“Faulty? What’s Wrong with Him?”

You know those famous old misquotes, don’t you?

“Beam me up Scotty” was never said in original Star Trek. “Play it again, Sam” was never said in Casablanca. Or how about my least favourite example: “Don’t tell him your name, Pike” is not the actual line in Dad’s Army. A sentence which is so lacking in comic rhythm that I could punch somebody… so obviously, it had to be plastered in large letters inside the audience foyer of New Broadcasting House.¹

This article is about another misquote. But unusually, it’s about a very recent misquote. One which we can see spreading before our very eyes.

So let’s take a look at this article in the Metro on the best Basil Fawlty lines in Fawlty Towers, published February 2018. I have to be honest: it is not an especially good article. I don’t plan to eviscerate it; I will leave that fun as an exercise for the reader, if you so desire.² I merely want to point you all towards the very first quote that the article gives as an example of Basil at his best:

“For someone called Manuel, you’re looking terribly ill…”

Here’s the thing. That line doesn’t appear in any of the 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.

Believe me. Not only do I know the show backwards, but somebody even kindly checked the subtitle files for me. Nothing like this line occurs anywhere in the programme.

The closest is this, from “The Anniversary”:

ROGER: Did you hear that? I said “Syb-ill.”
BASIL: Yes?
ROGER: Got it?³
BASIL: No, no, no, I’m fine.
ROGER: No, no, no. Well, I call her… I call her “Syb,” right? So “Syb – ill.” “Bas – well.”
MANUEL: “MAN – well!”

Which really isn’t close enough to be a mangled version of the gag.

For the record, I contacted the author of the piece to ask him where the quote came from. Unfortunately – although perhaps predictably – he didn’t reply. So, I had a quick search elsewhere online, to see if I could find any clues as to where the misquote came from.

Examples didn’t take long to find. The first one I came across was this piece on the frankly execrable WhatCulture, “10 Most Quotable British TV Shows”:

“Most interesting though is how Cleese and co based the character of Basil Fawlty on an actual hotel owner named Donald Sinclair, who the Monty Python cast once met while staying in Devon. It’s even rumoured that some of the famous quotes from the show do actually originate from Sinclair himself. It makes you wonder if such quotes from Basil as “You snobs. You stupid stuck-up, toffee-nosed, half-witted, upper-class piles of pus” and “For someone called Manuel, you’re looking terribly ill” are scripted or real?”

This was posted in August 2020 – two and half years after the Metro piece. I suspect it is highly likely that it was just copied from the Metro. Not only does said Metro article also include the “piles of pus” quote, but it includes it with exactly the same punctuation. A literal cut-and-paste job.

So where else can we find the misquote? It also appears on the Shotley Peninsula section of a site called the Nub News, in this edition of the “Breakfast Briefing”, published September 2020. Slightly bizarrely, it takes the form of a “Joke of the day”, but as most of the rest of the briefing is Fawlty Towers-themed, I think we can assume it’s meant to be a quote from the show. I would also put money on this being taken from the Metro piece; the “herds of wildebeest” section is also quoted as per the Metro, again with identical punctuation.⁴

We also have the slightly unlikely example of Issue 103 of The Bribie Islander, a local classifieds magazine in Australia. Luckily, the entire issue is available online. Flick to page 24, and we have a review of the “Faulty Towers Interactive Dining Experience”:

“The costumes and makeup used by Rob, Amy and Andy were superb – they really looked and sounded like the Fawlty characters. At times, Andy really fitted Basil’s description – “For someone called Manuel, you’re looking terribly ill…”

Unlike the above examples, there are no other telltale links to the Metro article. I’d merely point out that this was published in December 2019… nearly two years after the Metro piece.

Finally, we have a couple of oddities. Firstly is this result for a site I am not going to link to:

This is yer bog-standard scum SEO spam site, with Fawlty Towers stuff scraped randomly from elsewhere online… including the Metro.

More interesting is this result:

After some redirecting, this leads us to a thread about an ebook for the Fawlty Towers scriptbook. Bizarrely, that page does not contain the rogue line itself, despite Google telling us it does. This could very well lead us down a rabbit hole in thinking the rogue quote we’re searching for never made it into the episodes, but did appear in the scriptbook – but I believe this is incorrect.

