Fawlty Towers (1975)

Basil Fawlty can turn a routine hotel request into a crisis simply by trying to protect his own status. John Cleese's escalating panic, Prunella Scales's devastating calm and the precise placement of every misunderstanding make these twelve episodes a compact lesson in farce. Pick it for comedy that builds pressure until a room seems unable to contain it. Some period material has aged much less well than the comic engineering.