4787/17446
I love John Cleese. The work he did with Monty Python and on Fawlty Towers was some of the first comedy that blew my mind and made me want to do this job. He also lived in Weston-super-Mare as a kid which gave a young Cheddar boy hope that there was some chance of making behaving like an idiot my career. His performances in Fawlty Towers and Life of Brian show a comedian/actor at his absolute peak and looming high above nearly everyone else (though possibly Michael Palin subtly transcends him in Brian).
And I understand that each performer makes his own choices and that there are times in your life where you have to make commercial above artistic decisions and as I have mellowed into a less angry middle-aged man I don’t care so much about people doing adverts. In most cases it’s just a job and an ephemeral one. And perhaps int the 21st Century as comedians become autonomous some kind of sponsorship from business (or preferably fans) becomes a necessity for most. Cleese has had (another) expensive divorce and this means we got to see the Python team reunite (which was unexpectedly lovely) and tour with Eric Idle and write a book and (one might dream) create new, exciting comedy.
Sadly for comedy fans, but maybe delightfully for the public at large, he has chosen to help pay off his alimony by resurrecting a classic bit of Fawlty Towers for a Specsaver advert. He’s done adverts before - I recall him doing one for a supermarket where he worked alongside comedy colossus Emma Kennedy - and made loads of money even back in the day by putting together rather amusing training videos for business. And like I say, although it disappoints the pompously principled teenage comedy fan that still resides inside me, I understand that it’s his choice and given he never made any stand against the advertising industry and always been involved with it that that’s not his problem.
But it’s hard not to feel depressed about him taking the classic “hitting the car with a big twig/small branch” and rejigging it for an advert. Even ignoring the thought that he might be urinating over his own legacy (it’s his legacy after all and I’d love to have one like that to have the option to piss over), it mainly upset me because whoever put it together completely failed to understand why the original scene is so brilliant.
A man hitting a car with a twig is not necessarily funny, but there are a lot of factors in Fawlty Towers that make the scene so brilliant. Firstly there has been a big build up of awful things happening, which finally lead to Fawlty snapping and expressing his anger in this impotent and futile way. A thirty second ad could never have that of course, but the thing that annoys Fawlty - his talking car telling him that his ignition key is not inserted when it is - is not annoying enough, but also is in no way true. It is a situation that would literally never happen and I doubt it ever has happened, but certainly if it has most of the audience don’t have cars that do that. Yes technology can sometimes be annoying and counterintuitive and we’ve all experienced an automated phone not understanding what film we want or a phone not taking voice instruction. But what car would tell you that the key has not been inserted? What is the value of the function? It would have to keep saying that all the time that the key was not inserted and be capable of booting up without the key being inserted. You need to insert the key for any of the cars functions to work. It’s like the car knows he is trying to insert the key and then ignores the fact that he has done that. It feels like an idea that someone has come up with in two minutes and everyone, with an eye on the clock, has said, yeah that will do. And that is what is is, Cleese admits in the interview accompanying the ad that it took them 20 minutes to put the thing together. And obviously that’s what appealed to him about the job. One meeting, a day of filming, lots of money.
But the main issue is the way that the classic gag is shot. Watch the original (and I haven’t done so, this is from memory, so forgive me in the unlikely event that I have misremembered it). The car comes stalls and the camera stays on it throughout in a single shot, from the front. Basil gets angry, swears at the car, can’t start it and then has had enough, looks around and works out a plan to teach the car a lesson. He disappears. The camera stays on the car. For a long time. Longer than you’d usually see a shot of nothing happening on TV. What is Fawlty doing? What is his plan? We stay on the car and have the added delight of realising, when he appears with the twig, that he has taking his time finding and selecting it. It’s also the perfect twig. Not insubstantial, but not big enough to cause anything any damage. It’s ineffectual as a weapon and perfectly expresses the flimsiness of Fawlty and his powerlessness in the Universe. He’s taking out his frustrations on an inanimate object that he can not influence, but he still feels better about himself for having shown a broken car that he is superior to it (though his actions indicate otherwise). This is the “joke” and it’s funny, though it’s also an artistic representation of the human condition and we laugh as perhaps we outwardly feel superior to this idiot, but ironically we are his equal and we know it.
In the advert everything is shot from the wrong angle, there is very little pause between the decision to leave and the return. The camera angle alters, (of course by necessity for the hilarious reveal) and then too quickly we discover that Fawlty is hitting a police car (that for some reason is parked up in this salubrious middle-class area of antique shops and mock-Tudor houses). Which, you know, in reality, wouldn’t be that big a deal. I think the police would think he was mad, but he’s hit their car with an ineffectual twig (may be wrong, but if feels like the branch is a bit too big and bushy to be an effectively funny prop - though in this case the joke would only work if it was much bigger and might cause some damage), so they’d just ask him to stop. Then Cleese’s stunt double gets to do a bit of funny run (to get two legacies for the price of one) and jumps into a bush.
The real issue is why was Fawlty trying to drive a car when he was clearly too blind to do so. A better ad would be him successfully starting the car and then running over a couple of toddlers and as we see his horrified face some mordant music plays and someone says “Should have gone to Specsavers” which would also be a good road safety campaign, ending with Fawlty in prison with a rat popping up in his dinner.
It’s so upsetting to see the joke ruined in this way and our memories spoiled by an already rich man trying to get more money that it turns out that it’s actually a better advert for trying to make sure your marriage works so you don’t have to demean yourself. Colin Houlson on Twitter offered the tag, “should have gone to Relate”, which I seriously think Relate should consider doing in a viral video. Just show the advert, but replace the tag.
Like I say I have no legacy to piss over, which the 70 year old me might regret. My best idea is that I do an advert in which I attempt to suck my own cock, but when I look down I realise I have accidentally started sucking the cock of a nearby policeman who looks furious and disgruntled (though you have to ask yourself why he let me get this far - he must surely have wanted it on some level and also so must I, I mean the chances of that happening accidentally are so slight) and then it says “Should have gone to specsavers” and then I am arrested and go to prison, where my fellow inmates are a shrek, a bigfoot and a ghost and they all eat my ham hand and I escape up a stick attached to the moon, but slip off because it is coated in green jelly and beaver milk and now even I am struggling to think of things that people liked that I’ve done in my career.
Anyway I still love John Cleese, I owe him much laughter and for helping to set me off on the path I've taken. And that makes up for having to wipe some of his piss off his DVDs when I rewatch them.
