A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  Eddington also let it be known that, on the evidence of this first script, he would much rather play Sir Humphrey than Hacker, because he had noticed that Sir Humphrey always had the last line. Davies assured him, however, that the writers had always envisaged him as the actor who could best make Hacker seem real, and pointed out that, while Sir Humphrey would always be more or less the same, Hacker offered much more chance for character development. This seemed to satisfy him, but, like Hawthorne, he continued to harbour doubts about agreeing to do a series.

  The result was that, on 7 February 1978, Davies commissioned a second script from Jay and Lynn (for a joint fee of £1,35033), which they duly wrote and submitted by the agreed deadline of 13 March, and which he then sent on to the actors. Eddington and Hawthorne responded in much the same manner as before, praising what they had read but asking for more. Thus began a cycle.

  On 13 April a third script was commissioned. This time Jay and Lynn were paid an increased joint fee of £1,450 (with an additional £50 being sent to an unnamed ‘third party’ for assisting the writers with their research). The deadline was 5 June.34

  A fourth script was then ordered on 26 May. Jay and Lynn were again paid £1,450 between them. The deadline on this occasion was 18 August.35

  Eventually, after submitting their fourth meticulously researched and stylishly written episode, an exasperated Jay and Lynn decided to draw the line. ‘No,’ Lynn would recall the two of them saying to John Howard Davies as he began, somewhat sheepishly, to suggest yet another submission, ‘four scripts are enough, they must make up their minds, yes or no.’36 Davies put the question to the two actors at the end of August, and both of them finally came up with an answer: ‘Yes’.

  The sense of relief on all sides was palpable. Neither Eddington nor Hawthorne, in spite of their anxieties, had really wanted to pass on such an enticing part, and neither Jay nor Lynn (nor Davies) had wanted to lose them. The prevarication had been agonising to endure, but, now that the decision was made, the worries disappeared and the confidence came through. The two main characters had been cast.

  Davies then commissioned two more scripts from Jay and Lynn, bringing the total to what he thought, at that stage, would be a series of six episodes.37 He could now concentrate on moving ahead with the rest of the production.

  Most pressingly, the actor to play Bernard Woolley still had to be chosen, and, in stark contrast to the two leads, there was no immediate consensus as to who should be at the top of the list. John Howard Davies had a famously bulging book of TV and theatrical contacts, and, in such situations, could always be relied on to draw up an impressive collection of candidates (he had, for example, considered a list of fifteen possibilities to play Sybil in Fawlty Towers before settling on Prunella Scales38), but, given that the role was at this stage deliberately underwritten, the sheer range of options was almost overwhelming.

  Initially Jonathan Lynn had considered putting himself forward for the part. There was, after all, a precedent for such a move, as his friend John Cleese had written Basil Fawlty for himself with great success. There was also, on the other hand, a precedent for resisting such a temptation: Jimmy Perry had been blocked from playing the role of Private Walker in Dad’s Army (even though he had conceived it expressly for himself) because, it was decided, having a writer among the cast might have caused resentment over the distribution of lines.39 In the case of Yes Minister, however, the issue was soon rendered redundant because, after some reflection, Lynn decided to put his Cambridge Theatre Company commitments first and withdrew from consideration.

  John Howard Davies then sounded out several candidates for the role, but all of them declined because, as they saw it, on paper the part seemed far too insubstantial. Undaunted, Davies persisted, trying a number of other actors, but he kept getting the same negative response: the character said little, did little and thus held little appeal.

  It took a chance encounter to solve the problem. There is, however, a difference of opinion between the two main protagonists as to when and where that chance encounter took place.

  According to Jonathan Lynn’s recollection, the setting was Holloway Prison, where he was one of the guests at a dinner party hosted by the Governor and his wife. Seated next to him was the actor Derek Fowlds, who had worked in theatre and television on a wide range of productions over the course of about eighteen years, but who, at that stage, was best known to the general public for being the much-loved human sidekick to a hand puppet in the very popular children’s series The Basil Brush Show, from 1969 to 1973. Lynn liked him personally, and knew that his open, understated and amiable manner made viewers warm to him rapidly. He decided then and there that Fowlds would be just right for this new role.

