A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  Allen pushed on regardless, seemingly intent on turning Yes Minister into Yus Minister. Listening to Sir Humphrey’s elaborate monologues, he sighed, frowned and fidgeted, and then suggested things for the other actors to do to leaven the wordiness with a little action. Watching Hacker sit motionless at his desk, he suggested bits of physical business that might get one or two more laughs. He even started (without even thinking of consulting the writers first) dreaming up new lines, exchanges and scenes, claiming that it was all in the show’s best interests.

  It came as a profoundly unwelcome shock, therefore, when Jonathan Lynn arrived on the third day of rehearsals (Antony Jay was otherwise engaged on Video Arts business) and discovered what the director was actually doing. Upon entering the room and sitting quietly on a seat at the side, he watched as, to his horror, the actors worked on a scene that neither he nor Jay had written.

  It featured Hacker, as the newly elected Minister, excitedly studying swatches of fabric as he prepared to choose a new sofa for his office. Once the scene was over, Lynn, trying hard to stifle the desire to scream and shout, walked over to Allen and asked what exactly he thought he was doing adding things to the script. ‘But this new stuff is funny,’ the director exclaimed with a smile. Lynn, still straining to be polite, questioned that assertion, pointing out that this was a sitcom that was supposed to seem realistic, and having Hacker fuss over sofas, on his first day as a Minister, simply made no sense.

  He asked Allen to revert to the original script, exactly as it had been written, and stick to it, but the director was clearly disinclined to agree. ‘It’s clever,’ he said of Jay and Lynn’s script, with an expression on his face that suggested he was dealing with a sitcom neophyte. ‘It’s very clever. But we have an audience coming in on Sunday. We need to get some laughs.’11

  Lynn, now positively bubbling with hot bursts of volcanic fury, assured him that the script, as written, would indeed get laughs. Allen looked at him pityingly and replied: ‘Not very many.’12

  By this stage, the rest of the team had drifted over and, hovering nearby, were listening in on the tense conversation. ‘Look,’ Lynn said, barely able to contain himself any longer, ‘this is the script that the BBC bought, that Paul and Nigel signed on for, and that you agreed to direct.’ He wondered to himself if he could speak on his absent writing partner’s behalf, decided that he could and went on: ‘We don’t agree to your changing it. If you do, the show won’t happen on Sunday night. Tony and I will see that it’s stopped. We’ll call our agents today. There will be no show.’13

  Lynn, with his heart pounding, realised that he had possibly over-stepped the mark. He had no idea, off the top of his head, if he and Jay actually had the power, contractually, to carry out such threats, but he was far too angry to back down.

  An awkward silence descended on the room as Lynn stared at Allen and Allen stared back at Lynn. It was only a few seconds, but it felt more like minutes, until Paul Eddington stepped forward and, bearing a slight diplomatic smile, said to Allen: ‘I think, you know, if Jonathan feels that strongly, we should try it his way.’14 Then Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds joined in and agreed. ‘We all felt that it was wrong,’ Fowlds would recall, ‘because I think Stuart was directing it as the kind of sitcom that people would have been expecting – very light and slightly farcical. Whereas the beauty of Jonathan and Tony’s script was that it was so brilliant that we really had to play it totally for the truth.’15

  With great reluctance, the director reverted to the original script and resumed the rehearsal. Lynn watched for a while longer, making sure that all was well, and then left to call Antony Jay and explain what had happened. Jay, on hearing Lynn’s account, congratulated him on his response and reassured him that he had done the right thing. It was their script, they agreed, and it would be their script that would end up being acted out on the screen.

  Work continued through to the end of the week, with a fair amount of tension in the air. The actors did not trust the director, and the director did not trust the script. It was an uncomfortable situation in which no one seemed happy.

  The mood barely improved on the Sunday, when the team met in the studio to prepare for the recording. As was the norm in those days at Television Centre, members of the audience were obliged to form a queue, on the ground floor, directly outside the dressing room windows. As Eddington, Hawthorne, Fowlds and the rest of the cast were getting themselves ready to perform, their concentration kept being interrupted by the snatches of conversation that were drifting up from the crowd outside. Hawthorne, especially, was rattled to hear some of them express regret that they had failed to get free tickets for a show they already knew, and the nervous actor suspected that ‘many of them would have preferred to be coming to George and Mildred’.16

  Hawthorne and Eddington were further irritated once the audience had been admitted to the studio and were being entertained by the warm-up man. Trusted by countless BBC producers over the years not only to get the audience ready to laugh as soon as the red light came on at the start of a recording, but also to return whenever there was a scene change or a technical hitch to maintain the positive mood, Felix Bowness (who would soon find a certain amount of fame himself by appearing in front of the cameras as the lugubrious ex-jockey Fred Quilly in the sitcom Hi-de-Hi!) had worked behind the scenes on some of the biggest light entertainment shows of the past decade. He was, as a consequence, the obvious choice to warm up any sitcom audience.

