A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  BERTIE:

  Jeeves––

  JEEVES:

  Such harmony is in immortal souls. But whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

  BERTIE:

  Jeeves––

  JEEVES:

  Sir?

  BERTIE:

  You couldn’t possibly switch it off, could you?

  JEEVES:

  Certainly, sir, if you wish it.

  BERTIE:

  I’m not in the mood.

  JEEVES:

  Very good, sir.48

  There was yet one more influence that helped crystallise the new relationship. Antony Jay, like Jonathan Lynn, had always been a great admirer of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s sitcom Steptoe and Son – one of the truly great, groundbreaking contributions to the genre, in terms of both using character actors instead of comic personalities, and of blending drama with laughter – and, the more that they thought about their own show, the more the cruel but comical inextricability of the Steptoe scenario seemed to resonate with their own idea of what should root Yes Minister to the spot.

  Steptoe and Son was all about the ties that bound two people together. It was about a father and son, both too poor to go it alone, and both (deep down) too attached to the other to part company, even though the relationship was polarised on a day-to-day basis by their respective personalities and ambitions. Theirs were the ties that trapped. Harold, the son, was always dreaming of soaring off to the stars, while his father, Albert, constantly reminded him that he had grown up in the gutter, and it was always painfully clear that neither was going to go anywhere other than back out onto the streets to collect junk.

  The dynamic was quintessentially British: idealism undermined by realism, optimism by pessimism, pretentiousness by irreverence. When Harold tries to intimidate with forced verbosity – ‘You frustrate me in everything I try to do. You are a dyed-in-the-wool, fascist, reactionary, squalid, little know-your-place, don’t-rise-above-yourself, don’t-get-out-of-your-hole, complacent little turd!’ – Albert smacks him down with casual brevity: ‘What d’yer want for yer tea?’ Similarly, when Harold attempts to impress with his ethereal ambitions, such as when he talks of transforming his shared junkyard hovel into a fashionable salon, a ‘powerhouse of intellectual thought’ so full of ‘choice wines, superb food and elegant conversation’ that the likes of ‘C.P. Snow and Bertrand Russell will be busting a gut to get in’, Albert punctures the inflated pose with his earthbound actualities: ‘Oh yeah! There’ll be plenty for them to do here: table tennis, rat hunting … I can see you all now, going for long tramps across the yard deep in intellectual conversation and horse manure!’49

  The contrasts struck a chord for the writers of Yes Minister. ‘If you think about it,’ Jay would say, ‘young Steptoe was the minister, having lots of bright ideas which wouldn’t work, and old Steptoe was a kind of secretary just deflating everything, going, “Nah, that won’t work!” He was the Sir Humphrey. It was the conflict between the two of them that seemed to me could be just as well translated into Whitehall.’50

  Just like in Steptoe, they reasoned, the explicit division was counterbalanced by an implicit interdependence. As Jay put it:

  Comedy, like drama, comes from the tension between characters in conflict of intention. Therefore it seemed to me that the two characters, the Minister and the Permanent Secretary, symbolised the two halves of the conflict perfectly and what made the comedy, and indeed the drama, work was that although the two had quite different and often opposing ambitions, nevertheless, each needed the other. The Minister needed the Permanent Secretary for support, to get the facts right, for briefings, for the provision of the necessary administrative back-up and for advice. The Permanent Secretary needed the Minister to publicise the things the Department had done well – and thus to get kudos for himself. He also needed the Minister to fight the Department’s corner in Cabinet and to fight for its share of the budget at the public expenditure round. They could not just walk out on each other. Their relationship was like a marriage and they both had a great deal invested in it. Therefore, if the story line could put strong pressures to force them to the point of separation, the drama and the comedy would be created.51

  There was, however, a third person in this marriage: the Principal Private Secretary. Another ingredient inspired primarily by the contents of the Crossman diaries, which had described this figure as the key link between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary, he was the obvious choice to serve as their comic foil. According to Crossman, the Principal Private Secretary’s job was ‘to make sure that when the Minister comes to Whitehall he doesn’t let the side down or himself down and behaves in accordance with the requirements of the institution’.52

