The Builders
Encyclopedia
"The Builders" is the second episode in the first series of the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 TV
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 sitcom Fawlty Towers
Fawlty Towers
Fawlty Towers is a British sitcom produced by BBC Television and first broadcast on BBC2 in 1975. Twelve television program episodes were produced . The show was written by John Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth, both of whom played major characters...

.

Synopsis

Basil
Basil Fawlty
Basil Fawlty is the main character of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, played by John Cleese. The character is often thought of as an iconic British comedy character, and has been deemed unforgettable despite only a dozen half-hour episodes ever being made....

 hires Irish
Irish people
The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...

 builder O'Reilly to do some vital work on the hotel. However, due to the builders' incompetence various disasters occur, and Basil turns to his wife's new garden gnome
Garden gnome
A garden gnome or lawn gnome is a figurine of a small humanoid creature, usually wearing a pointy hat, produced for the purpose of ornamentation and protection from evil sorcery, typically of gardens or on lawns....

 as a source of violence while wreaking revenge.

Cast

Episode Credited cast:
  • John Cleese
    John Cleese
    John Marwood Cleese is an English actor, comedian, writer, and film producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report...

     as Basil Fawlty
    Basil Fawlty
    Basil Fawlty is the main character of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, played by John Cleese. The character is often thought of as an iconic British comedy character, and has been deemed unforgettable despite only a dozen half-hour episodes ever being made....

  • Prunella Scales
    Prunella Scales
    Prunella Scales CBE is an English actress, known for her role as Basil Fawlty's long-suffering wife in the British comedy Fawlty Towers and her award-nominated role as Queen Elizabeth II in the British film A Question of Attribution.-Career:Throughout her long career, Scales has usually been cast...

     as Sybil Fawlty
    Sybil Fawlty
    Sybil Fawlty is a fictional character from the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers. She is played by Prunella Scales. Her age is listed as 34 years old as seen on her medical chart in the 1975 episode "The Germans", thus presumably indicating that she was born in 1941...

  • Andrew Sachs
    Andrew Sachs
    Andrew Sachs is a German-born British actor. He made his name on British television and is best known for his portrayals of Manuel in Fawlty Towers, a role for which he was BAFTA-nominated, and Ramsay Clegg in Coronation Street.-Early life:Sachs was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Katharina , a...

     as Manuel
    Manuel (Fawlty Towers)
    Manuel is a fictional character from the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers. Played by Andrew Sachs, he is an iconic character in British comedy history...

  • Connie Booth
    Connie Booth
    Constance "Connie" Booth is an American-born writer and actress, known for appearances on British television and particularly for her portrayal of Polly Sherman in the popular 1970s television show Fawlty Towers, which she co-wrote with her then-husband John Cleese.-Biography:Booth's father was a...

     as Polly Sherman
  • Ballard Berkeley as Major Gowen
    Major Gowen
    Major Gowen is a fictional character played by Ballard Berkeley in the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers.Major Gowen is an old, befuddled, somewhat senile ex-soldier permanently residing in the hotel. He enjoys talking about the world and is always on the lookout for the newspaper. He has trouble forgiving...

  • Gilly Flower
    Gilly Flower
    Gilly Flower was an English actress, best remembered as the elderly Miss Abitha Tibbs in the cult BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers.Gilly Flower played Miss Tibbs in all twelve episodes of the show, which was produced in two six-episode series separated by a three-and-a-half-year interval Gilly Flower...

     as Miss Abitha Tibbs
  • Renee Roberts as Miss Ursula Gatsby
  • David Kelly
    David Kelly (actor)
    David Kelly is an Irish actor, who has been in regular film and television work since the 1950s.-Acting career:Playing everything from Beckett to Shakespeare, he has appeared in Theatre, TV and film constantly since 1959...

     as Mr. O'Reilly

With:
  • James Appleby as Mr. Stubbs
  • Michael Cronin as Mr. Lurphy
  • Barney Dorman as Mr. Kerr
  • Michael Halsey as Mr. Jones
  • George Lee as Bennion, a Delivery Man
  • Pat Gorman as Departing Guest (uncredited)

