'Fawlty Towers’ is being demolished to make way for retirement homes.

Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, the hotel that inspired the John Cleese's classic television series, ‘Fawlty Towers’, is to be demolished. Cleese, co-writer of the television series, stayed at the hotel in 1971 when he was in the area filming Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

He was amazed at the chilly greeting the team received from their hosts, Donald Sinclair and his wife, Beatrice; treatment that was later immortalised in the television series.

The 41-bedroom hotel closed last year. It will make way for 32 retirement flats on the site.

The Sinclairs tried to distance themselves from the Cleese connection. However, when the hotel was renovated in 2006, the new owners fully embraced the connection.

They ran Fawlty Towers-themed events and attracted a steady stream of fans from across the world who stayed there or posed for pictures outside.

The Gleneagles Hotel merely provided the inspiration for Fawlty Towers. The series was filmed in the Thames Valley and the opening exterior shots are of the Wooburn Grange country club in Buckinghamshire.