Not much Fawlty about this hotel

'It actually looks more like the set of Eldorado,' bemoans my friend Andy as we pull into the drive of the Hotel Gleneagles in Torquay – a building with a continental, Cubist feel that's painted so white viewing it without sunglasses will see its image seared on your retinas for life. The Gleneagles hotel: very, very white

The Gleneagles – not to be confused with the big posh place in Perthshire – does play a huge part in British television history but it has nothing to do with the early 1990s soap opera that proved anything but 'the golden one' for the BBC when it bombed after just a year. Instead the hotel served as inspiration for one of Britain's best loved sitcoms: Fawlty Towers.

John Cleese and the rest of the Monty Python team stayed here in the 1970s, arriving, the story goes, to find their luggage out in the rain. 'It could be a bomb,' said grumpy owner Donald Sinclair of the alarm clock ticking in one case. 'I will not have a bomb in my hotel.'

Cleese was already taking the notes that gave life to hotelier-from-hell Basil Fawlty. 'He was so wonderfully rude,' the comedian later recalled.


Understandably, the local tourist board spent a long time adopting a 'don't mention Fawlty Towers' policy. And who can blame them for not wanting to draw attention to a series that became synonymous with everything bad about British holidays in the late 1970s?

Over time, that attitude has mellowed and Enjoy England recently released a comedy map of Britain that features Torquay, while holiday firm Superbreak started offering Fawlty Towers entertainment breaks at the hotel – the reason for our being here.
Inside Gleneagles – now part of the Best Western chain – Sue Pine, the bright, breezy, blonde manager ushers us into the lounge which has a distinctly 1920s Art Deco feel, urging us to have a drink while waiting for our rooms to be readied.

A glance at the bar menu soon reveals an awful culture clash: a list of continental paninis with that most English of accompaniments, curly fries, while Peter, the East European barman, could easily be a Noughties Manuel. 'Are you here for the Fawlty Towers break?' he whispers. 'Get very drunk. They are too loud.' The spirit of Sinclair, it seems, remains intact.

Nonetheless, our rooms are clean if unremarkable, despite the hotel having undergone a £4million renovation, and the view may not be of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but it's a pretty spectacular one of a small cove.