  According to Derek Fowlds himself, however (‘I have been to Holloway Prison – the Governor and his wife, Tony and Patricia Heald, were friends of mine – and I did meet Jonathan there for a dinner, but that wasn’t when he mentioned anything to me about playing Bernard. He might have been thinking about me for the role, but that wasn’t when he first mentioned it’40), the encounter took place a little later in the considerably more conventional and respectable environment of the West End of London in the foyer of a theatrical agency:

  Johnny [Lynn] and I had the same agent. And I was there at the office, sitting waiting to go in and see our agent, when I saw Johnny come out. I knew him then as an actor. So I said, ‘Hello, Johnny, how are you?’ You know, the usual. And then he left and I went in and said to my agent, ‘What’s he doing here?’ And my agent said, ‘Oh, he’s so pleased, because they’re doing a new series, he’s co-writing it, and he’s thrilled because they’ve just cast Nigel Hawthorne.’ So I said, ‘Well, what is it? Is there something in it for me?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ So we chatted about other things, and then I went home.41

  Wherever the chance encounter really happened, what is clear is that the next morning Lynn talked to Antony Jay and then called John Howard Davies to suggest Fowlds for Bernard Woolley. Davies agreed, and sent him a script.

  Fowlds, unlike all of the previous candidates, would immediately see the part’s potential, realise how he could help develop it, and would not hesitate before calling to accept:

  My agent had phoned me and said, ‘Well, we have a script, because I asked Johnny Lynn and he said, “There is a part, and let Derek have a look at it”.’ So I said, ‘What is it? What’s it called?’ He said, ‘It’s called Yes Minister.’ So I said, ‘Oh, is it about vicars?’ I thought it must be some Derek Nimmo-style, All Gas and Gaiters sort of thing! He said, ‘No, no, it’s political, it’s very new, very different. Read the script – the part is Bernard.’

  So he sent me the script, and I read it, and I just wet my breeches, really. I thought, ‘This is so exciting!’ And I knew Paul and Nigel – I’d worked with Paul and I knew Nigel as a friend – and I really couldn’t wait to team up with them to do it.42

  The comic triangle had its trio of players. Now the rest of the casting could be concluded.

  Diana Hoddinott was hired (for a fee of £165 per show43) to be Hacker’s wife, Annie. She had been working fairly steadily in television since the early 1960s, mainly in dramas rather than comedies, popping up in one-off episodes of such popular shows as Suspense, Maigret and Dixon of Dock Green. John Howard Davies chose her mainly because, with her ability to blend a cool demeanour with subtle wit, she could portray a typical modern politician’s wife: a liberated woman forced to hide behind a submissive-looking image, realistic enough to know that she was obliged to seem pleasantly anodyne when thrust into the public spotlight, one step behind him physically while one step ahead of him mentally. 44

  Davies also decided to cast Neil Fitzwiliam as Frank Weisel. This was, he would admit,45 something of a gamble, as the actor had been more noticeable over the past decade or so as a dancer than as a thespian (his credits included spots on The Eartha Kitt Show, Half a Sixpence and The Slipper and the Rose), but Davies had also seen h
im in a few dramatic roles and had liked his portrayals of edgy, snappy types. He had wanted someone who could make Weisel seem as physically, verbally and irritatingly weaselly as possible, and Fitzwiliam seemed capable of fitting the bill.

  Finally, Davies needed to find someone suited to playing the Civil Service’s capo di tutti capi, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Arnold Robinson, a crusty, testy, imposing figure who needed to seem sufficiently threatening as to make even Sir Humphrey appear a little insecure. A number of actors were considered for this small but memorable part, but, eventually, Davies settled on selecting John Nettleton, a sober-looking man with a voice that sounded as though it had been marinated in Earl Grey tea and who, over the past couple of decades, had huffed, puffed and harrumphed his way through a wide variety of world-weary majors, colonels, admirals, barristers, spies and detective superintendents (as well as, in the sitcom If It Moves, File It, a senior civil servant). Davies felt Nettleton would bring just the right air of understated but menacing authority to such a formidable éminence grise.

