotty girlfriends who spend all their time dashing from one society party to another for no particular purpose. In his novel "Vile Bodies", on which the film is based, Evelyn Waugh called them bright young "people," not the patronizing "things." Their furious pursuit of gaiety is cast in the grave shadow of World War I, when the looming sense that even more devastating conflict lie ahead gives way to ceaseless frivolity and an almost lunatic carelessness. In the movie, they are merely the unspeakable in pursuit of the unedifying.
Fry is a noted British writer, actor, raconteur and all-around wit who wrote and makes his feature film-directing debut with "Bright Young Things". The result will be judged on two levels: as an adaptation of Waugh's classic novel and as a film on its own merits. Possibly torn between the two, Fry fails at both. Noisy and giddy, the film makes a stab at "Moulin Rouge" territory but ends up as a very trite story of boy loses girl, boy finds girl. It is also stridently camp -- not so much roaring '20s as screaming. It will take an extremely focused marketing campaign for the film to find any kind of substantial audience.
Waugh made his intentions reasonably clear, populating his satirical landscape with such characters as Lady Fanny Throbbing, Lady Circumference and Mrs. Melrose Ape, and Fry follows that path too. Many of his scenes are almost word-for-word from the original. It's where he deviates from Waugh's subtle and fragile construction that things go wrong. Adam Fenwick-Symes Stephen Campbell Moore) indeed returns from the continent only to have his memoirs, for which he has already been paid, confiscated by a moralistic customs man. He duly informs his unfazed sweetheart, Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer) that as he is now impecunious, they may not be married.
Adam retreats to the seedy Shepheard's Hotel, run by the reliably generous Lottie Crump (Julia McKenzie), where he performs a piece of legerdemain to win £1,000 from a gullible fellow and promptly telephones Nina that the wedding is back on. Deep into Lottie's bottomless champagne, however, Adam hands his £1,000 over to a "drunk major" (Jim Broadbent), who says he will place it on a sure thing in the November Handicap horse race. The major disappears and Adam is on the phone again to Nina with the bad news.
Their on-again, off-again love affair and Adam's search for the drunk major and his winnings are played out against the adventures of the chinless wonders, empty-headed heiresses, lecherous lords and doughty dowagers as recorded in the highly imaginative gossip columns of Mr. Chatterbox, published by newspaper mogul Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd).
So influential was Waugh that we have seen many of these characters in English movies before, especially those from Ealing Studios, played deliciously by a roster of such great character actors as Alastair Sim, Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Terry-Thomas, Katie Johnson and Margaret Rutherford. Only two players in "Bright Young Things" demonstrate similar ability. Broadbent's drunk major suffers from overfamiliarity only because John Cleese rendered the character so effectively in "Fawlty Towers" (Ballard Berkeley as Maj. Gowen). Sadly, Peter O'Toole is given only one, marvelous scene as Col. Blount, Nina's father, who mistakes his daughter's beloved, Adam, for a vacuum cleaner salesman.
Fry's choice is to pump up the unfunny Aykroyd as Lord Monomark and eliminate the book's entire sequence that has Col. Blount making a film about the life of John Wesley at his seen-better-days estate, Doubting Hall. Even worse is the way Fry ends the film. Waugh titled his final chapter "Happy Ending", but, writing in 1930, he famously closed with the bleakest imaginable setting by a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world. Suffice to say that Fry doesn't.
Bright Young Things
The Film Consortium presents in association with the U.K. Film Council and Visionview
and Icon Film Distribution a Revolution Films/Doubting Hall production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Stephen Fry
Based on the novel "Vile Bodies" by: Evelyn Waugh
Producers: Gina Carter, Miranda Davis
Executive producers: Andrew Eaton, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Fry, Chris Auty, Neil Peplow, Jim Reeve, Steve Robbins
Co-producer: Caroline Hewitt
Director of photography: Henry Braham
Production designer: Michael Howells
Editor: Alex Mackie
Composer: Anne Dudley
Costume designer: Nic Ede
Cast:
Adam: Stephen Campbell Moore
Nina: Emily Mortimer
Agatha: Fenella Woolgar
Simon: James McAvoy
Miles: Michael Sheen
Ginger: David Tennant
Archie: Guy Henry
Lord Monomark: Dan Aykroyd
Drunk Major: Jim Broadbent
Mrs. Melrose Ape: Stockard Channing
Col. Blount: Peter O'Toole
Running time -- 106 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Fry is a noted British writer, actor, raconteur and all-around wit who wrote and makes his feature film-directing debut with "Bright Young Things". The result will be judged on two levels: as an adaptation of Waugh's classic novel and as a film on its own merits. Possibly torn between the two, Fry fails at both. Noisy and giddy, the film makes a stab at "Moulin Rouge" territory but ends up as a very trite story of boy loses girl, boy finds girl. It is also stridently camp -- not so much roaring '20s as screaming. It will take an extremely focused marketing campaign for the film to find any kind of substantial audience.
