John Cleese is to oversee a stage adaptation of Fawlty Towers, his classic hit TV comedy.

Fawlty Towers - Live on Stage, which will be based on the characters and scripts devised by Cleese and Connie Booth for the 1975 to 1979 BBC sitcom, will tour Australia and New Zealand next year.

Cleese won't appear as Basil Fawlty himself, but he is working on adapting the scripts alongside Caroline Jay Ranger, the director who has previously worked on shows like Monty Python Live.

Speaking to Australian publications, the star said: "There have been many requests in the past 40 years to adapt Fawlty Towers for the stage. I now sense the time is right and I'd like my Aussie actor friends to be my collaborators on the world premiere of this epoch-shattering event, a watershed in the history of Australian theatrical culture. Or not."

Casting for the four main roles has yet to get underway. It is understood Cleese will assist producers Michael Coppel, Phil McIntyre and Louise Withers with selecting people at the auditions in February 2016.

Although the tour has not yet officially been announced, the first performance is believed to be on the 19th August 2016 at Sydney's Roslyn Packer Theatre. A website with a mailing list sign up form to allow fans to be alerted with more information is online at fawltytowerslive.com.au

The website says the tour will run into 2017, however there is no news yet on whether it will then transfer to the UK.

Although this will be the first official Fawlty Towers stage show, the characters have appeared in live environments elsewhere before in various ways. Most notably, the popular but unofficial Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience has been running since the late 1990s with many performances staged around the world each month.

In other related news, the hotel which inspired Fawlty Towers is soon to be demolished. The Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, the establishment in which Cleese came up against real-life rude hotelier Donald Sinclair during a Monty Python trip and was thus inspired to create Basil, is to be ripped down soon. Plans to replace it with retirement flats was given the go ahead earlier this month.