Image credit: Faulty Towers The Dining Experience
The most memorable anagrams in the opening titles of Fawlty Towers included Fatty Owls, Watery Fowls and, of course, the legendary Farty Towels.
Faulty Towers never made it onto the misspelled signage outside Torquay's most infamous fictional hotel, maybe because it's a pun rather than an anagram – not that that stopped John Cleese and co from using Flay Otters at the start of one episode.
Faulty Towers is, however, the name of the subtitled Dining Experience that's been tickling the funny bones of West End attendees for more than a decade and which now has a home at the President Hotel in the capital as it also heads up and down the country for a UK tour.
Unfashionably late to the party, I checked in to check it out recently and found it to be an immersively hilarious tribute to the 70s TV show that Cleese himself would surely appreciate.
The "dining" bit is a simple but tasty three-course meal. The "experience" is that the food is served by loose-limbed, short-tempered, politically-incorrect hotelier Basil, his long-suffering and loudly-disapproving wife Sybil and happy, hapless waiter Manuel.
Basil (a spot-on David Tremaine at the performance I attended) rudely ushers folk into the dining room, where Manuel (Andrew Gruen, brilliantly manic) lobs bread rolls at you and Sybil (Jessica Foden, suitably exasperated) rolls her eyes.
Between courses there are skits, like the location of missing dentures in the soup, Manuel misunderstanding his boss's instructions to "wait on table" and doing just that, Sybil attacking her husband with a fish, and lots of ad-libs as the guests are picked upon.
There's a running storyline, drawn from the TV show, about Basil placing a furtive bet on a horse, along with stuff like Manuel's pet hamster and a drunken chef which will be familiar to fans of Fawlty Towers itself.
The setting could be better done; the bare, brightly-lit room doesn't feel remotely 70s and the tables are arranged so that many diners have their backs to the action. And a trick is missed by not including such 70s dishes as prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau on the menu.
But Faulty Towers The Dining Experience is a fun bit of immersive theatre that fills the gap left by Fawlty Towers The Play – a more conventional tribute to arguably the greatest British sitcom of all time, done on stage as a compendium of three episodes from the TV show, which is also heading off on a UK tour later this year after its West End run.
My advice, if it's geographically possible, is to check out both The Dining Experience and Fawlty Towers The Play since they both serve up side-splitting nights out.
Faulty Towers The Dining Experience is at the President Hotel, London, and tours the UK from 19 April.
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