YMMV / Fawlty Towers S2E6 "Basil the Rat"

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: You certainly can keep rats as pets (though adopting them from the wild is not recommended). There is also such a thing as a Siberian hamster, but it looks absolutely nothing like a rat... funnily enough, it looks like a hamster.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Manuel gets a pet rat, and when the health inspector comes, Polly tries to explain that "Basil" is a nickname for the hotel's ratatouille.
• Special Effects Failure: Most of the shots of Manuel's pet "filligree Siberian hamster" used a real rat, videotaped separately from the main action and edited in. In a scene where the rat scurries across the floor it's obviously a model pulled by a nylon cord, but the main fx failure occurs in the final scene in which the rat pops its head out of a biscuit tin that Polly is presenting to the health inspector. In this scene the rat is a very unconvincing puppet with a rotating head which is operated from beneath the tin by Connie Booth. In a way the bad sfx only makes the scene all the funnier.

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