You're Right! It was run by an hotelier (described by Cleese as 'wonderfully rude') and his domineering wife.When a guest asked him for the time of the next bus to town, the manager flung the timetable at him and told him to look it up himself. He went on to hurl Eric Idle's briefcase into the street in case it contained a bomb and then complained that American Terry Gilliam's table manners were too American. The producer, Humphrey Barclay, was impressed by the hoteliers and told Cleese: "There's a series in those two." Two years later when Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth were thinking up ideas for a series, the hotel quickly came to mind. The original hotelier was much smaller than his wife so the lanky Cleese had to reverse the sizes in order that he could star as the manic Basil Fawlty alongside Prunella Scales as the formidable Sybil.