Fawlty Towers Fans Get Chance To 'Live’ In Hotel Inspired By BBC Sitcom

Hotel Gleaneagles/Rex Features

It was the hotel which inspired John Cleese to write the hit comedy Fawlty Towers during a memorable stay with his Monty Python pals back in 1973.

And now fans have the chance to actually live at the Gleneagles in Torquay.

That is, fans who are at least 65-years-old and fancy buying a retirement flat on the site of the legendary hotel which closed in January this year.

John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Connie Booth and Andrew Sachs at a 2009 Fawlty Towers reunion/Rex Features

Churchill Retirement Living have submitted plans to turn the hotel into 33 properties, according to local paper the Torquay Herald Express.

Developers hope to build one and two bedroom retirement housing amid landscaped grounds.

Hotel Gleneagles became famous in Torquay and around the world after Cleese and co-writer Connie Booth used it as inspiration for the show.

Fawlty Towers ran for two series and followed inept, rude and accident prone Basil Fawlty’s attempts to run a hotel alongside wife Sybil (Prunella Scales) Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs) and chambermaid Polly (Booth).

Plans for the retirement flats/SWNS

Hotel Gleneagles/SWNS

Cleese described Gleneagles’ then-owner Donald Sinclair as “the most marvellously rude man I’ve ever met” after he criticised Python star Terry Gilliam for his table manners and threw Eric Idle’s briefcase behind a garden wall after mistakenly concluding that it contained a bomb.

“I do remember all the other Pythons left but Connie Booth and I were lazy,” recalled Cleese of his time at the hotel. “We stayed on and didn’t realise we were accumulating material. As a hotelier [Sinclair] was astonishingly rude.“

The news comes as the hit British sitcom celebrates the 40th anniversary of its first ever episode this year.

Hotel Gleneagles/SWNS