Plot

Basil tells his resident guests Major Gowen, Miss Tibbs, and Miss Gatsby that they will have to have dinner at the Gleneagles hotel, as workmen are coming to do work on the hotel. The Fawltys themselves are going away on a rare holiday with friends. Polly and Manuel are left to deal with the workmen, whose instructions are to block off the drawing room door and build a door leading into the kitchen. Polly is drawing something on her sketchpad--what appears to be a landfill junk-pile with a shirt-collar and tie under it. Basil can't for the life figure out what it's supposed to be. Manuel later sees it and recognizes it as "Mr. Fawlty." Polly nervously shushes him. Basil tells Polly that the workmen will be O'Reilly's, an Irish cowboy builder with very little understanding of the building trade, as opposed to Sybil's preferred builder Stubbs, who is reliable and competent and who, Sybil believes, is actually booked to carry out the alterations. The high price for Stubbs' work has prompted Basil surreptitiously to hire O'Reilly for the project. According to Sybil, because he is cheap. Basil retorts with rather cheapish.

After the Fawltys depart, Polly goes to her room for a short nap, telling Manuel to wake her as soon as the builders arrive. Manuel enjoys his temporary power, imagining the hotel is his own. During this time, a delivery man arrives to deliver a garden gnome Sybil has ordered, but confuses Manuel into thinking that he wants a room for it. Manuel places the gnome under the desk. The builders enter, but Manuel cannot bring himself to wake the peacefully sleeping Polly. After presenting the workmen with the plans, Manuel receives a call at the front desk from someone he believes to be asking for Basil. After hanging up repeatedly, Manuel realizes it is in fact Basil himself on the line and drops the phone in shock. He then receives instructions from Basil and calls over the "man with beard," (Murphy, the only bearded builder) and then, on Basil's instructions but clearly not understanding what he is saying, tells the builder "You are a hideous orangutan." Murphy then punches Manuel's lights out as Basil, who was obviously aware of the man's short fuse, had hoped.

The next morning, Basil arrives to check on the hotel to see if everything is sound. However, he finds that, due to a misunderstanding of the plans, the builders have blocked up the dining room rather than the drawing room, much to his dismay. Moreover, there is now a door in front of the stairs rather than leading into the kitchen. In a combination of rage at the shoddy work and fear over his wife's anticipated reaction, Basil, after tripping over Sybil's gnome, furiously threatens first Polly and then Manuel, before phoning O'Reilly and threatening that if he is not at the hotel in twenty minutes to fix the problem, he will "come over there and insert a large garden gnome in you."

O'Reilly arrives, and while Basil is imploring him to get to work, Sybil - having forgotten her golf shoes - arrives back earlier than expected, spots O'Reilly's van and immediately becomes suspicious. Basil blames the chaos on Stubbs's men. Sybil (dangerously calm) responds to this by telling Basil that she saw O'Reilly's van outside. Basil explains this by saying O'Reilly has come in to fix up Stubbs's mess. Sybil, to Basil's surprise, actually agrees with him, but thinks that, since Stubbs made the mess, he should set it right as there would be no point in paying O'Reilly when Stubbs would have to do it for free. At that moment, Polly calls the front desk from another room impersonating Stubbs's secretary, but is caught by Sybil almost immediately and the game is up, as is Sybil's dander.

Sybil angrily confronts Basil for hiring O'Reilly and vows that she will make him regret it for the rest of his life. Basil continues his attempts to convince her it was "at least partly" Stubbs's fault, but Sybil orders him to halt his lies. Berating herself for letting Basil oversee the arrangements, Sybil assaults Basil, hurls the cash box across the room at him and goes into a furious tirade about all the times he'd hired O'Reilly to do jobs with shoddy, disastrous results. O'Reilly merrily appears and, upon admitting his mistakes, tries to joke about it. He even smiles at her when she's ranting, which terrifies Basil. This really sets Sybil off, as she has no capacity for a man smiling at her when she's angry unfortunately, and gives O'Reilly - and her husband - a harsh beating with an umbrella, and tells him to leave and never return. Sybil calls Stubbs to get him to do the work the next morning. She then storms off, not to return until that time. Unwilling to concede defeat, Basil convinces O'Reilly to stay and do the work anyway.

