The crucial difference for Jay and Lynn, however, was the fact that, unlike these illustrious predecessors, creating a sitcom was not their primary concern. They would have to write it, so to speak, ‘on the side’.
Their own particular modus operandi as a writing team was thus largely determined by the demands that their respective solo careers placed on their time together. Jay continued to be Chairman of and chief writer for Video Arts, while Lynn was still Artistic Director at the Cambridge Theatre Company, so neither had much room left for a new project, and what little they did have was further constrained by the fact that Jay had a strict policy of reserving evenings and weekends solely for rest and relaxation (‘Life has most people by the throat,’ John Cleese often said of his friend. ‘Tony has life by the throat’.)10 Matters were further complicated by geography: Jay, at the time, lived in Ealing, while Lynn was based about ten miles away in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and, thanks to the fact that they were connected by a North Circular Road that seemed to be in a permanent state of reconstruction, the drive to one or the other’s home would often take up to an hour each way.
There was no choice but to eschew all creative self-indulgence and approach writing Yes Minister in the most disciplined and businesslike manner they could devise. A strict schedule was agreed: no more than two weeks to construct a story, and no more than five mornings to write a script. Alternating between one home and the other, they would start work between 8.30 a.m. and 9 a.m.; if Jay had an appointment at Video Arts, they would finish at noon; if Lynn was rehearsing a play they would stop at 11.15 a.m. On those very rare occasions when both men had a relatively clear day in the diary, they would work on together until 12.30 p.m. or 1 p.m., but, even then, never any later. ‘For Tony,’ Lynn would recall, ‘afternoons were Yes Minister-free zones. They were for Video Arts, sitting in his garden or napping.’11
Physically, both of them favoured the desk-bound writing tradition, sitting opposite each other across a table and verbally exchanging ideas. After working hard to refine that morning’s material, whichever one of them felt the more energetic would pick up a pen and start writing out what they had talked through so far. Then the pad would be passed over to the other, who would study it, cross out the odd word, revise a sentence here and there and sometimes add a small detail, comic line or telling phrase. Occasionally one of them would stare at the page for a while and then decide, on reflection, that they had drifted off in the wrong direction, at which point they would scribble over the whole section and start all over again.
The relationship was kept scrupulously equal – each had the right to veto the other’s ideas – and admirably equable. ‘There were no rules,’ Lynn would say, ‘and no hurt feelings. Mostly, by the time the script was completed, we genuinely didn’t know who had written what, and we didn’t care.’12 They never rowed, always encouraged and supported each other’s efforts and certainly regarded their collaboration as mutually beneficial. ‘Tony often says that he learned how to write comedy from me,’ Lynn would recall, ‘but I don’t think that could be true, for he is a very funny man and a very experienced writer. I do know that I learned from him how the world works. I learned a little detachment, too, though that’s never been my strong suit and still isn’t.’13
If there was any unofficial division of labour between them, it concerned the management of the two main characters. Jay would come to describe himself, somewhat tongue in cheek, as ‘the guardian of Sir Humphrey’s soul’, while Lynn, he said, was the guardian of Hacker’s. Although they always wrote both characters – and everything else – together, Lynn would agree that the distinction did indeed make some sense. ‘Tony,’ he observed, ‘like Sir Humphrey, has a First in Classics, is fluent in Latin and Greek and has an academic, analytical mind. He would probably have become a Permanent Secretary, had he joined the Civil Service instead of the BBC.’14 Lynn also accepted that, at least at first glance, he was not unlike Hacker: ‘a frustrated and disappointed idealist who regularly fails to practise what he preaches.’15
As they wrote together, therefore, Jay would sometimes be the one to suggest how Sir Humphrey might act, or what he might say, and Lynn would then seize on that to develop some comic dialogue between him and Hacker. The best ideas for Bernard Woolley’s donnish interjections, however, would come about far more naturally and accidentally over the course of a writing session.
