The Builders

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“The Builders”
Fawlty Towers episode
Episode no. Season 1
Episode 2
Written by John Cleese & Connie Booth
Directed by John Howard Davies
Original airdate 26 September 1975
Episode chronology
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"A Touch of Class" "The Wedding Party"
List of Fawlty Towers episodes

"The Builders" is the second episode in the first series of the BBC TV sitcom Fawlty Towers.

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

Basil hires Irish builder O'Reilly to do some vital work on the hotel. However, due to the builders' incompetence a disaster occurs, and Basil turns to his new garden gnome as a source of violence while wreaking revenge...

[edit] Cast

Episode Credited cast:

With:

  • James Appleby as Mr. Stubbs
  • Michael Cronin as Mr. Lurphy
  • Barney Dorman as Mr. Kerr
  • Michael Halsey as Mr. Jones
  • George Lee as Bennion, a Delivery Man

[edit] Plot

Basil tells his resident guests Major Gowen, Miss Tibbs, and Miss Gatsby that they will have to eat at another hotel, as workmen are coming to do work on the hotel. The Fawltys themselves are going away on a rare holiday with Audrey and some other friends. Polly and Manuel therefore are left with the responsibility of taking care of the workmen. Basil tells Polly that the workmen will be from O'Reilly's business, an Irish cowboy builder with very little understanding of the building trade, as opposed to Stubbs who are respectable professionals (who he has told Sybil will be doing the work). The main reason for this deception is that O'Reilly is much cheaper.

Polly and Manuel are left in charge. It seems there are very few guests staying, and Polly uses Manuel as a model for some sketches. She is tired, and therefore tells Manuel that she is going for a 'siesta' (Spanish for little sleep) and instructs him to wake her up when the builders come.

Manuel is left to his own devices, daydreaming and acting that he runs the hotel and one of the quotes he says is "Manuel Towers, How are you? It's nice today..". A delivery man drops off a gnome that Sybil had ordered. Later on, three of O'Reilly's builders turn up, and so after some banter and misunderstanding (referring to the builders as "Orelly men", Manuel's own mispronunciation of "O'Reilly"), Manuel goes to wake Polly up. However she looks so blissful that he cannot bring himself to do so. Basil rings the hotel but Manuel does not recognise him and assumes the voice on the other end is looking for Basil so Manuel berates him as a 'half-wit'. After finally realising that it is in fact Basil on the other end, Manuel drops the phone in horror, Basil then instructs Manuel to call the bearded builder and then say something to him. He says to the builders "Please, which one is man with beard?" Lurphy, the only bearded builder, thinks this over for a bit and then indicates himself, to whom Manuel then says:

“ You are a hideous orangutan ”

Lurphy immediately punches Manuel in the face, as Basil had hoped.

The next morning, Basil arrives to check on the hotel to see if everything is sound. However he finds that the builders have blocked up the wrong doorway and the dining room entrance has disappeared, much to his dismay. In addition, there is now a door in front of the stairs! In a fit of fury, as well as fear at his wife's reaction, Basil threatens first Polly and then Manuel, before phoning O'Reilly and threatening that if he is not at the hotel in twenty minutes, he will "come over there and insert a large garden gnome in [him]".

O'Reilly arrives, and while Basil is telling him to hurry up, Sybil - having forgotten her golf shoes - arrives back earlier than expected. Basil blames the chaos on Stubbs' men. Sybil responds to this by telling Basil that she saw O'Reilly's van outside. Basil explains this by saying O'Reilly has come in to fix up Stubbs' mess. Then Polly calls the front desk telephone from the office, pretending to be Stubbs' secretary, recommending O'Reilly, as Stubbs' men won't be able to come in. But at that instant, Sybil walks in on Polly and the jig is up, as is Sybil's dander. She angrily confronts Basil for hiring O'Reilly and covering up by pretending it was Stubbs' fault when O'Reilly appears and, upon admitting his mistake, tries to joke with her about it. She has no capacity for jokes, unfortunately, and assaults O'Reilly both verbally and physically, just as she had done to Basil, and tells him to get out: "I never want to see you or any of your men in my hotel again."

Sybil calls Stubbs to get him to do the work the next morning. She then storms off, not to return until the next morning. Unwilling to concede that he was wrong to hire O'Reilly, Basil convinces O'Reilly to stay and do the work anyway.

Sybil arrives in the morning to find the renovations have been completed by O'Reilly, apparently with no problems. As Stubbs arrives Sybil confesses her embarrassment at having called on him, now, for nothing. Stubbs looks over the renovations and admits at first that whoever did them did a very good job. Then, in further questioning Basil about them, Stubbs finds out he probably wasn't called in for naught after all; It turns out O'Reilly hadn't used a proper girder for the lintel, such as a RSJ (rolled steel joist) or concrete girder, he'd used a wooden one - on a supporting wall! This means, as Stubbs points out, the supporting wall could give way at any moment, and he will need to repair it immediately, before the building collapses. Basil leaves the hotel immediately, with his garden gnome under his arms, explaining that he is going to see O'Reilly, and then he might go to Canada. The rest is left to the imagination...

[edit] Criticism

David Stubbs has rated The Builders as the weakest Fawlty Towers episode due to its reliance on stereotypes such as "the battleaxe wife, the feckless Irish labourer, and, of course, the dimwitted Spaniard".[1]

[edit] Trivia

  • Basil tells his guests that they must go to "The Gleneagles" for their dinners. This is a reference to the Hotel Gleneagles which Donald Sinclair, the hotel manager on which John Cleese based Basil Fawlty, ran in Torquay, the town where Fawlty Towers is set.
  • George Lee, who plays Bennion the delivery man, also appears as a delivery man in the episode: "Communication Problems".
  • John Cleese named "The Builders" as "the least good" of the Fawlty Towers episodes that were filmed, owing to a general lack of laughter in the studio on recording day. He recalls that members of the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation were visiting the studio that day and many of them were in the front row seats, apparently not entirely amused.
  • When Basil beats Manuel's head against the wall O'Reilly's men have made, it quite visibly moves. Also, while pretending his head is hitting the wall, he can actually be seen kicking it with his foot, which causes the sound.
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