Sybil arrives in the morning to find the renovations have been completed by O'Reilly, apparently with no problems. As Stubbs arrives, Sybil finds herself in an embarrassing situation at having called on him, seemingly now for nothing. Stubbs looks over the renovations and admits at first that whoever did them did a very good job. Then, in further questioning Basil about the work, Stubbs finds out he was not called in for nought after all; while making a doorway leading into the kitchen, which was on a load-bearing wall , O'Reilly had used a wooden lintel for the support frame rather than a concrete one or Rolled Steel Joist
RSJ
RSJ may refer to:* Rancho San Joaquin Middle School, a middle school in Irvine, CA* Rebecca St. James, Christian pop rock singer* Rock Street Journal, an Indian rock magazine* Rolled Steel Joist, an alternative name for an I-beam...

. The supporting wall could give way at any moment, and he will need to repair it immediately, before the building collapses. As Stubbs almost frantically telephones his men to come over and help with this job, Basil leaves and marches down the driveway with Sybil's garden gnome; he calls back to Sybil, in a vengeful tone, "I'm going to see Mr. O'Reilly, dear." Presumably, he is about to make good on his threat to insert said gnome into the builder. "...Then I think I might go to Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

," he adds, under his breath.

Criticism

David Stubbs
David Stubbs
David Stubbs is a British journalist. He was born on 13 September 1962 in London, but grew up in Leeds. As a student at Oxford University he was a close friend of Simon Reynolds; together they worked on an influential fanzine called Monitor before joining Melody Maker in 1986...

 has rated The Builders as the weakest Fawlty Towers episode due to its reliance on stereotypes such as the battleaxe wife, the feckless Irish labourer and the dimwitted Spaniard.

John Cleese himself named "The Builders" as "the least good" of the Fawlty Towers episodes that were filmed, owing to a general lack of laughter in the studio on recording day. He recalls that members of the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation
RÚV
Ríkisútvarpið is Iceland's national public-service broadcasting organization.Operating from studios in the country's capital, Reykjavík, as well as regional centres around the country, the service broadcasts a variety of general programming to a wide audience across the whole country via radio...

 were visiting the studio that day and many of them were in the front row seats, apparently not entirely amused.

Connections and errors

  • Basil tells his guests that they must go to "The Gleneagles" for their dinners. This is a reference to the Hotel Gleneagles which Donald Sinclair
    Donald Sinclair (hotel owner)
    Donald Sinclair was the owner of the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, which he had acquired after an extensive career in the Royal Navy...

    , the hotel manager on which John Cleese based Basil Fawlty, ran in Torquay, the town where Fawlty Towers is set.
  • When Polly brings O'Reilly a cup of tea and biscuits, the cup is clearly empty.
  • George Lee, who plays Bennion the delivery man, also appears as a delivery man in the episode: "Communication Problems
    Communication Problems
    "Communication Problems" is the first episode of the second series of BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers and the seventh episode overall. It is also known as "Mrs. Richards".-Cast:Episode Credited cast:*John Cleese as Basil Fawlty...

    ".
  • At the end, when the Major talks to Polly, the boom mic shadow is visible.
  • When Basil beats Manuel's head against the wall O'Reilly's men have made, it quite visibly moves. Also, while pretending his head is hitting the wall, Manuel can actually be seen kicking it with his foot, which causes the sound.
  • The man who delivers the Garden Gnome to Fawlty Towers asks Manuel where the "Generalissimo" (i.e. his boss) is, to which Manuel (believing that he is talking about Francisco Franco
    Francisco Franco
    Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...

    ) responds "in Madrid
    Madrid
    Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

    !" This episode aired just less than two months before the death of Franco.
  • The grandfather clock in the lobby shows the time to be 6:40 throughout the episode, even though each scene takes place at different times over the course of three days. One explanation for this is that it is broken.
  • In the closing credits, Major Gowen
    Major Gowen
    Major Gowen is a fictional character played by Ballard Berkeley in the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers.Major Gowen is an old, befuddled, somewhat senile ex-soldier permanently residing in the hotel. He enjoys talking about the world and is always on the lookout for the newspaper. He has trouble forgiving...

    's last name is incorrectly spelled "Gowan".

External links

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