  Once Nettleton accepted the offer of the role – which he did quickly and eagerly – the casting, for this initial stage, was complete. Davies, reflecting on all of his choices, was satisfied with the company that he had assembled. They would make Yes Minister work.

  Now everyone was keen to press on with the production process. They had the scripts and the stars and the supporting players. All of the key ingredients were, at last, in place. It was time for the pilot to be made.

  4

  The Preparation

  Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

  Filming started for the pilot episode on Sunday, 21 January 1979. The brief external scenes were being recorded well ahead of the rest, so the actors were out and about in Downing Street and Whitehall, walking up and down, looking suitably businesslike.1

  The mood at the start of such a production is always a mixture of hope and apprehension. Anything can happen – good or bad.

  It is the possibility of bad things happening that, inevitably, causes all of those involved to approach the early tasks with a high degree of anxiety. ‘A pilot is always done under conditions of extreme nervous tension,’ John Howard Davies would confirm. ‘It doesn’t matter how brilliant you think the script is, or how wonderful the actors are. Experience teaches you that anything could go wrong, or it might all go right and still, for some inexplicable reason, fall flat when it’s finished and an audience finally sees it. Honestly, I can assure you, you’re always frightened to death.’2

  Actors can struggle to make their roles work, writers can have second thoughts about certain scenes, directors can change their minds about how to shoot particular sequences, permissions to film in specific locations can suddenly be withdrawn, topical events can intervene to change the situation: all kinds of unexpected hazards can be encountered. One can never quite know, from day to day, what fresh hell is set to be unveiled.

  In the case of making Yes Minister, the first problem concerned the weather. All that the production team wanted to do was to cover, quickly and easily, the fleeting outside shots of Hacker hearing his election result and then heading off to his new Department. Everything else would be recorded on set, inside the studio. In January, the weather was predictably poor (with Londoners bracing themselves for the imminent arrival of the blizzards that were sweeping down the country from the north), and, while the various caravans and the make-up bus were stiflingly hot inside, the actors were left standing for hours outside in the bitterly cold wind and rain, trying hard not to look as if the weather was particularly seasonable at all.

  The next day of filming was even worse, because Paul Eddington, along with his screen wife Diana Hoddinott and special adviser Neil Fitzwiliam, were obliged to stand in front of a crowd of extras on the balcony of Chiswick Town Hall, supposedly celebrating at Hacker’s election count, while pretending that snow was not flying into their faces. There was no filming at all on the Tuesday, thanks to even heavier downfalls of snow and the traffic chaos caused by a rail strike, but they resumed on Wednesday at Euston Station, with Eddington joined by Neil Fitzwiliam to show Hacker and Weisel on their way to Whitehall. Eddington, already drained from having to appear on the West End stage eight times a week in the Alan Ayckbourn play Ten Times Table, had a previously arranged television commercial to record on the Thursday, and by Friday, thanks to the earlier exposure to the elements, he was forced to retire to bed with a bad bout of bronchitis.

  After recuperating over the weekend, Eddington joined up with the rest of the team on Monday, when they reassembled in a large and echoey room (Room 161, to be precise) in the BBC’s multistorey rehearsal block in Victoria Road, North Acton (known affectionately by those who used it as the ‘Acton Hilton’), to begin work on the studio scenes. Facing the usual tight schedule for pilot productions, they set about their task with plenty of energy and discipline, rehearsing all week (mornings only on those days when Eddington had a matinee to perform in at the theatre) and then reconvened in a studio at Television Centre on the Sunday (4 February) for a final run-through before recording the pilot in the evening.

