Fawlty Towers play: ’80s heartthrob Paul Nicholas, 79, looks unrecognisable in first…

3 Could 2024, 14:25

The ‘Simply Good Associates’ actor made his debut because the Main.

Paul Nicholas has made his return to the stage because the Main within the reboot of the 1975 hit present, Fawlty Towers.

The pin-up who starred in Simply Good Associates within the Eighties, was unrecognisable to followers as he launched the twenty first century model of Fawlty Towers alongside the present’s creator, John Cleese.

The 79-year-old spoke of taking over the function of the Main from the well-known BBC sequence, now turned returning as a West Finish present.

“Nicely, I’m at that stage in my life the place Peter Pan is not an choice,” he joked on the Fawlty Towers – The Play photocall on the Apollo Theatre.

“I’m on the age the place these sorts of roles come up – I performed Colonel Pickering just lately and that’s not dissimilar.”

Nicholas’s feedback come after John Cleese revealed it took simply him and his then-wife Connie Sales space, 20 minutes to assume up the idea of Fawlty Towers within the early Seventies.

Cleese, 84, mirrored: “I had lunch with Jimmy Gilmore, the BBC director and producer, and mentioned I didn’t need to do any extra Monty Pythons.

“I mentioned: ‘I’d love to do one thing with my spouse as a result of we chuckle on the similar issues and she or he’s an exquisite actress and nice at dialogue.’

“He advised me to go away and speak to her and mentioned he would fee.”

John Cleese remembers “horrible” American remakes of Fawlty Towers

“Connie and I had a chat that lasted about twenty minutes and we agreed we had been going to set it on this resort that we’d stayed in when the Pythons had gone right down to Torquay to shoot for the Monty Python present.

“Connie was within the resort quite a bit which individuals neglect.”

The resort in query was the real-life Gleneagles Resort, run by its extremely impolite proprietor, Donald Sinclair.

Cleese continued: “So I rang Jimmy Gilmore up and I mentioned: ‘We’d wish to set it in a resort,’ to which he mentioned, ‘High quality’. 

“And that was how the BBC used to work in these days – now it might undergo three committees none of whom actually would have any thought what they had been speaking about.”

John Cleese and Connie Sales space had been married from 1968 to 1978, throughout which era they wrote and filmed Fawlty Towers.

Cleese performed slip-stick resort proprietor Basil Fawlty, and his spouse Connie performed resort chambermaid, Polly Sherman.

The Monty Python creator has re-written his hit BBC sequence right into a stage present which is able to launch on Saturday on the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Cleese declared: “The stage present is best than it was on tv.”