Hotel Gleneagles

The Hotel Gleneagles in Torquay is famous – perhaps for all the wrong reasons! It was the place that the Monty Python team chose to stay at in 1971 whilst filming in the local area.  After just one night, however, they booked out again after being made to feel, in Michael Palin’s words, that they were ‘a colossal inconvenience’. Short as the stay understandably was, its legacy has been huge.  John Cleese and Connie Booth turned the hotel and its famously bad-tempered manager into Fawlty Towers and Basil – creating one of the funniest comedies ever to have been broadcast and, by association, turning the Hotel Gleneagles into something of a laughing stock. 

When new owners decided to capitalise on that rather dubious celebrity by undertaking a one million pound refurbishment programme and inviting actress Prunella Scales (Mrs Fawlty) to open it as a boutique hotel, they asked us to help draw up invitation lists and arrange the launch. The result was crowds lining the streets to welcome the redoubtable ‘Sybil’ and international press crews from as far afield as Australia. We even managed to secure a live radio broadcast from Joan Rivers in America. Bookings for the hotel shot up in the months after the event and Gleneagles continues to do well today.

www.hotel-gleneagles.com