When was the last new episode of Yes, Minister broadcast? Maybe 1989 or so? Perhaps it just snuck into the John Major years. Early 1990s?
As it happens, we are just about to celebrate the 10th anniversary. In early 2013, Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, creators of the original show, brought an updated version to the Gold channel. One imagines Sir Humphrey adopting the disingenuous smirk he reserved for Jim Hacker’s more reckless ventures. “That is, if I may say so, a most courageous decision,” the civil servant used to oil. Sure enough, the revived Yes, Prime Minister received indifferent reviews and, as I may have demonstrated above, was quickly forgotten.
That is not why we have asked you here today. This week it emerged that John Cleese was planning disinterment of an even more venerable comic classic. More than 40 years after the second and final series of Fawlty Towers debuted, the former Python is to return as the eponymous hotelier. Reports mentioned the revived version will “explore how the misanthropic Basil navigates the modern world”.
We will soon be awash in belated revivals. As you read this, a new version of Frasier – set to emerge 20 years after the earlier show ended and nearly four decades after the pernickety psychiatrist made his first appearance in Cheers – is shooting for the streaming service Paramount Plus. Frasier is returning to Boston, setting of Cheers, where he will interact with no less a representative of sitcom royalty than Nicholas Lyndhurst.
What the heck is going on? Columns such as this are forever droning on about the new golden age of television. So why this sudden interest in comic necromancy?
Elsewhere on planet comedy, Rob Reiner, an executive producer on the new Fawlty Towers, is plotting a revamp of the (literally it seems) immortal Spinal Tap. The famously dunderheaded rock band reunite for a contractually obliged gig after the death of their cricket-bat wielding manager Ian Faith. Reiner, who directed This Is Spinal Tap in 1984, returns as the oleaginous documentarian Marty Di Bergi.
What the heck is going on? Columns such as this are forever droning on about the new golden age of television. Tony Soprano and Don Draper acted as Leonardo and Michelangelo to the new Renaissance and we have, ever since, been enjoying the rebirth of perspective and the triumph of naturalism. Or whatever. So why this sudden interest in comic necromancy? We shouldn’t let the supposed fecundity of modern telly blind us to the continuing taste for content recycling. There are, at last count, 453 Marvel Shows on Disney+. The highest-profile TV series of the past year have revisited Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. A TV Dune prequel is on its way to HBO Max. Moreover, it is not as if spin-offs are a new phenomenon. Frasier was itself an offshoot of Cheers. A decade before the Boston bar opened for business, Lou Grant emerged healthily from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And on and on back into the mists.
Those were, however, grafts from relatively recent shows. The same market was being exploited. Most of those who were adults when Fawlty Towers was last broadcast will now be of pensionable age. A colleague of mine recently argued that, following the death of James Caan, the only two real-life figures mentioned in the series to be still above ground are stoic cricketer Geoffrey Boycott (82) and geopolitical nabob Henry Kissinger (99). We first met Frasier, now a septuagenarian divorcee, in 1984 as an angsty bachelor with some thatch still on the roof. The combined age of the three core Spinal Tap actors is 229.
It looks as if the projects above exist because the originating talents want them to exist. Everyone involved has had a decent career and deserves a chance to revisit early glories. Grammer is an executive producer of Frasier. The Tap team came up with the new pitch themselves. Cleese dreamt up Fawlty Towers Revisited with his daughter Camilla Cleese.
Good for them. But what’s in it for us? Speculation on the new Fawlty Towers (Warty Towels? Flay Otters?) has inevitably tended to weary consideration of Cleese’s current role as a belligerent in the “War on Woke”. Will there be enough distance between the furious hotelier and the current incarnation of his creator? With the might of Paramount behind it, Frasier 2023 should at least be professional.
But I’m staking all my chips on the new Spinal Tap film. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, the men behind the group, have remained feisty improvisers, and the proposed scenario is calling out to be exploited. Such is the nature of youth culture, Tap were already dealing with alleged redundancy 40 years ago. There is much fun to be had (and some poignancy to be mined) from a group facing up to the perils of genuine old age with cucumbers still down their sprayed-on trousers.
Always travel hopefully. These are most courageous decisions.