One example of this, which arose during work on a later episode,16 concerned an exchange between Sir Humphrey and Hacker about a policy that might prove to be a vote winner. Hacker declared that, if that was indeed the case, he would not want to look a gift horse in the mouth. This prompted Jay to give Sir Humphrey the line, ‘I put it to you, Minister, that you are looking a Trojan horse in the mouth’, which in turn caused Lynn to have Hacker say, ‘You mean, if we look closely at this gift horse we’ll find it’s full of Trojans?’
When Lynn then slid the writing pad back over to Jay, his partner frowned at the latest line and then said, ‘Well, no. If one had looked the Trojan horse in the mouth one would have found Greeks inside, because the Greeks gave the horse to the Trojans. So technically it wasn’t a Trojan horse at all, it was a Greek horse. Hence the tag Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, which is usually and somewhat inaccurately translated as “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”.’
Lynn could not resist asking his partner what a better translation of the Greek tag might be. ‘No,’ Jay replied, warming to his theme, ‘it’s a Latin tag. It’s obvious, really, the Greeks would hardly have advised other people to beware of Greeks. But there’s another way you can tell: the tag is clearly Latin rather than Greek, not because timeo ends in “o”, because the Greek first person also ends in “o” – actually, there is a Greek word timao meaning “I honour” – but because the “os” ending is a nominative singular termination of the second declension in Greek and an accusative plural in Latin. Incidentally, Danaos is not only the Greek for Greek but the Latin for Greek, too.’
Lynn, listening to this, realised that it was perfect for one of Bernard Woolley’s jaw-droppingly irrelevant yet well-meaning contributions to a conversation, so, as Jay went on, he quickly scribbled it all down and slipped it into the latest script.17 It would end up getting some of the loudest laughs of the episode. ‘Tony,’ Lynn later recalled, ‘was benignly pleased that his arcane academic knowledge struck other people as amusing.’18
The bulk of their work on the pilot script, though, involved making the situation, as well as the characters, seem as believable as possible, so they had to think carefully not only about what was going to happen but also who, on screen, would be involved. Neither Sir Humphrey nor Woolley, it was felt, would require any real glimpse into their lives beyond Whitehall, as having civil servants seem permanently in situ was part of the point, but it was felt that Hacker, as a public figure, would need to be shown to have some kind of life, and a separate set of relationships, outside of his department.
He was therefore given a wife (and later on a daughter) because the pilot needed to see him at home waiting to know his fate as far as the new Cabinet was concerned, and also because the tensions between a Minister’s real family and the surrogate one inside his department promised plenty of future comic opportunities. He was also given a political ally, his special adviser Frank Weisel (pronounced ‘Wy-sel’), partly because Ministers did indeed like to make use of such outside figures, and partly because Permanent Secretaries tended to hate them.
Some of the biggest, and most common, clashes between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary that were recounted in Richard Crossman’s diaries concerned his attempts, as a painfully isolated social democratic politician surrounded by conservative-minded bureaucrats, to seek out advice from beyond the walls of Whitehall, and Dame Evelyn’s strenuous attempts to stop him from doing so. It was a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and something that struck many senior civil servants – bristling at the prospect of more and more outsiders undermining and second-g
uessing them from a constitutionally questionable position – as the cue for chaos unless they could snuff the fashion out as swiftly as possible.
One of Crossman’s early favourites was Arnold Goodman, a left-leaning lawyer who later became Lord Goodman and one of the country’s most influential political grandees. When Dame Evelyn first heard that her Minister had been acting on Goodman’s unofficial advice, after he intervened in a bill that their Department was in an advanced stage of drafting, she burst into his office incandescent with rage, telling him that she had never been so insulted in her life, and had almost resigned in protest.19 Although shaken by the severity of her reaction, Crossman continued to crave ways to challenge the Civil Service’s monopoly on guidance and advice, and Dame Evelyn continued to devise more and more devious ways to defeat him.