  Crossman’s own Principal Private Secretary was a young, tall, owlish-looking man named John Delafons, whom he depicted as a kind of amiable double agent. Positioned in the office outside that of the Minister, like the host of ‘a grand vizier’s waiting room’, he liaised between his political and bureaucratic bosses, advising both on how best to deal with the other. Delafons, wrote Crossman, was thus able to appear simultaneously as one of ‘us’ and one of ‘them’, part friend and part foe. It was a role whose essential ambiguity clearly fascinated, and more than a little unnerved, the Minister, who valued the way that Delafons ‘really does try to get my ideas across to the Department’, but also feared that ‘his main job is to get across to me what the Department wants’.53

  It was for this reason, rich in comic potential, that Jay and Lynn saw the Principal Private Secretary as the obvious third point of the triangle. Never entirely under the control of either one of his two superiors, he would, as a consequence, undermine the authority and composure of both of them simply by standing between them instead of behind them.

  He would also serve as a natural means to elicit exposition. Whereas the line of least resistance with the Minister would result in his hiding behind the jargon of policy, and with the Permanent Secretary would result in him playing with the parlance of procedure, the Principal Private Secretary could be relied on to step in and ask each of them to explain himself plainly and simply, and thus provide the audience with whatever background information they might require.

  Another invaluable aspect of his role involved him serving as confidant to each of his two bosses. ‘You had to have scenes of them apart,’ Antony Jay would say of Sir Humphrey and Hacker, ‘because you had to tell the audience what Jim was planning that he didn’t want Humphrey to know, or Humphrey was planning that he didn’t want Jim to know, so that was where Bernard came in. He was piggy in the middle. He was confided in by both of them, trying to be loyal to both of them, and it made his part a very funny one’.54

  When it came to shaping these three characters, the writers remained, for a while, relatively cautious. Lynn, in particular, as the sitcom veteran of the duo, knew how each part only really started to grow and evolve once an actor had been assigned to play it, and so, at this early planning stage, the focus remained on building up the bare bones rather than adding too much of the fleshy substance.

  They decided to call the Minister ‘Gerry Hacker’,55 because, as Lynn would later explain, the name Hacker (in that pre-Internet era) ‘evoked an image of a lost and desperate politician, blindly and hopelessly hacking his way through the undergrowth of the Whitehall jungle’.56 There was no particular reason why he was dubbed ‘Gerry’ other than the fact that it sounded socially non-specific.

  Some would speculate, once the show was up and running, that Hacker’s character was modelled on one particular politician or combination of politicians, and it became something of a game in the bars and tea rooms of the House of Commons to guess who the most likely ‘Hacker’ might be. The writers, however, always remained adamant that their minister was never modelled on anyone in particular. Hacker, Jonathan Lynn would stress, ‘is completely fictional. But we did want him to be a centrist politician who could have belo
nged to either party, like Jim Prior or Roy Jenkins. He’s not as intelligent as either of them, though, and rather more venal.’57

  The Permanent Secretary, meanwhile, was christened ‘Humphrey’, because, when Lynn tried to think of someone suitably upper class, urbane and incisive, his old Cambridge and broadcasting colleague, Humphrey Barclay, came to mind. The surname of ‘Appleby’ was chosen because ‘it seemed suitably English and bucolic’, and the knighthood – as usually happened in real life – came with the job.58 Once again, as Antony Jay would make clear, the character of Sir Humphrey, just like that of Hacker, was dreamed up from what struck him and Lynn as most typical of each tribe: ‘They were [both] drawn from imagination, and from the logic of the job that they were in and the constraints and opportunities that those jobs created.’59

  As for the Principal Private Secretary, Lynn resorted to a spot of nominative determinism, calling him ‘Woolley’ to signal his vague nature. His first name, ‘Bernard’, had no conscious inspiration, but it did benefit from its connotations of hard-working and helpful St Bernard dogs.

