Fawlty Towers was inspired by the real Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, where the Monty Python group stayed in 1970 while filming on location; John Cleese was fascinated by the owner Donald Sinclair, whom he called 'the rudest man I've ever come across in my life'.

Donald Sinclair's real eccentric behavior included criticizing Terry Gilliam's 'too American' table etiquette and throwing Eric Idle's briefcase out of a window in case it contained a bomb, later explaining 'We've had a lot of staff problems.'

An early prototype of the Basil Fawlty character appeared in a 1971 episode of the sitcom Doctor at Large called 'No Ill Feelings', featuring an aggressive, incompetent hotel manager with a domineering wife.

The first Fawlty Towers script submitted to the BBC was rejected, with an assessor calling it 'full of clichéd situations and stereotypical characters' and predicting it would be 'a disaster'.

John Cleese was paid £6,000 for 43 weeks of work on the show and supplemented his income with TV commercials, which he credited with allowing him the time to write the scripts properly.

Although set in Torquay, no filming actually took place in South West England; exterior shots used the Wooburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire, which later briefly became a nightclub named 'Basil's' before burning down in 1991.

Scripts were extraordinarily detailed for a sitcom, running 135-140 pages instead of the average 65, and involved around 400 camera cuts compared to the usual 200, with 20-25 hours of editing per episode.

The theme music, composed by Dennis Wilson, was recorded by the Aeolian Quartet, who were asked by director John Howard Davies to perform it badly, though they ended up playing it well regardless.

Actor Andrew Sachs was seriously injured twice during filming: once being knocked out with a real metal frying pan in 'The Wedding Party', and again suffering severe burns when corrosive smoke-effect chemicals ate through his clothes during a kitchen fire scene in 'The Germans'.

Andrew Sachs, who played the Spanish waiter Manuel with an exaggerated accent, was actually originally German and had emigrated to Britain as a child.

For international dubbing, Manuel's nationality was changed to Italian (renamed Paolo) in the Spanish version, since the show initially flopped in Spain due to its portrayal of a Spanish waiter, while in Catalonia and France he became Mexican.

The rearranged letters of the 'Fawlty Towers' sign shown at the start of each episode became a running gag, with anagram phrases in series two provided by production assistant Iain McLean; the only genuine anagram of the hotel's name used was 'Flowery Twats' in 'The Anniversary'.

Despite later becoming a cultural phenomenon, the show initially received mixed reviews, with the Daily Mirror's 1975 headline reading 'Long John Short On Jokes'; critic Richard Ingrams' harsh review was later mocked by Cleese naming a guest character 'Mr Ingrams' who is caught with a blow-up doll.

Fawlty Towers was ranked first on the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes in 2000 and was named the greatest-ever British TV sitcom by a Radio Times panel in 2019.

Cleese and Booth deliberately ended the show after just two series of six episodes each, a decision later praised for preserving its quality and cited as an influence by creators of The Office, Extras, The Young Ones, and dinnerladies.

John Cleese once developed an idea for a feature-length Fawlty Towers special involving Basil and Sybil flying to Spain to visit Manuel, during which Basil would foil a plane hijacking and end up in a Spanish jail, but the idea was never produced.