By the mid-1970s, however, the fashion for special advisers (who were now starting to be nicknamed ‘spads’) had grown far more widespread, with no fewer than thirty-eight being appointed by the Labour Government following its 1974 election victory. Not everyone on the political side liked them – James Callaghan, for example, viewed them with intense suspicion and blamed them for government leaks – and not (quite) everyone on the bureaucratic side disliked them – sometimes the value of their specialist knowledge and insight was simply impossible to deny – but, at the time when Yes Minister was brought to life, they were indubitably newsworthy and controversial.
Jay and Lynn (who, of course, had the benefit of two of the most eminent exemplars of the breed – Marcia Falkender and Bernard Donoughue – as their guides) believed that Hacker’s special adviser would have a similarly unsettling effect on Sir Humphrey to that which the likes of Goodman had had on Dame Evelyn, so they wove the figure of Frank Weisel into the picture. A passionate, persistent, pushy little party dogmatist, Weisel could be relied on to bully Hacker into taking on the bureaucrats, and to berate him whenever he seemed in danger of settling for pragmatism before pure principle. Sir Humphrey would not even bother to hide his contempt for such an interloper, deliberately mispronouncing his name as ‘Weasel’ and suggesting that he base himself a safe way away in darkest Walthamstow, while Weisel would be open in his eagerness to see ‘Sir Humphrey Bloody Appleby and Mr Toffee-Nosed Private Secretary Snooty Woolley’ taken tightly ‘by the short and curlies’.
One thing that neither Jay nor Lynn wanted to add to the sitcom was the identity of Hacker’s own political party. They would scrupulously avoid any mention of its name, called its headquarters ‘Central House’ – an amalgam of the Conservative’s Central Office and Labour’s Transport House – had Hacker wear a white rosette when attending his election count, and (since Margaret Thatcher’s rise to the top of the Tory Party had finally made gender a feature of the political firmament) only referred to his leader as ‘the Prime Minister’.
This apparent coyness was mainly to satisfy the BBC policy to strive for political impartiality, even in a sitcom, but, as Jay later explained, it also helped to keep the focus on the fundamentals of the fiction:
The party in power was bound to be either Conservative or Labour – there was no other option at the time of devising it. Or there were the Liberals, if you count them as an option, but no one would have done. If we had identified the party then it could have been construed as a consistent and unremitting attack on one or other political party; obviously we did not want to do that. However, we also did not want to identify the party because we did not see the series as being about how the Labour Party or the Conservative Party when in government interacted with the Civil Service. Moreover, between some opposition politicians and government ministers there was often only a tiny gap in terms of their political beliefs and practice: as, say, between the Conservative William Whitelaw and Labour’s Merlyn Rees as Home Secretary. Therefore, following BBC policy was useful for our purposes.20
Once the pilot script was completed it was sent, at the end of 1977, on to the BBC’s new Head of Comedy, John Howard Davies, to review. Davies was a sharp-witted, imaginative and very experienced programme-maker who had produced and/or directed such hugely successful comedy shows as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Goodies, Steptoe and Son, The Good Life and, most notably, Fawlty Towers before rising up the ranks as an executive. He was, as a consequence, supremely confident in his own ability to judge the potential of any new sitcom, and, when he read the pilot script of Yes Minister, he felt sure that it had the ‘legs’ to be a success.
Not only did Davies like the idea of the show, but he also already had some fairly clear ideas concerning which actors to cast as the two leads – and his views on such a subject tended to be treated as authoritative. The son of the scriptwriter Jack Davies and a former child actor himself (making his debut in 1948 as the eponymous young hero of David Lean’s adaptation of Oliver Twist), and described by John Cleese as ‘a very, very good judge of comedy’,21 he had an impressive track record for picking the right performers for the right roles. While planning Fawlty Towers, for example, he had taken primary responsibility for choosing most of the members of the cast (selecting, among others, Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty, Andrew Sachs as Manuel and Ballard Berkeley as Major Gowen), and had also brought together the talents that worked so well as a team in The Good Life.
When, in January 1978,22 he first met up with Jay and Lynn in his office at Television Centre, he was keen to get straight down to business. He wanted to discuss the casting.
