Pru... I know!

Chris Hallam pays tribute to Prunella Scales

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One day in 1974, actress Prunella Scales travelled to Hyde Park Gardens to visit John Cleese in his flat to discuss a potential role in a new situation comedy called Fawlty Towers. As it happened, Cleese was in bed where he was recovering from a bad cold. "Did you like the scripts?" he croaked. “I think they're brilliant,” she replied. This must have been a relief. Actress Bridget Turner had already rejected the part on the grounds that the “apple pie” script for the pilot written by Cleese and his then wife, Connie Booth, was, in her view, “not funny enough”. But Scales had her own question about Basil and Sybil: why had such a mismatched couple ever got married in the first place? “Oh, God!” Cleese replied, laughing and groaning simultaneously. “I was afraid you'd ask me that!”

Having formally accepted the role, Scales put into practice her own ideas about Sybil Fawlty, partly basing her on a woman who had ran a hotel which her mother used to stay in. “I've found that if you get the accent right and the speech patterns, you very often find things underneath the surface,” she said later. “I don’t know how [Cleese and Booth] had seen Sybil, but I think it was my idea that she was a cut below [Basil] socially — not very well educated, but ambitious, and very careful about her speech. What she had fallen for was Basil’s “poshness”, and he had fallen for her because she was attractive in a blowsy kind of way.” Scales went on to create her own comprehensive backstory for Sybil. She also perfected Sybil’s unique look, including outfits and gravity-defying hair and, finally, her awful, cackling, gurgling laugh, probably half-remembered from an audience member from one of Scales' many stage performances.