Out of Waldorfs

Cue angry American, who has bribed Basil to keep the kitchen open while he ‘freshens up’. He arrives in the dining room and demands two Waldorf salads and two rare steaks. In any decent hotel dining room in the US forty years ago, that might have been a reasonable request. But part of the appeal of that particular episode of Fawlty Towers is that the vast majority of the British audience would have had as little an idea of what a Waldorf salad was as Basil Fawlty himself. A country still resentful of its debt to its ally was as happy then to see an American discomfited as were those of us who stayed up late to watch and cheer the result of the Ryder Cup.