25. Who are Boycott, Denis Compton and "Dolly"?
From Quiz F-F-F-"Fawlty Towers" - and Beyond!
Answer:
English cricketers
For non-Commonwealth readers, cricket is like baseball in that the aim of the game, depending on which side you're on, is either to try to kill an enemy team member using a bat and ball and then to run like hell, or to break your wrist by holding it in front of a ball travelling fast and accurately enough to punch a hole through a largish asteroid. The difference is that in baseball you see someone run once every few seconds, whereas in cricket it's more like one a week. This explains why at least four cricket games that started not long after the game was first invented in the 14th century are still going on today.
In "Basil the Rat" the Major is reading the newspaper and remarks to the person sitting at the next table "[Geoff] Boycott made the century!" before realising with astonishment that the "person" is in fact the eponymous rat.
When Polly tries to tell Basil in "The Builders" that the devastation wrought by O'Reilly's incompetent workmen on his hotel wasn't Manuel's fault, or her fault, he yells at her: "Whose fault is it then, you cloth-eared bint - Dennis Compton's?" (She tells him what he doesn't want to hear: it was his fault for hiring a nincompoop like O'Reilly in the first place.)
And in "A Touch of Class" the Major refers to "D'Olivera" (according to "The Complete Fawlty Towers" scripts; the correct spelling is D'Oliveira) making the hundred (i.e. a hundred runs), to which Basil replies "Good old Dolly".
This last character is truly interesting. "Dolly" was D'Oliveira's nickname. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but because he was classed as "coloured" under the apartheid laws of his time he couldn't play cricket for his country. In 1960 he emigrated to England. His talent was so evident that by 1966 he was selected for its national team. His performances against Australia, India, Pakistan and the West Indies ranged from solid to spectacular. So he was all set to be selected for the England team to tour South Africa in 1969 - but it was not to be, at least not at first. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) named the touring team, and it didn't include him. The behind-the-scenes machinations involving the Club and both the British and South African governments, including blustering by South African President BJ Vorster, to keep the coloured man out of the apartheid country, as well as betrayals by his supposed friends and colleagues, have subsequently been revealed, and a sorry tale it is. Nevertheless, the furor caused by the incident led in a direct line, through the publicity it engendered and South Africa's subsequent isolation from the sporting world, to the end of the apartheid regime.
A personal note: I well remember a similar furor caused by the touring South African rugby team, the Springboks, in my homeland of New Zealand. The then Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, defended the tour on the grounds that sport and politics shouldn't be mixed (this from the man who defended Cambodia's Pol Pot regime because the North Vietnamese-imposed Hun Sen regime which threw it out and stopped the genocide was illegitimate), but the level of protest, including violent protest, was simply too great, and the tour was cancelled. This was part of the growing sporting isolation of South Africa begun by Dolly's actions. Interestingly, he kept insisting the same as Muldoon: that sport and politics shouldn't mix. What seems to have given his argument such force was that, whatever the theory, it was so obviously wrong in practice, a state of affairs from which he quite blatantly suffered badly.
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