Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience | The President Hotel | ★★★☆☆
If you found Fawtly Towers funny when it had its first television run, you’ll probably find the Faulty Towers Dining Experience (note the change of spelling here…) brings you back in time to happy TV dinners. If you watched it more recently, again or for the first time, and wondered why exactly it had acquired that sacred status of funniest TV comedy, you had better avoid this immersive dining tribute performance. This experience really isn’t for everyone, yet, it speaks to a sense of humour that does engage vast demographic swathes.
First, let’s do the sums, because this is serious business. Anyone who manages to give work to more than fifty performers per season over the course of twenty-five years of uninterrupted, almost daily runs, starting from a gig out of an Australian Hotel and having toured pretty much every single English-speaking market and more, with tickets hovering around £75 a pop and deploying a ratio of three actors to approximately one hundred guests gets my attention, regardless of any reservations about their product’s artistic merits.
Then, let’s look at the facts: at Faulty Towers people laugh and actually have a great time. Thrown together in tables seating eight-to ten diners, those that seem to have the best time of all are friends that booked a whole table as a group. These Basil Fawlty fans simply cannot stop laughing and one’s giggles trigger giggles in all the rest. The actors cotton on and tend to improvise and interact with these groups most, knowing they’ll happily take a send up, reinforcing the experience.
Next are family groups, where parents and grandparents laugh hardest while teens try to make themselves invisible. Differences in generational sensibilities make an appearance but, after all, those who pay for the tickets get the entertainment they are looking for.
The least successful experience is probably reserved to mixed tables accommodating couples next to other couples or singles they have never met before. One grumbling diner is sufficient to spoil the experience for the rest. This should be front of mind if purchasing this experience as a present for two: couples are not seated as couples at smaller tables. Reminiscing the good old times and reliving happier days would be easier if they were.
The actors are extremely good at impersonating Basil, Sybil and Manuel, at re-enacting key moments from the episodes among the tables and at picking up clues from those diners who wish to interact, when they’ll launch into improvisation in line with the show’s tone. Real seventieth birthdays, fortieth wedding anniversaries and recent engagements were called out by Sybil and applauded by the rest of the dining room and seem to be part of the package.
This Fawlty Towers tribute is an entirely different proposition to the upcoming West End show, penned by John Cleese, and it seems he is none too happy about it even existing. Basil impersonators whose rent was covered should write him a note of thanks.