[Only two things can reliably make Silverbelle She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named laugh. One is the spontaneous mayhem on shows like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and the second is Fawlty Towers. And, although she has not articulated it as such, I suspect a major reason for the latter are Sybil Fawlty’s laser-like put-downs of husband Basil. How can someone with a name like “Prunella” not be funny. SB SM]

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The truth about Sybil

Basil didn’t deserve her.

Justin Myers

Nov 05, 2025

It’s been a tough few weeks if you’re the kind of clichéd middle-aged gay man whose role models are ballsy and powerful women who proudly stalked the TV shows of his youth. If Patricia Routledge’s Kitty was my muse when it came to humour, then Prunella Scales’s five-star portrayal of Sybil Fawlty was the benchmark for not taking any crap from anyone, ever. And never leaving the house with flat hair.

Prunella Scales sadly died last month, aged 93, and while you could argue it was what people like to call ‘a good innings’, surely it wasn’t long enough. Only a century or so of the woman who gave us Sybil, and Elizabeth Mapp, and Sarah in After Henry, among many others? Too short a blink in the expanse of the universe, in my opinion.

I don’t know why we get drawn to the people we do, why instant infatuations spark, and reflexive dislikes can immediately raise the guardrails. What could I, as a child, have seen in the long-suffering hotel owner, with a sociopathic husband who needed reining in at last three times an episode, often with a slap to the face?

Maybe it was her gravity defying hair – the wigs only increasing in size as the series wore on. Perhaps it was Sybil’s dazzling array of fussy and frilly outfits – fitted jackets in every colour of the Quality Street wrapper spectrum, over-embellished collars, frills and peplums, waistcoats and bed jackets. Not a minimalist touch or clean line in sight aside from Sybil’s mouth when set in a scar-thin grimace.

Her appeal may have lay in her ability to charm the guests and punish Basil in the same millisecond, or her honking walrus laugh, or her taste for Harold Robbins novels or the cocktail cigarettes she loved to puff on. I don’t know. But she was mesmerising from the off – watching repeats of Fawlty Towers in the 1980s – and any scene without her was all the poorer for her absence.

There was more to Sybil than a decent Halloween costume and her ‘I knoooooooow’ catchphrase. The perceived wisdom is Basil deserves our pity, trapped in a much lower echelon of the class system than he’d like, thwarted at every turn by his ‘little nest of vipers’, his aspirations merely soap bubbles popping one by one as they float to the ground.

But for me, Sybil is the true heroine of the show. Aside from Polly, perhaps, Sybil is the only competent person who ever steps behind the reception desk. As she tries to keep a straight face for the guests, her husband and staff are playing It’s a Knockout on endless mode, on the verge of destroying the business on a daily basis.

Sybil’s only escape is her golf, and chatting to her friend Audrey on the phone. Should she be denied these small pleasures? Didn’t Sybil also dream of more than this? Is she truly happy with her twin-bed marriage in a tacky Torquay hotel?

Even Sybil’s more monstrous habits retain a veneer of cool because Prunella Scales’s portrayal is so honest, solid, and dignified, and never goes over the top. Sitting up in bed in a nightdress that looks like a theatre curtain, smoking a cigarette, rummaging in a box of chocolates, leafing through a magazine, and chatting to Audrey on her landline – all at the same time! Sybil invented multitasking.

Basil may have chucked plenty of barbs her way, often including sincere wishes that she would leave him or die, but Sybil was not just a straight women to a set of chaotic clowns. Among her zingers.

To Basil, as he yet again falls foul of a troublesome guest thanks to his snobbery:
‘You never get it right, do you? You’re either crawling all over them, licking their boots, or spitting poison at them like some benzedrine puff adder.’

In the same episode, on finding Basil hiding in a young female guest’s wardrobe:
‘Do you really imagine, even in your wildest dreams, that a girl like this could possibly be interested in an ageing, brilliantined, stick-insect like you?’

Sybil had her heartaches, and her trials, but we rarely saw them – other in the episode where Basil pretends to forget their anniversary and Sybil sobs in her car to her friend. She bears them with dignity. My favourite Sybil moment, other than the way she barks ‘Basil!’, is a short monologue that offers a rare glimpse into Sybil’s life away from the hotel, delivered while Basil is off-screen, to a guest who is on the phone and not listening to her:

‘Old people are wonderful when they have so much life, aren’t they? Gives us all hope, doesn’t it? My mother on the other hand is a little bit of a trial, really. You know, it’s all right when they have the life force, but Mother… well, she’s got more of the death force really. She’s a worrier. She has these, well, morbid fears they are, really. Vans is one. Rats. Doorknobs. Birds. Heights. Open spaces. Confined spaces. It’s very difficult getting the space right for her really, you know. Footballs. Bicycles. ows. And she’s always on about men following her, I don’t know what she thinks they’re going to do to her. Vomit on her, Basil says.’

Was Sybil annoying? Could her voice, if endured too long, curdle the top of a Black Forest gateau? Yes, of course. Sybil’s allure was heightened by the fact we spent only 12 half-hour episodes with her; a lifetime of her would’ve been another matter altogether. Yet I never rooted for Basil; I wanted Sybil to win, to crush him like a beetle under her patent stiletto.

Sybil wasn’t just a cartoonish battleaxe in bad wigs. She was, for me, the proto-Alexis Carrington. A no-nonsense woman who did not, particularly, need a man. If Sybil walked out of the hotel for ever, Basil would be lost, and very likely end up gambling away the hotel and staggering into an early grave.

Should Basil have decided to take his hook, however, Sybil would’ve thrived. She’d have commissioned esteemed local builder Mr Stubbs to renovate the reception area, sent Manuel on an ESL course, and made Polly head of housekeeping. She’d have hired a young, handsome, gay assistant manager to hold the fort while she went golfing with Audrey, and swapped the twin singles in her cramped boudoir for a water bed, perhaps eventually installing a roll-top bath by the window so she could gaze out and try to find the tiny patch of sea.

She would’ve been active on TripAdvisor. And the wigs would’ve been taller and more lustrous than ever.

If there is one lesson to learn from Sybil Fawlty, it’s that if you want something done right, you must do it yourself. To Prunella Scales, I am forever grateful for providing me with an all-time assertive icon – nobody ever held a phone or wielded an umbrella better.