  The only real decision the writers made, at this early stage, as to their characters’ respective backgrounds, concerned their academic training and the impact it had had on their personalities. They saw Sir Humphrey as a classicist and Hacker as an economist because, as Lynn would put it, ‘A classicist lives within certain established principles and attitudes. An economist exists on quicksand.’60

  Sir Humphrey would have been educated at Balliol College, Oxford, it was decided, because ‘Oxbridge represented privilege’ and so many senior civil servants were Oxonians or Cantabrigians in real life (the estimated figure at the time was 75 per cent61). His Classics training would have furnished him not only with a deep appreciation of history, tradition, continuity and change, but also a mastery of the mechanics of language and culture, enabling him to remain calm in the face of any local crisis while deciphering, or dissembling, his way to an acceptable solution.

  Gerry Hacker, on the other hand, was deemed to have been educated at the London School of Economics, where he would have learned, both as a student and as a fledgling lecturer, how to claim, and sometimes feign, authority in a subject that, notoriously, can never quite forgive practical human reality for not being as predictable as mathematics. As Lynn explained:

  There was a famous joke about a successful economist who went back to see his old professor at Cambridge. He saw his professor marking exam papers and commented that the questions were the same ones set for his own finals 30 years before. The old economist said, ‘I set the same questions every year. The students know that the questions are the same.’ ‘Then why don’t they all get 100 per cent?,’ asked his former student. ‘Because,’ the professor replied, ‘each year the answers are different.’

  Therefore, it seemed very suitable that Hacker should be an economics lecturer at the LSE. We also wanted him to be more typical of most members of the House. A great many of them are teachers, university lecturers and journalists. We did not want him to have the same mental framework as Sir Humphrey. We wanted him to approach questions from a different perspective.62

  Woolley, meanwhile, was handed the Civil Service’s standard Oxbridge background, but, as befitted his name and nature, little else was considered relevant about him at this stage in the process. Such sparseness of biographical detail did indeed suit a figure whose role would rarely warrant the need to volunteer much, if any, personal information. Richard Crossman, when writing after about a year of daily interaction with his own Principal Private Secretary, had reflected on the fact that ‘we don’t know each other much better [now] than we did on the first day’,63 so it made perfect sense to allow for an air of mystery to surround young Bernard. The only notable distinguishing characteristic that the writers did decide to give him was an obsession – ‘to a fault’64 – with language, causing him to play with it via ‘comically irritating’ puns or pedantically pause it in order to parse it. This would be the main means whereby his puppy-like gaucheness would be revealed, contrasting quite endearingly with the enculturated self-awareness of his two superiors.

  With Woolley now formed as an outline alongside Hacker and Sir Humphrey, the writers were finally in a position to start working on their first script. It was at this moment, though, that a degree of doubt started to creep in.

  They knew that they would soon have to pitch the idea to a broadcaster, but, in an age when there were only three television channels – BBC1, BBC2 and ITV – the competition for commissions was intense. The more they reflected on their own proposed programme and compared it to the range of recently launched sitcoms that were currently succeeding on the screen (such as the cartoon-like Citizen Smith, the creakily crude George and Mildred and the sugary Robin’s Nest), the more they feared that Yes Minister ‘had none of the ingredients for a popular television show’.65

  ‘There was no target audience,’ Lynn would recall, shaking his head at the seeming naivety, or bravery, of it all. ‘Antony and I had an idea for a comedy show, but we did not think anyone would be much interested. It was about three middle-aged men sitting around and talking about the government of Britain. It had no sex, no violence, no action.’66

  It still made sense, however, to Jay and Lynn. They still believed that it could work. They were determined to make it work.

  They were ready to sell it. They just had to hope that someone, somewhere, would be willing to buy into their vision.

  3

  The Pitch

  Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

  The idea was pitched during the summer of 1977. Jay and Lynn typed up a brief outline of what Yes Minister was going to be about and sent it off to the BBC’s Head of Comedy, James Gilbert. He opened it, read it and, contrary to their fears, he liked it. He wanted to sign this sitcom up.

