Brits! Please Help this Yank with Fawlty Towers One-Liner

Cafe Society
1

Basil Fawlty to complaining hotel guests: “There’s nothing I can do to please a pair like you, short of putting straw in the rooms.”

For years, I thought Basil was calling this couple a pair of barnyard animals. But now, I’m reading a book called Craze about London’s Gin Acts of the mid-1700’s. Apparently, there was a ginhouse somewhere once with a sign that read, “Drunk for one pence, Dead drunk for twopence, Clean straw for nothing.”
This was published in a newspaper as something scandalous.

So, was Basil calling the couple barnyard animals, or was he calling them drunken working class trash?

Yours most cordially,

Two Many Cats

2

I don’t recall the actual scene, but I’m pretty sure it would have been barnyard animals. Not many of us British people, even in the 1970s, still remembered the mid-1700s.

3

La la la.