Waugh made his intentions reasonably clear, populating his satirical landscape with such characters as Lady Fanny Throbbing, Lady Circumference and Mrs. Melrose Ape, and Fry follows that path too. Many of his scenes are almost word-for-word from the original. It's where he deviates from Waugh's subtle and fragile construction that things go wrong. Adam Fenwick-Symes Stephen Campbell Moore) indeed returns from the continent only to have his memoirs, for which he has already been paid, confiscated by a moralistic customs man. He duly informs his unfazed sweetheart, Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer) that as he is now impecunious, they may not be married.
Adam retreats to the seedy Shepheard's Hotel, run by the reliably generous Lottie Crump (Julia McKenzie), where he performs a piece of legerdemain to win £1,000 from a gullible fellow and promptly telephones Nina that the wedding is back on. Deep into Lottie's bottomless champagne, however, Adam hands his £1,000 over to a "drunk major" (Jim Broadbent), who says he will place it on a sure thing in the November Handicap horse race. The major disappears and Adam is on the phone again to Nina with the bad news.
Their on-again, off-again love affair and Adam's search for the drunk major and his winnings are played out against the adventures of the chinless wonders, empty-headed heiresses, lecherous lords and doughty dowagers as recorded in the highly imaginative gossip columns of Mr. Chatterbox, published by newspaper mogul Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd).
So influential was Waugh that we have seen many of these characters in English movies before, especially those from Ealing Studios, played deliciously by a roster of such great character actors as Alastair Sim, Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Terry-Thomas, Katie Johnson and Margaret Rutherford. Only two players in "Bright Young Things" demonstrate similar ability. Broadbent's drunk major suffers from overfamiliarity only because John Cleese rendered the character so effectively in "Fawlty Towers" (Ballard Berkeley as Maj. Gowen). Sadly, Peter O'Toole is given only one, marvelous scene as Col. Blount, Nina's father, who mistakes his daughter's beloved, Adam, for a vacuum cleaner salesman.
Fry's choice is to pump up the unfunny Aykroyd as Lord Monomark and eliminate the book's entire sequence that has Col. Blount making a film about the life of John Wesley at his seen-better-days estate, Doubting Hall. Even worse is the way Fry ends the film. Waugh titled his final chapter "Happy Ending", but, writing in 1930, he famously closed with the bleakest imaginable setting by a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world. Suffice to say that Fry doesn't.
Bright Young Things
The Film Consortium presents in association with the U.K. Film Council and Visionview
and Icon Film Distribution a Revolution Films/Doubting Hall production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Stephen Fry
Based on the novel "Vile Bodies" by: Evelyn Waugh
Producers: Gina Carter, Miranda Davis
Executive producers: Andrew Eaton, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Fry, Chris Auty, Neil Peplow, Jim Reeve, Steve Robbins
Co-producer: Caroline Hewitt
Director of photography: Henry Braham
Production designer: Michael Howells
Editor: Alex Mackie
Composer: Anne Dudley
Costume designer: Nic Ede
Cast:
Adam: Stephen Campbell Moore
Nina: Emily Mortimer
Agatha: Fenella Woolgar
Simon: James McAvoy
Miles: Michael Sheen
Ginger: David Tennant
Archie: Guy Henry
Lord Monomark: Dan Aykroyd
Drunk Major: Jim Broadbent
Mrs. Melrose Ape: Stockard Channing
Col. Blount: Peter O'Toole
Running time -- 106 minutes
No MPAA rating...
