WHEN I wanted to interview Connie Booth for a stage production 25 years ago, I was first obliged to write her a letter stating that I wouldn’t ask her about Fawlty Towers.

Face to face, I side-stepped my promise and dared to mention the BBC comedy series that she co-wrote and starred in with John Cleese, the husband she divorced between series.

She was fine about it in the end, didn’t get angry, and said a few words about playing chambermaid Polly. But her reluctance to speak about Fawlty Towers persisted, with overtures for a reunion rejected until now.

She ventured out before the cameras this week with Cleese and the other Fawlty favourites, Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs, to promote two documentaries about the series being shown on digital channel Gold.

Booth, who gave up acting to train as a psychotherapist, had little to say at the launch reuniting the stars for the first time in more than 30 years. She left the talking to Cleese, who took the opportunity to criticise the state of television today, saying broadcasters weren’t investing enough in writing talent.

Not that he earned a fortune for being Basil, being paid £6,000 for writing and performing in an entire series. He and Booth spent as much as four months on each episode.

The two Fawlty Towers series ran for only 12 episodes and nearly didn’t see the light of day after the BBC head of comedy complained that the pilot episode was full of cliched situations and stereotypical characters”. The report added, “I cannot see it being anything other than a disaster”.

He wasn’t the only one unimpressed when the series debuted on BBC2 in 1975.

One critic wrote that the programme was devoid of everything that makes good modern comedy.

Not until the series was repeated on BBC2 did it really took off. After much dithering on the part of the writers, the second and final series of the hotel-set comedy featuring bombastic manager Basil Fawlty was shown in 1979.

But those 12 episodes about insulting German diners, finding rodents in the kitchen and abusing waiters from Barcelona have been shown again and again, as well as being released on video and DVD.

Cleese has no regrets about ending Fawlty Towers. “We both felt we had done our best. We just knew if we did more, it wouldn’t be a good,” he says.

He had an idea for a feature film sequel – in which Basil and wife Sybil go to Spain to visit waiter Manuel – although he never wrote a script.

Cleese doesn’t believe the show would have been made in the current TV climate.

He reckons himself lucky to have been writing comedy in less politically correct times and when bosses weren’t so concerned with money and ratings.

Post-Basil, Cleese had a film hit with A Fish Called Wanda, moved to California and married twice more. Prunella Scales, who played Basil’s bossy wife Sybil, went on to play Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett’s play, A Question Of Attribution, and starred in TV adverts for Tesco.

Andrew Sachs left Manuel behind to play Dr Watson on Radio 4 and become the target of prank phone calls from Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on their Radio 2 show. He arrives in Coronation Street next week, playing newsagent Norris’s brother.

Don’t expect the four to get together to revive the show, which was voted the one programme viewers would most like to see remade in a poll in 2005. “We’re too old and tired now,” says Cleese.

Bearing in mind the dreadful reviews that the resurrected Reggie Perrin series has received, the decision to leave well alone is probably a good one.

Mind you, the dream cast suggested by voters in that poll sounds intriguing, with Newsnight interviewer Jeremy Paxman as rude Basil and newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky as “overdressed and hard as nails” Sybil. Andrew Marr was suggested as Manuel and Fiona Bruce as Polly.

■ Fawlty Towers – Re-opened: tomorrow, Gold, 9pm, followed at 11.05pm by the first episode. Fawlty Exclusive: Basil’s Best Bits is on May 17, at 9pm.