Just to follow up on this entry from two days ago, it appears I’m not alone in being pessimistic about the reboot of Fawlty Towers. I just came across this Guardian article predicting the show will be an ‘anti-woke nightmare’. Broadly echoing the points I made in my entry, Stuart Heritage writes how Fawlty Towers is a ‘foundational text’ of british comedy, and to revive it is almost certainly doomed to fail. “[T]he world needs a Fawlty Towers reboot as much as it needs to be kicked down a well by a horse. Almost nothing about this news is a good idea. Where to start? There is the fact that, by Cleese’s own admission when the subject last came up in 2009, the original is held in such high regard that any attempt to follow it is almost guaranteed to be a disappointment. There is also the fact that reboots of almost everything, barring perhaps the first return of Frasier, are almost always inferior to the originals.” He goes on to explain how nothing about this idea makes sense: “Cleese won’t have the same support staff around him. Andrew Sachs is dead. Prunella Scales has long since retired on health grounds. Connie Booth – who, let’s not forget, co-created and co-wrote the whole thing – doesn’t appear to have anything to do with this new project.” I hope I’m wrong but, again, this just reeks of a right-wing zealot reviving one of his greatest hits to use as a political soapbox.