"The Wedding Party"  (3^rd October 1975)

A family attending a local wedding stay at the hotel, but Basil gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks they’ve come for an orgy………

The Wedding Party provides a showcase for Basil’s psychological problems, in particular his attitude towards sex. It’s also a great example of high farce, with lots of running about between bedrooms, slamming of doors and rushing up and down stairs. It’s a beautifully crafted episode with every small detail being significant to the plot, and with several sub-plots running parallel to each other to make up the episode as a whole. Sybil’s laugh also debuts in The Wedding Party to great (or should I say grate?) effect, both in the bar as she’s hob-nobbing with a guest and later on when she and Basil are in bed and we just hear the trademark forced intake of breath rather than the laugh itself.

There aren’t any toffs or members of the gentry in this episode as such, but Basil does seem to put Mrs Peignoir (a cultured guest who actually seems to like Basil) on a pedestal and treat her with the utmost respect and, dare I say it, even admiration, and I can only assume that this is because she’s French and so has some sort of automatic right to be treated civilly in his mind. Of course, a blatant bit of fawning doesn’t go amiss when he realises that she shares his love of Chopin.

In a similar vein, there aren’t any obvious examples of ‘the common people’ to receive Basil’s usual disparaging remarks, but he immediately picks on the Lloyd family purely because they’re normal people enjoying themselves, something which is totally alien to him.

Other than in the later episode The Psychiatrist which we’ll look at in due course, The Wedding Party is the most obvious example of Basil’s attitude towards sex. He demonstrates his entire spectrum of reaction in this episode, from jealousy and disgust through to ignorance and fear. His reaction to the flirtatious behaviour of the young couple (Alan and Jean) the moment they walk into the hotel is immediate, and is acute to the point where he blatantly lies to them by claiming that all the double rooms are booked when he realises that they’re not married. He even goes as far as to claim that what they’re proposing is ‘against the law of England’, whatever the hell that is, but as usual Sybil foils his scheme by taking over the booking half way through and telling them that they do in fact have a free double room. This immediately puts Basil’s back up, and he subsequently goes out of his way to make the guests feel as uncomfortable as possible. The situation worsens when Alan asks Basil if there’s a local chemist shop still open as he wants some batteries, and Basil’s already wandering mind interprets in a less than wholesome manner. When Alan eventually explains that the batteries are for his electric shaver, Basil makes a futile comeback by claiming that his accusation of disgusting behaviour was at the fact that Alan hadn’t shaved. Very convincing. With Mrs Peignoir, Basil’s scared stiff of her drunken amorous advances (probably because he’s forgotten how to react to that sort of thing), but I think he’s secretly rather flattered.

Basil’s misinterpretation of almost everything and everybody in this episode is tightly intertwined with his problems about sex. The only reason he gets the wrong end of the stick about things is that he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and overhear various things which would otherwise be totally innocent but which he pieces together to form what he believes to be hard evidence of some serious swinging between guests (and Polly), be it known to them all or otherwise.

As mentioned in my overview of The Wedding Party, this is a well-crafted episode, particularly the fact that Basil is found in compromising positions with various guests and staff members, but is only witnessed by members of the Lloyd family.

The wonderful scene where Basil’s locked himself in the bedroom and he’s telling Mrs Peignoir on the other side of the door to stop pestering him is a joy to behold. Eventually, of course, he tells her to go away because his wife has just returned unexpectedly but we know that it is actually Sybil who’s standing in the hallway, and his eventual ‘Oh my God - what a terrible dream!’ excuse to Sybil when he eventually let’s her in gets a deserved round of applause from the studio audience.

Basil also shows his talent for improvisation when he swiftly guides Mrs Lloyd into another bedroom across the hall in order to delay her from reaching her own bedroom where he assumes her husband is engaged in some rumpy-pumpy with Polly. Once he’s secured her in the room, he realises that he’s now actually got to think of a suitable reason for taking her in there in the first place, so he fairly unconvincingly apologises for the original room not being up to standard and this new one being much better. Of course this is lost on her, and when she eventually reaches her own room she says to her husband in wonderfully confused tones, "This room is exactly the same as the one we just left!" John Cleese produces some wonderfully contorted facial expressions as he realises (wrongly, of course) that the latest arrivals are using his hotel as ‘Basil Fawlty Knocking Shops’.

John Cleese is particularly on form in The Wedding Party. There are a couple of great scenes in which he has to deliver a solo speech of some length at breakneck speed whilst the rest of the cast look on in amazement (and probably from an actor’s point of view, admiration).

The very last scene in The Wedding Party features John Cleese hitting Manuel over the head with a frying pan. Whilst in rehearsals Cleese had ensured that he only gave Andrew Sachs a glancing blow with the pan, in the actual recording Sachs straightened up at the wrong moment and received a full-on clout.