FILE - Actress Prunella Scales delivers a petition carrying the signatures of 100 prominent women to 10 Downing Street, London on February 11, 1975. (AP Photo/Robert Dear, File)
The perfect counterpoint to madness
From Surrey to Sybil
Fawlty Towers: The best of Sybil
The long marriage and the short fuse
A serious actress with a comic weapon
The politics of laughter
The final act
There’s a certain kind of Englishwoman immortalised not in marble but in tone — clipped, nasal, and quietly furious. Prunella Scales gave her a name, a laugh, and a husband to torment. For twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers, she was Sybil Fawlty, the queen of the short-tempered, the empress of exasperation, and the most terrifying sound in British television: “Basil!”Her death at 93, after a long and public struggle with dementia, closes the curtain on a generati
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