Basil ends up neglecting Mr Walt, who is forced to wait after his bottle of Aloxe-Corton wine proves to be corked.
Returning to the reception desk, Basil welcomes three smartly-dressed businessmen who have witnessed the assault on Hutchinson, and, realising who they must be, screams in terror.
[3] Interior scenes for this episode were recorded on 27 August 1975, in Studio TC8 of the BBC Television Centre, before a live audience.
[5][6] Producer and director John Howard Davies had spent six months persuading the BBC to release audio versions of the series.
Upon release, the record earned a profit of £100,000 and, according to authors Morris Bright and Robert Ross, "remains something of a collector's item".
[5] in 1981, We Are Most Amused, a compilation LP record containing classic comedy moments, was released to raise money for the Prince's Trust.
[2] The episode has been noted as having drawn inspiration from Nikolai Gogol's similarly themed The Government Inspector: "it is clear they derived the inspiration for The Hotel Inspectors, an episode of the classic Fawlty Towers, from the work of a 19th century Ukranian [sic] writer" [7] Comparisons were drawn between Basil's fawning to the suspected hotel inspector, and the township's actions involving a civil servant that they believe to be "a top man".
[8] Morris Bright and Robert Ross similarly praised Cribbins's performance, writing that "his insistence on every imaginable extra, his yearning for a particular 'televisual feast' and his complaints about shoddy treatment in the dining room, provide some of the best moments in the series".
[9] Bright and Ross believe that Cribbins's performance as Mr Hutchinson is the actor's "best remembered small-screen character".
[10] This episode, along with "The Germans" and "Communication Problems", was adapted into a stage play by John Cleese and director Caroline Jay Ranger.