  What followed would come to seem like a deliciously ironic echo of the Sir Frank Soskice saga. Gilbert, in order to get the green light for the project, needed to have his decision ratified by his immediate superior, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment. By the time it was submitted to him, however, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment was none other than James Gilbert.

  The proposal had arrived only a few days before the BBC was due to make one of its periodic executive reshuffles, with the then Head of Light Entertainment, Bill Cotton, being promoted to Controller of BBC1, Gilbert succeeding him as Head of Light Entertainment and a young producer, John Howard Davies, succeeding him as Head of Comedy. Gilbert, therefore, was able simply to take the proposal with him from one office to the other, sit down behind his new desk, reach into his in tray and then, in stark contrast to Sir Frank Soskice, show perfect consistency by rubber-stamping his own request.

  It was happening. The proposal had been accepted and, on 13 October, a pilot would be formally commissioned with a view to making a series for screening on BBC2.1

  ‘We were very pleasantly surprised that BBC 2 wanted it,’ Lynn would say. ‘I was very surprised that anybody wanted it.’2

  The next step, now that a pilot script had been requested, was to settle down and actually write it, so Jay and Lynn started to plan their first story. ‘Hypocrisy was the name of the game,’ Lynn later remarked on their starting point for this, and every subsequent, story-making session. ‘[We would focus on] the contrast between the public face and the private face; the difference between what was being fed to the public and the reality.’ The next stage, Jay would say, would be to tighten the focus further by looking for the most pertinent context: ‘The guiding factor always was to explore themes that would produce conflict between the political side and the administrative side of government.’3

  The two writers would then search through these scenarios for the ones that offered a ‘hideous dilemma’ that would generate the right degree of dramatic tension: ‘There had to be a truly appalling situation for Jim Hacker or Sir Hump
hrey, or preferably both of them,’ Lynn would recall, ‘there had to be a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Without a hideous dilemma you do not have an uproarious comedy, and if we could not find the dilemma we would put the subject aside, because we did not want to write a preachy programme.’4 The final stage, Lynn added, was to narrow down the remaining options ‘to particular themes that amused or annoyed us, after which we would go out and find sources.’5

  For their first script, they decided, the topic would be what seemed like the most fundamental issue of all: open government. A newly elected government would come to power in part due to its promise to replace secrecy with transparency. Gerry Hacker, once given ministerial responsibility for Administrative Affairs, would be the politician whose task it would be to turn this promise into a reality, while Sir Humphrey, as the Permanent Secretary attached to Hacker’s Department, would be the bureaucrat whose task it was to ensure that the promise went unfulfilled.

  It seemed the ideal set-up. The main political theme would be introduced explicitly and immediately, and the basic dynamic of the Westminster versus Whitehall, Hacker versus Sir Humphrey, relationship would be animated right from the start. It was a plot that both writers were happy to tackle.

  What still had to be decided, however, was how they would write it together. There were no rules about how any pair of writers should collaborate on a sitcom. It depended on their respective personalities, typing skills and creative habits.

  Some liked to do it standing up and others liked to do it sitting down. Some preferred to type and then read out loud, others to improvise and then transcribe. Some wrote separately and then met up to synthesise the sections; others worked face to face and bounced ideas off each other until every line had been agreed.

  Ray Galton and Alan Simpson created both Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son inside a large and airy office in London, with Simpson seated behind a desk with a typewriter and Galton usually stretched out on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.6 David Croft and Jimmy Perry gradually changed how they collaborated on Dad’s Army, starting out by meeting up to agree on a series of plots and then going their separate ways to write several whole episodes each, and then, in later years, teaming up at Croft’s country home in Suffolk to work on each story together.7 Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais cobbled together many of their scripts for The Likely Lads in the former’s house in Kentish Town, with Clement writing in longhand at the kitchen table while La Frenais walked back and forth over the lino.8 John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote most of Fawlty Towers while sitting side by side at a large desk in an upstairs room at their home in Kensington, with Booth scribbling on a notepad and Cleese poised over a typewriter.9