IT inspired one of the world’s most loved sitcoms, Fawlty Towers , but Gleneagles Hotel has been forced to close its doors.

While the exterior shots in the show were of an English hotel in Buckinghamshire, John Cleese based his iconic sitcom, Fawlty Towers, on his stay at Gleneagles, in Torquay, while filming Monty Python in 1970.

If these walls could talk … Torquay Countil was told Gleneagles Hotel ceased trading in January.

Cleese was transfixed by the behaviour of the owner, Donald Sinclair, who he once described as “the rudest man I’ve ever come across in my life.”

Sinclair became the inspiration for Basil Fawlty, while his domineering wife Betty morphed into Sybil Fawlty.

Former waitress Rosemary Harrison told The Telegraph: “Donald Sinclair was inept when it came to doing things around the hotel. Like Basil Fawlty he was not polite to the guests and he shouted at staff. Looking back, it was an extraordinary experience.

“Fawlty Towers was terribly funny. John Cleese exaggerated the character but the basic things are there. He probably wasn’t neurotic but he was just so bad-tempered. It was as if he didn’t want the guests to be there.”

Sitcom gold … Basil Fawlty with hapless waiter Manuel.

Meanwhile, Michael Palin told The Independent: “That man Sinclair ran it like a high-security prison. I remember asking for a wake-up call and his eyebrows went skywards. ‘Why?’ he said. We also had a meal there, and Terry Gilliam (who is American) left his knife and fork at an angle. Sinclair leant over him while Terry was in full flow, put his knife and fork together, and muttered ‘This is how we do it in England’.

“It’s funny now, but it really did seem like the worst hotel in the world. Everything we asked for seemed to be the most unforgivable imposition — in fact Terry Gilliam, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and myself checked out after just one night. But John and Eric Idle stayed, which I couldn’t understand at the time, especially as Sinclair had taken Eric’s suitcase and put it outside, by the gate, apparently because he thought it might contain a bomb.”

Sinclair sold the hotel in the mid-1970s and died soon after. The hotel underwent a major renovation in 2006 and Prunella Scales, who played Sybil Fawlty, walked the red carpet for the grand reopening.

Oceana Hotels, which currently owns Gleneagles Hotel, had hoped to sell the property to

Churchill Retirement Living, with plans to turn the site into 36 retirement homes, but Torquay Council rejected the proposal.

If Oceana fails to find another buyer, it may consider reopening the hotel at Easter.

Kevin Wood, managing director of Oceana Hotels, told The Torquay Herald Express: “We always close it for winter for a varying amount of time, sometimes for a month, sometimes two weeks. It is the slackest period of the year … It is a difficult location to run a hotel being a mainly residential area and we have tried our best.”

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