There’s a certain kind of Englishwoman immortalised not in marble but in tone — clipped, nasal, and quietly furious. Prunella Scales gave her a name, a laugh, and a husband to torment. For twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers, she was Sybil Fawlty, the queen of the short-tempered, the empress of exasperation, and the most terrifying sound in British television: “Basil!” Her death at 93, after a long and public struggle with dementia, closes the curtain on a generation of actors who could make repression funny. Sybil’s laughter — shrill, nasal, unstoppable — was the sound of Britain deflating itself, of class pretensions punctured in one long cackle. Scales understood that Basil Fawlty wasn’t a monster; he was an Englishman with delusions of grandeur. But Sybil, played with divine disd

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