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

3 May 2024, 14:25

The ‘Just Good Friends’ actor made his debut as the Major.

Paul Nicholas has made his return to the stage as the Major in the reboot of the 1975 hit show, Fawlty Towers.

The pin-up who starred in Just Good Friends in the 1980s, was unrecognisable to fans as he launched the 21st century version of Fawlty Towers alongside the show’s creator, John Cleese.

The 79-year-old spoke of taking on the role of the Major from the famous BBC series, now turned returning as a West End show.

“Well, I’m at that stage in my life where Peter Pan is no longer an option,” he joked at the Fawlty Towers – The Play photocall at the Apollo Theatre.

“I’m at the age where these kinds of roles come up – I played Colonel Pickering recently and that’s not dissimilar.”

Nicholas’s comments come after John Cleese revealed it took just him and his then-wife Connie Booth, 20 minutes to think up the concept of Fawlty Towers in the early 1970s.

Cleese, 84, reflected: “I had lunch with Jimmy Gilmore, the BBC director and producer, and said I didn’t want to do any more Monty Pythons.

“I said: ‘I’d like to do something with my wife because we laugh at the same things and she’s a wonderful actress and great at dialogue.’

“He told me to go away and talk to her and said he would commission.”

John Cleese recalls “terrible” American remakes of Fawlty Towers

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

“Connie was in the hotel quite a lot which people forget.”

The hotel in question was the real-life Gleneagles Hotel, run by its incredibly rude owner, Donald Sinclair.

Cleese continued: “So I rang Jimmy Gilmore up and I said: ‘We’d like to set it in a hotel,’ to which he said, ‘Fine’. 

“And that was how the BBC used to work in those days – now it would go through three committees none of whom really would have any idea what they were talking about.”

John Cleese and Connie Booth were married from 1968 to 1978, during which time they wrote and filmed Fawlty Towers.

Cleese played slip-stick hotel owner Basil Fawlty, and his wife Connie played hotel chambermaid, Polly Sherman.

The Monty Python creator has re-written his hit BBC series into a stage show which will launch on Saturday at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Cleese declared: “The stage show is better than it was on television.”