Fawlty Towers Show 'still funnier than anything else on these days'

JOHN Cleese has said his stage adaption of Fawlty Towers has been successful because 50 years on from the show's 1975 TV debut it is still “funnier than anything else that’s on these days’

- Casey COOPERFISKE

Cleese, 85, who grew up in Weston-super-Mare and attended Clifton College, was speaking to the PA news agency ahead of a new run of Fawlty Towers: The Play, which will begin at the Apollo Theatre in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue on June 24, where it will remain until September 13 before heading out ona UK and Ireland tour.

Speaking about the success of the show, which began in Australia in 2016, before moving to the West End in May last year, Cleese, pictured inset, said: “Well, this may sound a bit smug, but I knew the script pretty well, and we'd done it in Australia a few years before Covid.

“So I knew the script was very, very funny, but the moment which I was so thrilled about was when I was attending by Zoom the auditions, and I could not believe how good the people auditioning were.