John Howard Davies’s comedy direction gives performers room without letting a scene drift. We rate his work on Fawlty Towers especially highly: the situations stay clear, the supporting players matter, and the embarrassment has time to grow.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the people around John Cleese in Fawlty Towers (1975): they have time to register annoyance or embarrassment while he holds our attention. John Howard Davies directed the first series, and our admiration begins with that care for the whole cast. We can follow the situation, which makes the prospect of Basil interfering with it funnier and more alarming. The writing by Cleese and Connie Booth is precise, and Davies gives the performers room to make it work.
Davies’s wider contribution to comedy came through producing as well as directing. He produced and directed the first four episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969), and defended the programme within the BBC. He also produced the whole run of The Good Life (1975–78), while his later work at Thames Television included producing Mr. Bean (1990). That is a substantial contribution to television comedy, but a producer’s credit cannot tell us who made an individual joke work. Fawlty Towers gives us firmer grounds for judging his handling of performers.
Davies shares the directing credit on the programme with Bob Spiers, and the finished comedy also depends on the cutting. Editors Susan Imrie, Bob Rymer and Bill Harris preserve the little waits before reactions, giving the staging time to pay off. Davies also contributed the changing hotel sign, a small visual joke that shows an interest in more than the spoken line. The cutting does not hustle everyone towards a punchline, so embarrassment can register before the next line arrives.
We sometimes wished a joke would stop earlier in Fawlty Towers, because the treatment of Andrew Sachs’s Manuel made us uncomfortable. The supporting cast’s precision does not make that discomfort disappear. Some performers described Davies’s directing style as strict or schoolmasterly, a useful caution against assuming that well-timed comedy must have been carefree to make. Start with the first series, and watch how much the people around Basil contribute before they say a word.
Biography
John Howard Davies (1939–2011) was a British television director and producer. As a child actor he played the title role in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948). He joined the BBC as a production assistant in the mid-1960s, becoming a producer in 1968, and specialised in comedy programming.
Davies directed and produced the first series of Fawlty Towers (1975) and directed the first four episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969). He produced the full run of The Good Life (1975–1978) and worked on Mr. Bean (1990). He was the BBC's Head of Comedy from 1977 to 1982 and later head of Light Entertainment, before moving to Thames Television.
