Speaking Of Star Trek....

[Lord Jim]

Hmmmm... possibly, an Alchemist can make gold out of base metal.

Only if he's Sir Isaac Newton....

[Sean]

Yeah Strop, I know the story he's told about how Fawlty Towers came about...

I also know that Cleese got his start in David Frost's That Was The Week That Was back in the early 60's...

So it seems inconceivable to me that he would have been unaware of an American program from the mid 60's,(when Cleese was a rising star in British Television) as popular as The Bill Dana Show, on American television...

I have no reason to doubt that the Python story is also true, but Cleese had to know about this show...

Maybe he just tucked it away in the back of his head, and forgot about the reference, but there's no way he couldn't have been influenced by it:

the pompous manager of a posh hotel who is constantly at odds with his bumbling Bolivian bellhop,

Come on, that's just too close....

I'm not sure that this show was as popular as you think Jim. I've never heard of it before so I looked it up on IMDB. There are a total of five reviews and if I may quote from some of them:

It might be interesting to release one episode of 'The Bill Dana Show' on home video - mostly for its curiosity value, and to give us a glimpse of Don Adams and Jonathan Harris before their stardom - but this series as a whole was poorly written and unfunny.

The show hasn't been since it was cancelled in 1965. However,repeated episodes of this series ended up on CBN Cable Network(Christian Broadcasting Network)back in the mid-1980's when the network ran all 23 episodes. And it hasn't been seen since.

Pressure from Latino groups got this show canceled which wasn't drawing those good ratings in any event. Jose was not a character capable of sustaining a thirty minute comedy show built around him.

I very much doubt that Cleese (who BTW was not a 'rising star' at that time... he wasn't even on screen!) would be aware of that show. I very much doubt that many people who weren't directly involved in it's production would be aware of that show!

[oldr_n_wsr]

Thanks for the history/biography LordJim. A lot I did not know about Jonathan Harris.
RIP JH.
You gave me entertainment in my youth.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Sean, are you forgetting that Cleese lived in the USA in the early-mid 60s and in 1968 married an American, Connie Booth who co-wrote Fawlty Towers? JC was a scriptwriter for TW3 and did not appear on-screen, as you said, but by '66 he was definitely back in the UK and on-screen in the Frost Report. It is entirely possible that the character of Manuel was Booth's idea, inspired by her familiarity with the show in the USA, melded with Cleese' experience of the Torquay chap.

Fawlty Towers was by no means a "posh" hotel and Manuel was not at all the same kind of character as the Bolivian. He was in fact a rather incidental character, especiallly at the beginning; the focus of the show was Fawlty's eccentricity and his relationship to his wife and Booth.