  The session seemed to go reasonably well – the audience, composed mainly of Londoners curious to see a new sitcom being made for free, had been reassuringly positive in their reaction – but the performers were left somewhat flat and dissatisfied by the experience. It was not the script that had bothered them – far from it – but rather the direction.

  It had not felt right. It had not felt right from the very first day of rehearsals.

  The man responsible was Stuart Allen. An experienced producer/director, he had overseen plenty of sitcoms in the past, but none of them had been notable for their subtlety or scope. Specialising in ITV’s distinctive brand of undemanding comedy – the kind that signalled each gag with all the mouthy, shouty, face-slapping, ‘wakey, wakey’ intrusiveness of a red-top tabloid front-page headline – Allen’s creative nadir had been Yus, My Dear (an execrable 1976 sitcom, set in and around a council flat, that starred Arthur Mullard as a cockney bricklayer), but he was associated most strongly with On the Buses.

  A weekly cacophony of leery laughs, mock moans and the inevitable ‘I ’ate you, Butler!’, the show (which co-starred the small and stocky Reg Varney and the tall and cadaverous Bob Grant as a pathetic pair of would-be Lotharios) had been one long wolf whistle to sexist, seaside humour, impressive only for the shameless way that it kept underestimating the intelligence of the audience it targeted. It had also, however, been remarkably popular, running for seven series comprising seventy-four episodes, between 1969 and 1973, and had spawned no fewer than three spin-off movies.

  As soon as Jonathan Lynn heard that the normally judicious John Howard Davies had chosen Allen, of all people, to make the pilot of Yes Minister, his mind flashed back to the unhappy time that he and George Layton had spent writing a handful of scripts for On the Buses a few years earlier (‘George did more than me,’ Lynn later explained, admitting that it had been a sitcom which he ‘found very hard to write’3). Relations between Lynn and the show’s director had actually been good (‘I had no problem with Stuart Allen. I liked him’4), but it had not been a happy working experience.

  Lynn had been startled by how formulaic it all was – the strict rule was that no episode must contain more than one hundred and forty speeches, because, he was told, ‘that’s the speed the actors go at’5 – and how low it had set its standards (on one occasion, for example, when he proposed a plot revolving around the show’s resident female grotesque, Olive, flirting with the women’s lib movement, it was explained to him that feminism was ‘a middle-class fad’, and that this was ‘a workin’ class show’ that required ‘jokes about the price of fish’6). It had been this kind of demoralising sitcom experience that had driven Lynn away from television to the theatre, and, as appreciative as he now was of the BBC’s willingness to invest some of its time and money in filming the first Yes Minister script, it w
as hard for him not to feel anxious about having Allen (as amiable and well regarded though he was within the industry) at the helm.

  Antony Jay, while not plagued by such painful personal memories, was also far from enthusiastic about the choice of director. ‘I was not particularly impressed by him,’ he later recalled, ‘but I felt he would do. I didn’t know his previous work.’7

  It was not just the writers who were concerned. Neither Paul Eddington nor Nigel Hawthorne was happy about the selection, suspecting, as Eddington would later put it, that the ‘sophistication of our show’ would hold little appeal to a director more used to sitcoms about boobs, bums and buses.8 Derek Fowlds agreed: ‘There was nothing personal about it, but, knowing that the script called for something that would seem more factoid than fiction, we all thought that Stuart seemed a strange choice’.9

  Their worst fears were confirmed during rehearsals, when Allen made it clear that he felt the show needed a few ‘improvements’. His first idea, much to all the actors’ horror, involved getting Diana Hoddinott, who as Annie Hacker was on her hands and knees searching for something or other under a coffee table, to waggle her bottom in the air as she did so. ‘It’s all dialogue,’ Allen explained impatiently, ‘we’ve got to get in some visuals.’ Hawthorne sidled over to Eddington at the side of the rehearsal room and whispered, ‘Surely the script’s funny enough in itself, we don’t have to try to make it funny?’10 Eddington, rolling his eyes, nodded grimly in agreement. This was not how they wanted things to develop.