Window

Out to catch the 11:33am from Wimbledon Chase through to London St Pancras and then a walk to the President Hotel at Russell Square for The Faulty Towers The Dining Experience.  Mum and Dad bought this for my birthday and today is the day we were treated to a 3 course meal that was served in a hotel dining room staffed by Basil, Sybil and Manuel.  It’s an immersive comedy show that’s very much based on the TV series and even includes references to many of the famous sketches but it is also improvised around the diners who attend. 

PY had read reviews online and so we arrived early and bought some wine in the hotel bar in advance. This way we could take it into the restaurant and avoid the queues in the area where we had to register and wait for the show to begin. We managed to grab a couple of seats up against the restaurant so were some of the first people to see Manuel as he came to clear the tables and Basil as he seated us.

The whole experience is very well done. It’s communal dining and we were sat with a group that was quite quiet at a table that was not the main focus of attention - which was a relief because the show requires a lot of audience participation. My main task was to avoid the bread rolls that Manuel was throwing around just before the soup course. In some ways it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it might be bit less integrated into the real dining experience and I thought the comedy - being based on something that’s quite dated now - might be a bit too familiar and even a bit cringeworthy. But, it’s none of those things although there is, intentionally, a bit of a dated feel to the jokes (Sybil tells Basil to be nice to the vegetarians because, after all, “it’s an illness” which is something I can imagine being said in 1975).

After dining we took a bus to Whitehall so we could walk to a place near St James’ park where PY wanted to start running through the plans he has for a wine walk. For the next hour or so we walked around Westminster looking a places connected to the wine and making sure that they could fit into the tale he has to tell.

One of stops was outside Berry Brothers and Rudd, Britain's oldest wine and spirit merchant, who have been trading from the same shop since 1698. I thought the window was quite evocative of old London shops. It reminded me of something from Dickens. 

I gave my feedback over a glass of wine at Rockwell, a lounge bar inside the Trafalgar Hotel at Trafalgar Square. I hope it was received well because I think this could be a great thing for him to do but it needs a bit if tightening up and better linking between locations. The content itself is quite fascinating.