LONDON -- Writer-director Stephen Fry's "Bright Young Things" is a Jazz Age English period comedy full of frightfully keen chaps and their ever-so-dotty girlfriends who spend all their time dashing from one society party to another for no particular purpose. In his novel "Vile Bodies", on which the film is based, Evelyn Waugh called them bright young "people," not the patronizing "things." Their furious pursuit of gaiety is cast in the grave shadow of World War I, when the looming sense that even more devastating conflict lie ahead gives way to ceaseless frivolity and an almost lunatic carelessness. In the movie, they are merely the unspeakable in pursuit of the unedifying.
Fry is a noted British writer, actor, raconteur and all-around wit who wrote and makes his feature film-directing debut with "Bright Young Things". The result will be judged on two levels: as an adaptation of Waugh's classic novel and as a film on its own merits. Possibly torn between the two, Fry fails at both. Noisy and giddy, the film makes a stab at "Moulin Rouge" territory but ends up as a very trite story of boy loses girl, boy finds girl. It is also stridently camp -- not so much roaring '20s as screaming. It will take an extremely focused marketing campaign for the film to find any kind of substantial audience.
Waugh made his intentions reasonably clear, populating his satirical landscape with such characters as Lady Fanny Throbbing, Lady Circumference and Mrs. Melrose Ape, and Fry follows that path too. Many of his scenes are almost word-for-word from the original. It's where he deviates from Waugh's subtle and fragile construction that things go wrong. Adam Fenwick-Symes Stephen Campbell Moore) indeed returns from the continent only to have his memoirs, for which he has already been paid, confiscated by a moralistic customs man. He duly informs his unfazed sweetheart, Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer) that as he is now impecunious, they may not be married.
Adam retreats to the seedy Shepheard's Hotel, run by the reliably generous Lottie Crump (Julia McKenzie), where he performs a piece of legerdemain to win £1,000 from a gullible fellow and promptly telephones Nina that the wedding is back on. Deep into Lottie's bottomless champagne, however, Adam hands his £1,000 over to a "drunk major" (Jim Broadbent), who says he will place it on a sure thing in the November Handicap horse race. The major disappears and Adam is on the phone again to Nina with the bad news.
Their on-again, off-again love affair and Adam's search for the drunk major and his winnings are played out against the adventures of the chinless wonders, empty-headed heiresses, lecherous lords and doughty dowagers as recorded in the highly imaginative gossip columns of Mr. Chatterbox, published by newspaper mogul Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd).
So influential was Waugh that we have seen many of these characters in English movies before, especially those from Ealing Studios, played deliciously by a roster of such great character actors as Alastair Sim, Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Terry-Thomas, Katie Johnson and Margaret Rutherford. Only two players in "Bright Young Things" demonstrate similar ability. Broadbent's drunk major suffers from overfamiliarity only because John Cleese rendered the character so effectively in "Fawlty Towers" (Ballard Berkeley as Maj. Gowen). Sadly, Peter O'Toole is given only one, marvelous scene as Col. Blount, Nina's father, who mistakes his daughter's beloved, Adam, for a vacuum cleaner salesman.
Fry's choice is to pump up the unfunny Aykroyd as Lord Monomark and eliminate the book's entire sequence that has Col. Blount making a film about the life of John Wesley at his seen-better-days estate, Doubting Hall. Even worse is the way Fry ends the film. Waugh titled his final chapter "Happy Ending", but, writing in 1930, he famously closed with the bleakest imaginable setting by a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world. Suffice to say that Fry doesn't.
Bright Young Things
The Film Consortium presents in association with the U.K. Film Council and Visionview
and Icon Film Distribution a Revolution Films/Doubting Hall production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Stephen Fry
Based on the novel "Vile Bodies" by: Evelyn Waugh
Producers: Gina Carter, Miranda Davis
Executive producers: Andrew Eaton, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Fry, Chris Auty, Neil Peplow, Jim Reeve, Steve Robbins
Co-producer: Caroline Hewitt
Director of photography: Henry Braham
Production designer: Michael Howells
Editor: Alex Mackie
Composer: Anne Dudley
Costume designer: Nic Ede
Cast:
Adam: Stephen Campbell Moore
Nina: Emily Mortimer
Agatha: Fenella Woolgar
Simon: James McAvoy
Miles: Michael Sheen
Ginger: David Tennant
Archie: Guy Henry
Lord Monomark: Dan Aykroyd
Drunk Major: Jim Broadbent
Mrs. Melrose Ape: Stockard Channing
Col. Blount: Peter O'Toole
Running time -- 106 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Fry is a noted British writer, actor, raconteur and all-around wit who wrote and makes his feature film-directing debut with "Bright Young Things". The result will be judged on two levels: as an adaptation of Waugh's classic novel and as a film on its own merits. Possibly torn between the two, Fry fails at both. Noisy and giddy, the film makes a stab at "Moulin Rouge" territory but ends up as a very trite story of boy loses girl, boy finds girl. It is also stridently camp -- not so much roaring '20s as screaming. It will take an extremely focused marketing campaign for the film to find any kind of substantial audience.
