Basil Fawlty

Basil Fawlty runs a small hotel in Torquay with his wife Sybil, and runs it badly. He wants respectability, wealthy guests, and total control, but gets none of them. Snobbish, seething, and hopeless at hiding his contempt for the people he's supposed to serve, he greets every crisis with barely contained fury and a desperate, doomed politeness.

Cleese builds Basil from pure contradiction: a man who craves order but generates chaos everywhere he goes, whose body seems permanently one insult away from breaking into a furious, gangling assault on the furniture. The writing traps him beautifully, each episode a tightening vice of his own snobbery and bad luck, and his rage becomes the funniest thing on television.