‘Perfection’: How Prunella Scales’ Sybil Fawlty is one of the best characters in TV comedy | television

pRonella Scales portrayed two of Britain’s greatest monarchs on television: Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. She was the first dramatic actress to play the latter on television, and received a BAFTA Award nomination for doing so.

However, Scales, who has died aged 93, knew that public memory of her would be shaped by another woman. The person who makes these two royals look impotent – the self-proclaimed empress of cottage industry and hospitality, Sybil Fawlty, wife of Basil, owner of Torquay’s worst hotel in Fawlty Towers, who co-stars with John Cleese, who also co-wrote with Connie Booth.

Although she occupied only a few months of work in a seven-decade career that spanned from Lydia Bennet in 1952 in BBC’s Pride and Prejudice to a cameo in ITV’s The Royal (2011), dozens of episodes from the 1975 and 1979 series of Fawlty Towers achieved immortality. They became a model of perfection in sitcom writing and performances, including Skills.

In naming the character, Cleese played on the classical associations of various Sibyls with prophecy, longevity, guarding the gates of Hell, and, above all, striking terror in mortal men. Scales, an accomplished classical theater actor, was particularly effective in the latter, deliberately channeling these legendary women.

Sybil frightened her husband with what might be called the basilisk look. A single word for another character’s name might not seem like the most promising basis for a patriotic slogan, but Scales created one with “Basil!”. All professional Impressionists and many amateurs in bars and bus stations soon had it in their repertoire.

Scales was particularly skilled at the flexibility of her delivery. Sometimes she barked so hard and so fast that the word “basil” sounded like it was just one syllable long. But the drawn-out lyrics like an opera singer gave Sybil her trademark tics: the gossipy, “Oh, I know!”, which would punctuate phone calls to unseen friends. Further proof of her perfect ear came when Basil was given a line about Sybil’s laugh sounding like “someone shooting a seal.” It actually became a demanding stage direction for Scales – which she pulled off effortlessly.

At script meetings these days, there would be concerns about describing Sybil as a misogynist or stereotypical hinky-pecker, and Cleese said the BBC rejected the first script partly on the basis that it depicted a standard marital battlefield.

Indeed, Cleese and Booth’s scripts were part of a trend in television comedies of the era to accord women power and agency by dramatizing their dominance over weak men. Scales’ portrayal won sympathy for Mrs. Fawlty by showing the character’s domineering style to be a plausible response to her husband’s follies and deceptions. There was deliberate physical comedy in the 6ft 5in Cleese cringing at the sound of the 5ft 3in scale.

This stature made it just the right height for Elizabeth II. Her portrayal of the then-current king in A Question of Attribution (BBC One, 1991) – adapted by Alan Bennett from his play in which she had appeared at the National Theater three years earlier – came with multiple degrees of difficulty.

Some conservative radio gentry balked at the idea of ​​depicting a living monarch, something which, outside of similar comedies such as Janet Charles, had long been taboo in English culture. While theater is a more artificial medium, Skills has been playing her part on television alongside appearances by the real Queen on newscasts and the annual Christmas broadcast. Despite this, the scales manage to be a spitting image without ever running the risk of looking like a spitting image.

Although four inches taller than the famous Victoria, Scales captured everything else in the 2003 two-hour documentary drama Searching for Victoria, directed by Louise Osmond, which featured the actress searching her stage show for the queen between fictional interludes.

Scales brought to her screen work a comedic technique mastered in the stage. But television also allowed her to play a choice role that had eluded her on stage: as Marion, a woman who descends into alcoholism through three successive Christmas Eve parties filmed in BBC One’s 1985 seasonal production of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1972 play, Absurd Personal Singular.

Scales appeared on screen with her husband, actor Timothy West, in her last major television contribution, a feature-length Channel 4 excursion called Grand Canal Journeys (2014-2021). The show began happily, with the couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and revisiting their honeymoon locations, but became progressively more poignant as subsequent series were frank about Skills’ diagnosis and progression of dementia, becoming the latest public service in a great career in raising awareness of the condition and its management.

There is no doubt that millions of Britons have heard the word “Basil!” Happiness echoes in their heads today, a tribute to one of the many wonderful creations of an accomplished comedian.