"Basil Fawlty" is correct

From across the Tasman comes this gem of a story about a hotel owner fed up with the unruly behaviour of sports teams from a certain town.

Mr Donnelly said teachers and parents repeatedly failed to keep their charges in check, letting them run wild in the motel's facilities.

Wainuiomata Indoor Sports Club owner Calena Hura denied the accusations and said the motel manager, Malcolm Glen, described on Supreme's website as a "Basil Fawlty" after the John Cleese character had been unprofessional towards the club's indoor netball team from the start.

Wainuiomata High School's touch team was turfed out of the motel two days into its stay, but principal Rob Mill also said the motel manager was to blame.

"They are teenagers, so there is going to be some level of noise. The manager was quite unreasonable and actually quite aggressive."

When I was at school, we went to a sports carnival in Hong Kong - there would have been about 24 of us, all 16 or 17.

We were absolute shockers once we landed. We were there for a week, and spent most of it drunk. People chundered during practice sessions. Our rooms were about 20 floors up, and we found that the windows opened, so we had a lot of fun setting fire to toilet rolls and chucking them out the windows. When we ran out of toilet rolls, we raided the maid's carts and nicked more. When they ran out, we started tossing oranges out as well.

Our rooms were utter pigsties, being knee deep in beer cans and other flotsam and jetsam. We'd break into the rooms of team mates, tie toilet rolls to the legs of their beds and then toss the roll out the window. The hotel could be spotted from miles around, due to the great white streamers dangling from our floor.

We abused taxi drivers and did runners without paying. We were thrown out of night clubs, pubs and strip joints all over the island and mainland. Most of us had to run from the cops at some point. We filled bath tubs and toilets with butane and ignited it (and ourselves). We drank and threw up in hideous quantities.

Two blokes got creative one night after a session on the vodka and visited the landing on every floor in the hotel, scooping up the ashtrays and pot plants and coffee tables and chairs and sofas, loading them into the lift and then dumping them on just one floor. There were 20 floors worth of furniture crammed into one landing, piled from floor to ceiling. It was impossible to get past, and that was almost the last straw for hotel management. If they'd had CCTV back then, we would have been toast.

The school didn't send another contingent until years later - it took them half a decade to get over the trauma of our trip. I think Hong Kong was well and truly pleased to see the back of us.

So I have every sympathy with this hotel owner in NZ - I know what little shits boys can be when on a sports trip.