Fawlty Towers: The real life Torquay hotelier who inspired Basil

John Cleese starred in and co-wrote the farce, set around a Torquay hotel, alongside his then-wife and co-star Connie Booth, while Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs also starred.

The legendary show was first broadcast on September 19, 1975, and six episodes aired, with another six being broadcast in 1979.

Read also: Fawlty Towers cast: who starred in original series with John Cleese and Connie Booth, where are they now?

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And, despite enduring talks of a resurrection and a West End stage show being held in its name since 2016, that was that.

Even so, the show is still regularly top of all-time best comedy lists and has a 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Cleese starred as the bad-tempered Basil Fawlty who struggled to keep the hotel running alongside his wife Sybil (Scales), chamber maid Polly (Booth), and chef Manuel (Sachs).

The cynical lead is one of the most-loved and best-known of British TV comedy characters, and was written by Cleese after a real-life encounter at a Torquay hotel.

Fawlty Towers: The real life Torquay hotelier who inspired Basil

Cleese came up with the idea for the character Basil Fawlty when he and the rest of the Monty Python comedy group stayed at Donald Sinclair's Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay.

The writer said he became fascinated with Sinclair's rude behaviour, and he and Booth went on to co-write Fawlty Towers, setting it in a fictional hotel in Torquay.

Sinclair, born in 1909, had been a Royal Navy officer and saw action during the Second World War. He opened the Greenacres with his wife Beatrice and began taking customers in the 1960s, although Sinclair was reportedly reluctant to go into business.

The couple sold the hotel in 1973, two years before Fawlty Towers was first broadcast, and it later became a Best Western-branded hotel - before being demolished in 2015.

Cleese later played a hotelier character called Donald Sinclair in the 2001 film Rat Race, but the family said that the depiction was unfair.

Beatrice told the Telegraph in 2002: "I regard John Cleese as a complete and utter fool. He's held my family up to ridicule and made a lot of money doing it. My husband was no Basil Fawlty. He was a gentleman and a very brave man.

"Certainly Donald was a disciplinarian and he couldn't stand fools. But he was not the neurotic eccentric that John Cleese made him out to be."