Take a look at the other line mentioned in that Google summary: “JOHN CLEESE looked pleased to meet the cast of his show Fawlty Towers: Live ahead of this month’s… That quote doesn’t appear on the forum page either, and is actually a quote from this story on The Sun’s website. This looks to me like a simple corruption of Google’s database, rather than anything useful.

Which means we’re back to square one. And having run out of Google searches, at this point I was at a bit of a loss. I had my suspicions, but no proof. But there was one other place left to try: Twitter.

Because back in September, John Cleese asked everybody a question:

45 years later and I still haven't hung up the picture. Fawlty Towers premiered on this day in 1975. What was your favourite line? pic.twitter.com/LobwR6LXjo

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) September 19, 2020

And he got some rather interesting replies:

HMMMMMM.

I am afraid, dear reader, I now had to do possibly the most irritating thing I have ever done while researching things for this site. Telling people who have just quoted their favourite line from Fawlty Towers at John Cleese that it isn’t actually in the show – and worse, asking them where they actually heard it – was not an appealing prospect. And sure enough, most of them just ignored me. I can’t really blame them.

But one person privately replied. And without any hinting from my side, they revealed that the place where they’d read the quote was… oh, a certain little article in the Metro. They even gave me the link to it and everything.

So at this point, I’m calling it. Every single mention of this line elsewhere online has been after February 2018. There have been enough hints that other publications grabbed the quote from the Metro article. And somebody who used the line on Twitter confirmed the same. I think every single instance of this online originally comes from somebody reading the Metro. And worse still, the misquote seems to be gaining popularity online, not fading away.

I want to stamp down on it now. The line “For someone called Manuel, you’re looking terribly ill…” never, ever appeared in Fawlty Towers. Tell your friends and family. This is important, dammit.

And as for how the writer of the piece got it wrong in the first place, who can say? Certainly they’re not, as my email remains resolutely unanswered. I suppose I could check the article again for some hints. I wonder what they think the next brilliant line from Basil was?

“Ze Germans! Ze Germans!”

That line doesn’t appear in a-… you know what, forget it.

With thanks to Tanya Jones, Darrell Maclaine-Jones, Richard Latto, Mike Scott, and Jonathan Sloman. Yes, I really do need that many people helping me in order to stop me publishing something stupid.

UPDATE (3/12/20): Well, one more piece of the puzzle has slid into place. Many thanks to Anne Matthews, the writer of The Bribie Islander piece mentioned above, for confirming that it was indeed the Metro article that she took the quote came from. This is of course what I suspected, but the confirmation is very welcome.

While we’re at it, Anne also had the following to say:

“You might be interested to know that the ‘Faulty Towers’ interactive theatre show was a wonderful success and we raised A$2,200 for Rotary’s End Polio campaign. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation then matched our contribution by $2 for every dollar raised which made our contribution A$6,600 and allowed 7,300 children to be vaccinated.”

Even I have to admit that this is slightly more useful work than tracking down a stupid Fawlty Towers misquote. You can read more about Rotary’s End Polio campaign here, and I’ll certainly be sending a donation as a thanks to Anne for indulging me in this silly quest.

As for the silly quest itself, we now have every single source pointing back towards the Metro piece, which is in many ways rather pleasing. To have nailed down how this quote spread across the net is worthwhile in itself. Of course, there’s still the lingering question of exactly where the Metro journalist got it from in the first place, so the story remains troublingly incomplete. But without a reply, the only other option is Roger Cook tactics, and even I think that’s going a little far.

Probably.

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1. For more of the same see this TV Tropes entry – with the usual health warning that TV Tropes requires. ↩

2. “Irish man” is a good place to start, though. ↩

3. This is Roger’s line, according to the The Complete Fawlty Towers scriptbook. The subtitles give it as “Have you got it?” I think it sounds more like “Well, d’you got it?” None of this matters, except misquoting Roger’s line here considering the nature of this article is liable to give me fleas. ↩

4. You can also read exactly the same for Felixstowe but with different shop opening times, if you wand to ponder the myth of truly local news in 2020. ↩

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