Are you familiar with That’s TV 2? It’s the home of “iconic TV and cult classics”, a definition it stretches to include Little Britain, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Benny Hill. If your idea of an evening’s entertainment is laughing at people who don’t speak English as a first language or sex offenders chasing women in their underwear around a park it will be right up your street. You can either watch it because you long for a simpler time when racism was acceptable, or you can dip into it as a glimpse into bygone attitudes before changing channel in bewildered tedium.

As anyone who has ever tried to see what was funny about Charlie Chaplin will confirm, humour doesn’t always age well, even if Lenin is reported to have said “Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet”. One of the very rare exceptions to this rule is Fawlty Towers. Its comedy is in its middle aged male character living a life of existential bleakness in a transactional loveless marriage, making a living from people he despises in a provincial backwater.

The stage version is now showing in London as part of the intellectual property mining operation that now accounts for much of contemporary cinema and theatre, and I was seduced by an email offering cheapish tickets. You can’t spend every night on the sofa reading Materialism and Empirio-criticism to see if it offers any answers to why Lenin found Chaplin funny.

Whatever the artistic rights and wrongs of reviving old shows, this one is laugh out loud funny throughout. All the best lines are included.

“You can see the sea! It’s over there between the land and the sky!”

“Is there anywhere they do French food?”
Basil: “Yes, France, I believe. They seem to like it there.”

And of course, “you started it, you invaded Poland”.

When Anna-Jane Casey as Sybil first appears, it felt as if Prunella Scales was on the stage and Victoria Fox captures Polly exactly. Adam Jackson-Smith as Basil seems to have been cloned from John Cleese, and for my money was a funnier actor working with a better script than Mark Rylance’s recent performance. The staging was perfect too. It captured the 1970s nylon aesthetic of aspirant gentility and the German guest’s checked, flared trousers are a work of comedy genius.

Fawlty Towers has something to say about a certain section of the English middle class. You can bet that Reform is full of Basil Fawltys. Cleese and his co-writer Connie Booth saw into the soul of those people who feel that life has cheated them but feel that they can compensate by crawling to their social superiors, sneering at foreigners at lashing out at their social inferiors. In Fawlty’s case the violence, which is obviously farcical, is literal and directed against the Spanish Manuel and a guest. Cleese and Booth took this rage and turned it into comedy that will probably still be funny in another fifty years and this show really does it justice. The fact that a substantial part of the audience clearly hadn’t been born when it was first shown on TV says that it has earned its place in the English canon.

Alternatively, don’t over-think it and just go and see it for a bloody good laugh.