Prunella Scales portrayed two of Britain’s greatest monarchs on TV: Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. She was the first dramatic actor to play the latter on television, and won a Bafta nomination for doing so.
However, Scales, who has died aged 93, knew that public memory of her would be shaped by another woman. One who made those two royals look powerless – the self-declared domestic and hospitality industry empress, Sybil Fawlty, wife of Basil, owner of the worst hotel in Torquay in Fawlty Towers, in which she co-starred with John Cleese, who also co-wrote with Connie Booth.
Though occupying only a few months of work in a seven-decade career that stretched from Lydia Bennet in a 1952 BBC Pride and Prejudice to a cameo in ITV’s The Royal (2011), the dozen episodes of the 1975 and 1979 series of Fawlty Towers have achieved rerun immortality. They have become a template for perfection in sitcom writing and performances, including Scales’s.
In naming the character, Cleese brought into play the classical associations of various Sybils with prophecy, longevity, guarding the gates of hell and, above all, inducing terror in mortal men. Especially effective at the last of these, Scales, an accomplished classical stage actor, knowingly channelled these mythical women.
Sybil cowed her husband with what might be called a Basilisk stare. The single word of another character’s name might not seem the most promising basis for a national catchphrase, but Scales created one from “Basil!”. All professional impressionists and many amateur ones at pubs and bus stops soon had it in their repertoire.
Scales was especially skilful in the elasticity of her delivery. Sometimes she barked so hard and fast that “Basil” seemed to have only one syllable. But elongating words like an opera singer gave Sybil another of her signature tics: the gossipy, “Oh, I knoooooow!”, that would punctuate phone calls to unseen friends. Further evidence of her perfect ear came when Basil was given a line about Sybil’s laugh sounding like “someone machine-gunning a seal.” It de facto became a demanding stage direction for Scales – which she pulled off effortlessly.
At script meetings these days, there would be concerns about the characterisation of Sybil being misogynistic or a stereotypical henpecker, and Cleese has said that the first script was rejected by the BBC partly on the grounds that it depicted a standard marital battleground.
In fact, the Cleese and Booth scripts were part of a trend in TV comedy of that era to give women strength and agency by dramatising their dominance over feckless men. Scales’s portrayal won sympathy for Mrs Fawlty by showing the character’s imperious manner to be a reasonable response to the snivelling idiocies and deceits of her husband. There was deliberate physical comedy in the 6ft 5in Cleese shrivelling at the voice of the 5ft 3in Scales.
That stature made her exactly the right height for Elizabeth II. Her portrayal of the then current monarch in A Question of Attribution (BBC One, 1991) – adapted by Alan Bennett from his stage play in which she had appeared at the National Theatre three years earlier – came with multiple degrees of difficulty.
Some conservative broadcasting grandees balked at the thought of dramatising a living monarch, which, outside of comedy lookalikes such as Jeanette Charles, had long been a taboo in English culture. And whereas theatre is a more artificial medium, Scales was playing her on TV alongside appearances of the real Queen on news bulletins and the annual Christmas Day broadcast. Scales, though, managed to be a spitting image without ever risking seeming like Spitting Image.
Though four inches taller than the famously diminutive Victoria, Scales captured everything else in the 2003 two-hour drama-documentary Looking for Victoria, directed by Louise Osmond, in which the actor was shown researching her stage show about the monarch between fictional interludes.
Scales brought to her screen work comic technique perfected in theatre. But TV also allowed her to play a choice part that had eluded her on stage: as Marion, a woman descending into alcoholism across the three successive Christmas Eve parties depicted in the 1985 BBC One seasonal treat production of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1972 play, Absurd Personal Singular.
Scales appeared on screen with her husband, the actor Timothy West, in her last substantial TV contribution, a long-running Channel 4 travelogue, Great Canal Journeys (2014-21). The show began happily, with the couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and revisiting honeymoon sites, but became progressively more poignant as subsequent series were candid about the diagnosis and progress of Scales’s dementia, becoming the last public service of a great career in raising awareness of the condition and its management.
Millions of Britons will have heard the word “Basil!” echoing happily in their heads today, a tribute to one of many great creations of a consummate comedy performer.
