RUDE hotel manager Basil Fawlty has become one of TV's legendary characters. What a shame, say fans, that only 12 episodes were ever made of Fawlty Towers as co-writer John Cleese and then wife Connie Booth deciding to quit while they were ahead.

The "missing" Basil Fawlty episode is identified by authors Quentin Falk and Ben Falk in their book Television's Strangest Moments, which shows that Basil might have made a previous TV incarnation.

A bad-mannered hotelier turned up in an episode of ITV's comedy series Doctor At Large, for which Cleese and fellow Monty Python comic Graham Chapman contributed scripts.

He wasn't Basil Fawlty then, but Mr Clifford. The storyline of the episode No Ill Feelings is similar to Fawlty Towers in several ways, including a moment where the lead character pours food over a customer's head, and a know-it-all wife.

The big difference is that Mr Clifford was played by actor Timothy Bateson, not Cleese, who admitted that he based Fawlty on a real life Torquay hotel manager he met while filming the Pythons. Mr Clifford was far less angry than Basil, and played as an altogether more submissive character.

The story goes that after the show was filmed, producer Humphrey Barclay told Cleese that the character was strong enough to hold up an entire programme. He and Booth wrote Fawlty Towers a couple of years later.

The father and son Falk duo have trawled through the TV archives looking for downright odd things that have happened on that box in the corner of the room. Some are funny ha-ha, some are funny peculiar.

Animal lovers can relive chat show host Michael Parkinson's encounter with an unfriendly Emu (egged on by his handler Rod Hull) and the late Richard Whiteley getting bitten by a ferret on Yorkshire's local magazine programme Calendar.

FEW will thank the authors for reminding them of Keith Chegwin presenting a gameshow in the nude. Naked Jungle was shown as part of Naturism Week on five, although the sight of former children's TV presenter Cheggers wearing nothing but a pith helmet had people switching off the length and breadth of the land.

That made singer Janet Jackson's exposure of a breast and pierced nipple during the half-time show at the 2004 Superbowl almost tasteful. This "wardrobe malfunction", seen by an audience of more than 100 million, cost TV company CBS a $550,000 fine. Think how much it would have cost if Jackson had bared both breasts.

The book's publication coincides with the 80th anniversary of inventor John Logie Baird giving his first public demonstration of television in Selfridges store in London.

Early live programmes resulted in all sorts of strange occurences, like the time a nervous actor unleashed a barrage of farts while performing a charade on the fortnightly magazine Kaleidoscope, which ran from 1946 to 1953. Christopher Lee recalled that he and the other actor played the ten-minute scene without once looking at each other.

"And he never stopped farting. It was like 50 rounds rapid. People behind the camera were rolling in agony, but there was nothing they could do to help us," he said.

Wind was a minor problem compared to what happened during a live transmission of the play Underground in 1958. The Armchair Theatre drama was set in a Tube tunnel where survivors of an atom bomb blast had taken shelter. At one point, actor Gareth Jones had to walk along the tunnel, constructed in a studio, towards them.

Peter Bowles recalls seeing Jones coming towards them and then dropping to the ground. He and the other actors began making up lines to cover Jones' absence until the commercial break. Then they were told that he'd fallen and hurt himself, and the show went on. Only later were the cast informed that Jones had suffered a fatal heart attack.

The book reveals that Leonardo DiCaprio might have been bounding along the beach beside David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson in Baywatch, once the most popular show on the planet. The Titanic star was among young actors who auditioned to play lifeguards. "We didn't hire him," admits Hasselhoff.

There was mystery surrounding one of the writers on Frost On Sunday. Ronnie Barker knew the truth about Gerald Wiley - it was his pseudonym. He thought people would treat the sketches differently if they knew he'd written them. Even little Ronnie Corbett, with whom Barker was appearing in the topical news show, didn't know the real identity of Wiley. He even tried to buy some of the material for his stand-up comedy act.

EVENTUALLY rumours began to fly about Wiley and who he really was. Willis Hall, Tom Stoppard and even Noel Coward were considered contenders. To put an end to speculation, Barker wrote, on Wiley notepaper, inviting cast and crew to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. There, he owned up to the deception.

Television's Strangest Moments also reminds us of shows that might have seemed a good idea but, viewed in the cold light of day, were just plain silly. Like Touch The Truck, five's version of a US gameshow called Hands On A Hardbody (I wonder why they changed the title over here?).

A group of contestants tried to win a big car - a truck was obviously beyond the budget - by touching it. The person who kept their hand on it the longest was the winner. Not so much strange as ridiculous.

* Television's Strangest Moments (Robson Books, £8.99)