I think he actually says “*Surrey *had to get 33”. The match, then, would have been India vs. Surrey rather than a test match (the Oval being Surrey’s home ground, of course). It makes more sense than saying that Gavaskar would have to get 33, and anyway it sounds like the Major is talking about a long time previously.
Having read how precisely Cleese & Booth wrote that show, you’re definitely not over-analyzing it. I can picture the two of them having exactly the above conversation.
I’m thinking of the episode where he tries to surprise his little pit viper on their anniversary. If he hadn’t tried so hard to be clever, to pretend to forget, or just admitted what was happening when their friends showed up, everything would have been fine; maybe not perfectly according to his grand master plan, but not the inevitable catastrophe that followed. If he’d just been willing to pay Terry to stay late and cook for the loudmouthed American and his wife, it would have been okay. Didn’t the guy slip him ten pounds to keep the kitchen open, and he was only gonna pay Terry five? Dude, keep the guests and your chef happy, pocket the extra five pounds for doing nothing, and call it a night.
The things that set Basil off aren’t unforeseeable; it’s just the sort of slight randomness that everybody deals with every day, but Basil’s response is always to make it a hundred times worse.
I watched the first three episodes on Netflix streaming last night. It definitely didn’t make me laugh as much as it did the first time but I got a lot of great belly laughs out of it.
There is one shot in the Wedding Party that truly shows Cleese’s genius. When he comes downstairs to tell Sybil what he has uncovered about the guests and then when she explains the truth, the camera is tight on Basil’s face. His expression changes from triumph to realization to horror over several seconds. It’s so subtle and perfect and hilarious.
That’s kind of the point, though. There are very few famous villainous dramatis personae who are motivated purely by being a dick. Perhaps Milton’s Satan and Shakespeare’s Iago, but I can’t think of any others.
Cleese encountered Donald Sinclair and thought he’d make a great comic character, but the character would have been completely hollow had he not had motivation for his dickish behaviour. It’s the tension between that sense of ‘decency’ - including xenophobia, wistfulness for a world that never really existed, raging snobbery, a heap of prejudices, jealousy, sexual inadequacy, fear of Sybil - and reality that creates the behaviour and thus the fulcrum for the comedy.
Basil does suffer from external circumstance too, but mainly from his own inadequacies. Exaggerated though he is, we are necessarily sympathetic to him as we watch him exacerbate that suffering due to his character quirks, slowly turning mild inconveniences into gigantic train wrecks. Without our guilty empathy, the show would just have been a cartoon, rather than the towering work of genius that it actually is.
Confession: I skim-read your post and thought you wrote “I find him too sympathetic” rather than “I too find him sympathetic” that you actually wrote. Oops.
Sadly, I don’t think it does. India, a national side, wouldn’t play Surrey, a local county side. I wouldn’t stick my neck out and say that it’s never happened - there may have been exhibition matches and so on, but it’s not normal. True, The Oval is Surrey’s home ground, but it’s also one of the venues for most international test series. It’s extremely unlikely to have been ‘Surrey’ in the quote.
National sides play local sides all the time – when they are on tour, they use local sides for practice matches. They are called ‘tour matches’. If you look at the most recent India tour of England (2011), you will see that they played Somerset, Northants, Sussex, Kent and Leicestershire. See here.
