In a statement today, announcing the death of Prunella Scales at the age of 93, the actor’s sons, Samuel and Joseph, remarked that their mother was watching Fawlty Towers on the day before she died.

As it happens, my wife and I were also watching Fawlty Towers last weekend – and we were both struck anew by how Scales’s character, Sybil Fawlty, was the engine room of this classic 1970s sitcom – the centre around which John Cleese could embark on his manic clowning as snobbish Torquay hotelier Basil. Sybil, with her selection of wigs and grating laugh (described by Basil as “someone machine-gunning a seal”), was the super-efficient yin to Basil’s chaotic yang.

And while Basil may have physically towered over “my little commandant” (one of his nicer epithets for his wife), he wa

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