Jay and Lynn had some ideas of their own about the cast. ‘The person I originally had in mind for Sir Humphrey,’ Jay later revealed somewhat whimsically, ‘was an actor called Cecil Parker. He was not available for two reasons: one was that he was too expensive, and the other was that he was dead [he died in 1971]. He was marvellous at playing anguished butlers who were superior to their employers but had to cloak it in deference. His style was very funny as it thinly concealed the fury and contempt that were hiding, stifled, beneath.’23
Given the absence of Parker, Jay agreed with Lynn that the actor now most suited to playing Sir Humphrey was Nigel Hawthorne (‘We each think we suggested him first’24), and the one best equipped to capture Hacker was Paul Eddington. They would therefore be very relieved to discover that John Howard Davies, completely independently, had come to exactly the same conclusion.
Jay and Lynn had seen Hawthorne onstage playing a frustrated schoolmaster in Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged (1975) and a Blimpish major in Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade (1977), as well as on television in numerous productions, and they had already worked with him briefly in a Video Arts film called Decisions, Decisions (‘He’d been terribly good,’ Jay would say25). His ability to play calm, cool-headed, superior types, who were nonetheless prone to the odd apoplectic explosion, convinced them that he would be perfect for the part of their Permanent Secretary.
Lynn, meanwhile, had been an admirer of the artful and amiable Paul Eddington ever since, as a teenager, he had seen him at the Bristol Old Vic in the 1961 production of George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart, and had got to know him a little when, in 1975, he joined him in one episode of The Good Life.26 Jay had also seen and admired Eddington over the years in countless plays and programmes, and, like Lynn, was very keen to have him as Hacker.
Davies knew both actors well, and, indeed, had been the one who had chosen Eddington for The Good Life (and had promised to find him another vehicle for his talents27). So when Jay and Lynn began the meeting by proposing Paul Eddington for Hacker, Davies agreed immediately. In turn, when Davies suggested Nigel Hawthorne for Sir Humphrey, Jay and Lynn were similarly quick to accede. At which point both parties agreed that that was that, and the meeting was deemed to be over. ‘It was the easiest casting session in my career,’ Lynn later said.28
What would prove to be far from easy, however, was convincing the actors. Neither, it would soon seem, was particularly keen to commit himself to the project.
Jay and Lynn had no real reason to anticipate such reluctance, so they pr
essed ahead with their plans. After making one small revision to the pilot script – on John Howard Davies’ advice, Hacker’s first name was changed from ‘Gerry’ to ‘Jim’, in order to avoid associations with Eddington’s previous sitcom incarnation, Jerry Ledbetter – they sent off a copy to each of their two targets.
According to Nigel Hawthorne’s later recollection of his first sight of the initial script (‘It was like being handed a pot of gold’29), he was immediately impressed by the ‘brilliance of the dialogue’ and was fascinated by the ‘central, complex relationship’ between the politician and the civil servant: ‘I recognised the potential in Sir Humphrey the moment I’d reached the end of the first page and, long before finishing the last, had decided to do the job.’30 Paul Eddington would end up saying much the same thing: he loved the script and was drawn just as quickly to the project, even though he ‘thought the appeal would be very small’.31 It seems, though, that neither actor’s memory was entirely reliable on this point.
Their actual reaction at the time, according to John Howard Davies, was positive, but curbed by a certain degree of caution. ‘They wanted to see more scripts,’ Davies would later reveal. ‘Both of them really liked the first one – Nigel, especially, was pretty dazzled by it, in fact – but I think because of that, they wanted to be reassured that it wasn’t a one-off, a flash in the pan. They wanted to see if that quality could really be sustained.’32 Eddington in particular was, it seems, very wary about getting carried away by the accomplishments of a first script. He was painfully aware of other actors who had signed up for a series on the basis of a solitary sample script – unaware that it had actually taken several months to shape, hone and polish – only to discover, soon after the contract had been signed, that the writing on subsequent episodes fell far below the standard of the original.
A Very Courageous Decision Page 8
