From Fawlty Towers to Frasier — the difficult world of the reboot

Comedy is a famously fickle business, and no one knows it better than John Cleese. Consider the case of “The Builders”, one of the most celebrated episodes of Fawlty Towers, the perfectly written series conceived by Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth, which the BBC aired in the autumn of 1975. Cleese was concerned that the recording of the episode had gone badly, the studio audience failing to respond with sufficient enthusiasm.

He felt that the recording was a “tough” one, and he and his team expended much energy in tightening it at the editing stage. It was only later that he found out that the BBC had filled the front row of the audience with visiting executives from Iceland’s national broadcasting corporation. “They were pleasant and charming and Icelandic,” recalled Cleese many years later, but “not laughing at all”.

Did the chilliness of the response help — or hinder — the rewrite? We shall never know. But it was a sharp reminder that context, as in all things, matters. Cleese will be reflecting on this as he prepares to reboot the classic series for another turn, with the help of his daughter Camilla. The show’s admirers are concerned; Cleese himself is bloody-minded, certain that the travails of his best-loved character have something to say about the modern world.

There are two reasons for the public’s wariness. First, that the show simply won’t be funny. The original series was scripted and performed with an attention to detail that was rare for its time. Its 12 episodes were enough, so rich was its comedic virtuosity. The reboot doesn’t have a chance, says just about everyone. It can only tarnish the memory.

But the other concern regards Cleese himself. The 83-year-old, in his public statements at least, has become curmudgeonly and unsympathetic to what he sees as the over-protection of delicate sensibilities in today’s world. He is, say his detractors, on the wrong side of a culture war. He has already said that he is not taking the new series to the BBC (though there is no announcement yet as to where the series will air), and is soon to start his own talk show on the defiantly anti-liberal GB News. Is there an uneasy elision here between the star and his monstrous creation? And is there really any comic potential in the clichéd observation that old age makes people grumpy?

Other reboots have faced similar dilemmas. The 2018 revival of Roseanne, a sassy and genuinely original take on blue-collar life from the Reagan era, was derailed after its protagonist Roseanne Barr was fired for posting a racist message on Twitter. Roseanne without Rosanne seemed inconceivable; yet ABC’s nimble response, to turn the show into The Conners, an ensemble piece about the rest of the family, was inspired.

It turned out that losing the old, grumpy one (she died, we learn in the opening episode, from an opioid overdose) allowed the show to become more sophisticated and nuanced in its tone. The culture war portrayed here, in the fictional town of Lanford, Illinois, is more of a series of skittish spats, the jokes spraying in all directions with equal gusto.

There is no sentimentality about working-class life: “You’re a catch,” Roseanne’s sister Jackie says to her niece Darlene of her marriage prospects, “you’re educated and diabetes-free”. Yet anyone acting above their station is gleefully shot down. When Jackie’s boyfriend Peter turns up at Halloween dressed as a representation of Cartesian mind-body dualism (a Frasier-esque joke if ever there was one), he is given predictably short shrift by the family.

Frasier itself is also due for another outing, expected later in the year, as its star Kelsey Grammer reprises another classic comic character. Grammer too has been castigated in liberal circles for expressing support for some of the policies of former president Trump: sufficient, in a bellicose climate, for some to view his return with trepidation. But there is surely little chance of any of this back-story seeping into the show: Frasier was always a soft- hearted, liberal show about soft-hearted liberals, in which the only wars fought were over wine choices and the rival interpreters of operatic arias.

It is because comedians are able to speak truth to power with eloquence, brevity and charm that their societal role is endlessly scrutinised today. It is also why they so frequently appear in the front lines of what are essentially political battles. But a joke is a promiscuous thing. It doesn’t care about whom it damages, nor whom it hurts. It is in a way heartening to see old comics girding their one-liners to challenge the world again. Their belief in their art is total, and they will not be brought down by seriousness or the strictures of good intentions. Keep writing, and don’t think of Iceland.

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