How many Should’ve gone to Specsavers scenes can ad creatives come up with? The Specsavers in-house team came up with a Basil Fawlty idea. The voice control on Basil’s car keeps telling him he is trying to start the car incorrectly. That infuriates him, so he finds a brand and thrashes the car bonnet to “teach it a lesson”. Except he has not come back to his his car. He is thrashing the police car parked just ahead of his.

John Cleese liked the idea. That isn’t how John Cleese ideas usually play out – “A lot of people have sent me Fawlty Towers scripts, or Basil scripts, and they were always absolutely awful,” Cleese stated in the behind the scenes video. “But these people had an idea, and I have to say—I’ve met them, they’re all very nice—and within twenty minutes we’d written the script.”

“There’s a bit of Basil in most people, if they’re sufficiently stressed,” he added.

The spot was inspired by this Fawlty Towers scene:

The show ended in 2009 and Cleese has done a number of commercials since, including a campaign for Bankwest in Australia in 2014, for which this was the launch TVC:

He has only done one other ad, though, that referenced Fawlty Towers – McCann’s Faulty Showers for AA Home Emergency Response in the UK.

Credits:
Creative agency: Specsavers Creative
Creative director: Graham Daldry
Creative team: Graham Daldry, Simon Bougourd, Neil Brush & John Cleese
Agency producer: Sam Lock
Production company: Blink
Director: Tim Bullock
Production company producer: Ewen Brown
Post production: MPC
Editor: Mark Burnett @ Whitehouse Post