The Builders

"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:

• John Cleese as Basil Fawlty
• Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty
• Andrew Sachs as Manuel
• Connie Booth as Polly Sherman
• Ballard Berkeley as Major Gowen
• Gilly Flower as Miss Abitha Tibbs
• Renee Roberts as Miss Ursula Gatsby
• David Kelly as O'Reilly

With:

• James Appleby as Mr. Stubbs
• Michael Cronin as Mr. Lurphy
• Barney Dorman as Mr. Kerr
• Michael Halsey as Mr. Jones
• George Lee as Bennion, a Delivery Man
• Pat Gorman as Departing Guest (uncredited)

Plot

Basil tells his resident guests Major Gowen, Miss Tibbs, and Miss Gatsby that they will have to have dinner at the Gleneagles hotel, as workmen are coming to do work on the hotel. The Fawltys themselves are going away on a rare holiday with friends. Polly and Manuel are left to deal with the workmen, whose instructions are to block off the drawing room door and build a door leading into the kitchen. Basil tells Polly that the workmen will be O'Reilly's, an Irish cowboy builder with very little understanding of the building trade, as opposed to Sybil's preferred builder Stubbs, who is reliable and competent. The high price for Stubbs' work has prompted Basil to choose O'Reilly for the project.

After the Fawltys depart, Polly goes to her room for a short nap, telling Manuel to wake her as soon as the builders arrive. Manuel enjoys his temporary power, imagining the hotel is his own. During this time, a delivery man arrives to deliver a garden gnome Sybil has ordered, but confuses Manuel into thinking that he wants a room for it. Manuel places the gnome under the desk. The builders enter, but Manuel cannot bring himself to wake the peacefully sleeping Polly. After presenting the workmen with the plans, Manuel receives a call at the front desk from someone he believes to be asking for Basil. After hanging up repeatedly, Manuel realizes Basil is in fact on the line and drops the phone in shock. He then receives instructions from Basil and calls over the "man with beard," (Murphy, the only bearded builder) and then, clearly not understanding what he is saying, says "You are a hideous orangutan." Murphy then punches Manuel's lights out as Basil, who was obviously aware of the man's short fuse, had hoped.

The next morning, Basil arrives to check on the hotel to see if everything is sound. However, he finds that, due to a misunderstanding of the plans, the builders have blocked up the dining room rather than the drawing room, much to his dismay. Moreover, there is now a door in front of the stairs rather than leading into the kitchen. In a combination of rage at the shoddy work and fear over his wife's anticipated reaction, Basil, after tripping over Sybil's gnome, furiously threatens first Polly and then Manuel, before phoning O'Reilly and threatening that if he is not at the hotel in twenty minutes to fix the problem, he will "come over there and insert a large garden gnome in you."

O'Reilly arrives, and while Basil is imploring him to get to work, 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. Sybil, to Basil's surprise, actually agrees with him, but thinks that, since Stubbs made the mess, he should set it right. At that moment, Polly calls the front desk impersonating Stubbs's secretary, but is caught by Sybil almost immediately and the game is up, as is Sybil's dander.

Sybil 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 halt his lies. Berating herself for letting Basil oversee the arrangements, Sybil slaps Basil and hurls the cash box across the room at him. O'Reilly merrily appears and, upon admitting his mistakes, tries to joke about it. He even smiles at her when she's ranting. This sets her off. She has no capacity for a man smiling at her when she's angry unfortunately, and gives O'Reilly a sound beating with an umbrella, and tells him to leave and never return. Sybil calls Stubbs to get him to do the work the next morning. She then storms off, not to return until that time. Unwilling to concede defeat, 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 finds herself in an embarrassing situation 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 the work, Stubbs finds out he was not called in for naught after all; while making a doorway leading into the kitchen, which was on a supporting wall, he had used a wooden lintel for the support frame rather than a concrete one or Rolled Steel Joist. 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, Basil leaves and marches down the driveway with Sybil's garden gnome and calling back to Sybil, in a vengeful tone "I'm going to see Mr. O'Reilly, dear," presumably to make good on his threat to insert said gnome into the builder.

Criticism

David Stubbs has rated The Builders as the weakest Fawlty Towers episode due to its reliance on stereotypes such as the battleaxe wife (indeed, this is the only episode to depict Sybil as a physically abusive and domineering wife), the feckless Irish labourer and 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, Manuel can actually be seen kicking it with his foot, which causes the sound.
• The man who delivers the Garden Gnome to Fawlty Towers asks Manuel where the "Generalissimo" (i.e. his boss) is, to which Manuel (believing that he is talking about Francisco Franco) responds "in Madrid!" This episode aired just less than two months before the death of Franco.
• The grandfather clock in the lobby shows the time to be 6:40 throughout the episode, even though each scene takes place at different times over the course of three days. One explanation for this is that it is broken.