Waugh made his intentions reasonably clear, populating his satirical landscape with such characters as Lady Fanny Throbbing, Lady Circumference and Mrs. Melrose Ape, and Fry follows that path too. Many of his scenes are almost word-for-word from the original. It's where he deviates from Waugh's subtle and fragile construction that things go wrong. Adam Fenwick-Symes Stephen Campbell Moore) indeed returns from the continent only to have his memoirs, for which he has already been paid, confiscated by a moralistic customs man. He duly informs his unfazed sweetheart, Nina Blount (Emily Mortimer) that as he is now impecunious, they may not be married.
Adam retreats to the seedy Shepheard's Hotel, run by the reliably generous Lottie Crump (Julia McKenzie), where he performs a piece of legerdemain to win £1,000 from a gullible fellow and promptly telephones Nina that the wedding is back on. Deep into Lottie's bottomless champagne, however, Adam hands his £1,000 over to a "drunk major" (Jim Broadbent), who says he will place it on a sure thing in the November Handicap horse race. The major disappears and Adam is on the phone again to Nina with the bad news.
Their on-again, off-again love affair and Adam's search for the drunk major and his winnings are played out against the adventures of the chinless wonders, empty-headed heiresses, lecherous lords and doughty dowagers as recorded in the highly imaginative gossip columns of Mr. Chatterbox, published by newspaper mogul Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd).
So influential was Waugh that we have seen many of these characters in English movies before, especially those from Ealing Studios, played deliciously by a roster of such great character actors as Alastair Sim, Alec Guinness, Dennis Price, Terry-Thomas, Katie Johnson and Margaret Rutherford. Only two players in "Bright Young Things" demonstrate similar ability. Broadbent's drunk major suffers from overfamiliarity only because John Cleese rendered the character so effectively in "Fawlty Towers" (Ballard Berkeley as Maj. Gowen). Sadly, Peter O'Toole is given only one, marvelous scene as Col. Blount, Nina's father, who mistakes his daughter's beloved, Adam, for a vacuum cleaner salesman.
Fry's choice is to pump up the unfunny Aykroyd as Lord Monomark and eliminate the book's entire sequence that has Col. Blount making a film about the life of John Wesley at his seen-better-days estate, Doubting Hall. Even worse is the way Fry ends the film. Waugh titled his final chapter "Happy Ending", but, writing in 1930, he famously closed with the bleakest imaginable setting by a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world. Suffice to say that Fry doesn't.
Bright Young Things
The Film Consortium presents in association with the U.K. Film Council and Visionview
and Icon Film Distribution a Revolution Films/Doubting Hall production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Stephen Fry
Based on the novel "Vile Bodies" by: Evelyn Waugh
Producers: Gina Carter, Miranda Davis
Executive producers: Andrew Eaton, Michael Winterbottom, Stephen Fry, Chris Auty, Neil Peplow, Jim Reeve, Steve Robbins
Co-producer: Caroline Hewitt
Director of photography: Henry Braham
Production designer: Michael Howells
Editor: Alex Mackie
Composer: Anne Dudley
Costume designer: Nic Ede
Cast:
Adam: Stephen Campbell Moore
Nina: Emily Mortimer
Agatha: Fenella Woolgar
Simon: James McAvoy
Miles: Michael Sheen
Ginger: David Tennant
Archie: Guy Henry
Lord Monomark: Dan Aykroyd
Drunk Major: Jim Broadbent
Mrs. Melrose Ape: Stockard Channing
Col. Blount: Peter O'Toole
Running time -- 106 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/23/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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