'I know nothing!' Manuel's most farcical moments in Fawlty Towers

Manuel the receptionist

There are more laughs in these 90 seconds than many sitcoms manage in an entire episode. “Where are your ears, you great big halfwit?” asks Manuel, left in charge. He has clearly learned from his boss – and is now answering the phone with a rudeness to rival Basil’s. Then, of course, it turns out to be Basil on the phone. Unable to actually beat Manuel in person as punishment, Basil manages to manoeuvre things so that the builder – “You are a hideous orangutan” – punches Manuel in the face. It’s pure slapstick: cruel and hilarious.

Basil the rat

Manuel’s loneliness in the permanently grey Torquay drives him to acquire a pet rat, resulting in perhaps the greatest scenes of farce Fawlty Towers ever conjured up. Andrew Sachs’ delighted greeting of his new friend, clapping his hands together and trilling “Ba-seel!”, is the trigger for a hotel-wide rat hunt, around a plummy young couple and towards the cheese biscuits. Manuel’s sheer terror as the farce climaxes – “you put Basil in the ratatouille!” – is a masterpiece of double meaning.

“I know nothing!”

While Manuel was subjected to occasional lapses into casual 1970s xenophobia (“you dago dodo!”), the cultural rift between him and the Brits around him was full of comic potential – particularly his terrible language skills, a simple and sublime foil for Basil Fawlty’s rising blood pressure. As Basil tries to keep his betting on the down-low from Sybil, it’s up to him to explain to Manuel that he must pretend not to know about it. Of course, Manuel’s poor English and man-child innocence mean the scheme is doomed to fail.

The talking moose

This clip really belongs to the Major (Ballard Berkeley), and is all about the terrific double-take he does upon hearing what he believes to be a moose talking, but is actually an English actor playing a Spanish waiter attempting his version of received pronunciation (“I can speak English, I learned it from a booook”). Once again, Manuel’s blithe innocence is the bass note around which the entire comic riff is built.

“Breakfast kaput!”

One of the neatest jokes in Fawlty Towers is how Basil’s constant abuse of Manuel always comes back to haunt him. Manuel is quite literally a cowed figure – never walking so much as retreating – and in his desperation to please he becomes hopelessly rigid in following the rules. In this scene, his dogmatic adherence to breakfast hours reduces an upstanding guest to barking “I’m a doctor and I want my sausages!” in a matter of seconds. Basil, of course, is left sweaty and defeated.