The Builders

"The Builders" is the second episode in the first series of the BBC TV sitcom Fawlty Towers.

Synopsis

Basil hires Irish builder O'Reilly to do some vital work on the hotel. However, due to the builders' incompetence various disasters occur, and Basil turns to his wife's new garden gnome as a source of violence while wreaking revenge...

Cast

Episode Credited cast:

With:

James Appleby as Mr. Stubbs
Michael Cronin as Mr. Murphy
Barney Dorman as Mr. Kerr
Michael Halsey as Mr. Jones
George Lee as Bennion, a Delivery Man

Plot

Basil tells his resident guests Major Gowen, Miss Tibbs, and Miss Gatsby that they will have to eat at another hotel, as workmen are coming to do work on the hotel. The Fawltys themselves are going away on a rare holiday with Audrey and some other friends. Polly and Manuel therefore are left with the responsibility of taking care of the workmen. Basil tells Polly that the workmen will be from O'Reilly's business, an Irish cowboy builder with very little understanding of the building trade, as opposed to Stubbs who are respectable professionals (who he has told Sybil will be doing the work). The main reason for this deception is that O'Reilly is much cheaper.

Polly and Manuel are left in charge. It seems there are very few guests staying, and Polly, who is studying art at college, uses Manuel as a model for some sketches. She is tired, and therefore tells Manuel that she is going for a 'siesta' (Spanish for little sleep) and instructs him to wake her up when the builders come.

Manuel is left to his own devices, daydreaming and acting that he runs the hotel and one of the quotes he says, in an authoritative tone 'answering' an imaginary phone call, is "Manuel Towers, How are you? Is nice day!" A delivery man drops off a gnome that Sybil had ordered. Later on, three of O'Reilly's builders turn up, and so after some banter and misunderstanding (referring to the builders as "Orelly men", Manuel's own mispronunciation of "O'Reilly"), Manuel goes to wake Polly up. However she looks so blissful that he cannot bring himself to do so. Basil rings the hotel to check up on things, but Manuel does not recognise him and assumes the voice on the other end is looking for Basil, so Manuel berates him as a 'half-wit' for keeping on calling. After hanging up on him several times, Manuel finally realises that it is in fact Basil on the other end, and drops the phone in horror. Basil then instructs Manuel to call the bearded builder and then say something to him. He says to the builders "Please, which one is man with beard?" Murphy, the only bearded builder, thinks this over for a bit and then indicates himself, to whom Manuel - clearly not understanding the words he has been given - then says haltingly:

You are a hideous orangutan

Murphy immediately punches Manuel in the face, as Basil had hoped, obviously aware of the man's short fuse.

The next morning, Basil arrives to check on the hotel to see if everything is sound. However, he finds that the builders have blocked up the wrong doorway and the dining room entrance has disappeared, much to his dismay. Moreover, there is now a door in front of the stairs! In a combination of rage at the shoddy work and fear over his wife's (correctly) anticipated reaction, Basil apoplectically threatens first Polly and then Manuel, before phoning O'Reilly and threatening that if he is not at the hotel in twenty minutes, he will "come over there and insert a large garden gnome in [him]". (Basil had become aware of the gnome after falling headlong over it while manically racing around surveying the damage to the hotel.)

O'Reilly arrives, and while Basil is telling him to hurry up, Sybil - having forgotten her golf shoes - arrives back earlier than expected. Basil blames the chaos on Stubbs's men. Sybil responds to this by telling Basil that she saw O'Reilly's van outside. Basil explains this by saying O'Reilly has come in to fix up Stubbs's mess, "That's why his VAN'S OUTSIDE!!! On a Sunday. That's what I call service." Sybil, to Basil's surprise, actually agrees with him, but thinks since Stubbs made the mess, he should clean it up; "There's no point paying O'Reilly to fix up the mess when Stubbs would have to do it for free." Then Polly calls the front desk telephone from the office pretending to be Stubbs' secretary and recommending O'Reilly, as Stubbs's men won't be able to come in. But at that instant, Sybil walks in on Polly and the jig is up, as is Sybil's dander. She angrily confronts Basil for hiring O'Reilly and vows that she will make him regret it for the rest of his life. Basil continues his attempts to convince her it was "at least partly" Stubbs's fault, but Sybil orders him to stop it with his pitiful lies. Berating herself for her own stupidity at letting Basil oversee the arrangements, Sybil slaps Basil and hurls the cash box across the room at him, him ducking out the way just in time. Sybil continues her rant about O'Reilly's incompetence and continues to give Basil a beating, when O'Reilly merrily appears and, upon admitting his mistakes, tries to joke with her about it. She has no capacity for jokes, unfortunately, and gives O'Reilly a sound beating with an umbrella, and tells him to get out: "I never want to see you or any of your men in my hotel again!!"

Sybil calls Stubbs to get him to do the work the next morning. She then storms off, not to return until the next morning. Unwilling to concede that he was wrong to hire O'Reilly, Basil convinces O'Reilly to stay and do the work anyway.

Sybil arrives in the morning to find the renovations have been completed by O'Reilly, apparently with no problems. As Stubbs arrives Sybil confesses her embarrassment at having called on him, seemingly now for nothing. Stubbs looks over the renovations and admits at first that whoever did them did a very good job. Then, in further questioning Basil about them, Stubbs finds out he probably wasn't called in for naught after all; It turns out O'Reilly hadn't used a proper lintel, such as a RSJ (rolled steel joist) or concrete lintel, he'd used a wooden lintel - on a supporting wall! This means, as Stubbs points out, the supporting wall could give way at any moment, and he will need to repair it immediately, before the building collapses. As Stubbs gets started, Sybil realises that Basil has left and goes outside to see him angrily marching down the driveway with the garden gnome under his arms and tells Sybil that he's going to see O'Reilly (presumably to carry out his previous threat) and adds that, afterwards, he "might go to Canada." The rest is left to the imagination...

Criticism

David Stubbs has rated The Builders as the weakest Fawlty Towers episode due to its reliance on stereotypes such as "the battleaxe wife, the feckless Irish labourer, and, of course, the dimwitted Spaniard".[1] John Cleese himself named "The Builders" as "the least good" of the Fawlty Towers episodes that were filmed, owing to a general lack of laughter in the studio on recording day. He recalls that members of the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation were visiting the studio that day and many of them were in the front row seats, apparently not entirely amused.

Connections and errors

Basil tells his guests that they must go to "The Gleneagles" for their dinners. This is a reference to the Hotel Gleneagles which Donald Sinclair, the hotel manager on which John Cleese based Basil Fawlty, ran in Torquay, the town where Fawlty Towers is set.
When Polly brings O'Reilly a cup of tea and biscuits, the cup is clearly empty.
George Lee, who plays Bennion the delivery man, also appears as a delivery man in the episode: "Communication Problems".
At the end, when the Major talks to Polly, the boom mic shadow is visible
When Basil beats Manuel's head against the wall O'Reilly's men have made, it quite visibly moves. Also, while pretending his head is hitting the wall, he can actually be seen kicking it with his foot, which causes the sound.