  On this occasion, however, there was a problem. Both Eddington and Hawthorne hated the way he was doing it.

  Hawthorne, for example, emerged from the make-up room to hear ‘gales of laughter rocking the studio’. That would normally have delighted any sitcom actor, but in this case, as he hovered in the wings to listen to some of the material, it began to worry him. ‘I realised a lot of the jokes were decidedly blue,’ he later explained, ‘and that Felix was gearing up the audience to expect a very different show from the one which we were to present.’17

  Eddington, if anything, reacted even more negatively – mainly due to the fact that he had already had more than his fill of warm-up men during the years that he spent on the set of The Good Life. Raging at the typical practitioner’s ‘racist and honeymoon jokes and his invitations to the audience to shake hands with each other and shout out where they came from’, he immediately resented Bowness’ presence, scowling at the bawdy-sounding laughter and vowing that this would be the last time he would tolerate such a pre-show performance.18

  ‘I liked old Felix,’ Derek Fowlds would recall. ‘He was funny, but on that particular night I must say he was being a bit blue, and I could see it was really rattling Paul and Nigel. They were pacing around backstage, listening to all of this, going: “What on earth is going on out there?”’19

  Both men, however, were far too professional to dwell on such issues so close to a performance, and quickly returned their focus to the script. When everything was ready, they stepped onto the set in Studio 1, straight into character, and the recording duly began.

  There were no significant mistakes. Each scene flew by according to plan and, as Lynn had promised, the original script elicited plenty of laughs. By the end, as all of the actors returned to take a bow before the loudly applauding audience, John Howard Davies had already decided to commission two more scripts and thus guarantee Yes Minister its first six-episode series.

  Relieved and exhilarated (‘A huge cloud of worry just blew away,’ Antony Jay would say20), the writers and their stars went off to reflect on what had happened and plan for what was to come. Both parties had opinions that they wanted to air.

  The stars, for example, were keen to compare notes with the writers as to how they might grow into their respective roles. After having to rush through the all-too-brief rehearsal period to get the pilot completed, there seemed to be a need, before the production process resumed, to use whatever breathing space was available to think more deeply about who each character was s
upposed to be.

  It was probably inevitable that Paul Eddington would have strong ideas about his part because he himself was quite a political animal. Raised as a Quaker who believed passionately in George Fox’s tenet that ‘There is a God in every man’,21 he was a staunch pacifist who had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War and a keen supporter of the Labour Party until, under Clement Attlee’s leadership, they decided to continue with conscription into peacetime: ‘I ceremoniously burned my [membership] card and dropped it out the window’.22 Now defiantly non-aligned in terms of parties, he remained firmly left of centre (quite Crossman-like, in fact) and followed the political coverage, both at home and abroad, with a keen interest.

  Eddington said that he saw Jim Hacker as ‘a sort of Candide – an innocent beset by these piratical civil servants’, who was bound, in time, to be corrupted, to some extent, by the culture of the governing class.23 This was surely in itself a little naive, as ‘a sort of Candide’ would struggle even to get selected as a prospective MP in the cut-throat, cynical world of modern British politics, let alone go on to get elected and then clamber over enough of his or her contemporaries to be made a Minister. Jonathan Lynn, however, while sympathising with the actor’s perspective, endeavoured to deepen the depiction.

  Lynn said that he thought of Hacker as a figure reminiscent of the ‘whisky priest’ portrayed in Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory – a disappointing man who neither desired to dirty his hands nor was strong enough to resist doing so, a character who, as Greene had put it, just ‘gets caught up’.24 Lynn explained: ‘I think Hacker was very much a moralist, but I would say that he totally failed to live up to his morality. I would argue that he was a sort of unfrocked priest. His problem was that he would always compromise – when the opinion polls told him he had to, or when Sir Humphrey warned him that he was being “courageous”. As you know, to be controversial may lose votes, but being courageous could lose the next election.’25

  There would be strong rumours at the time that Eddington, unbeknown to the writers, drew further inspiration for his portrayal of Hacker by studying the Conservative MP James Prior.26 A Heathite member of the Thatcherite Shadow Cabinet, Prior – a stocky little figure with a round, red-cheeked face that suggested he had either just peered inside a piping-hot Aga or been scolded by his headmistress – bore a passing resemblance to the actor Ned Beatty, who was famous for playing the unfortunate fellow in Deliverance who was forced to ‘squeal like a pig’ (which was somewhat ironic, seeing as Prior was a farmer who had started out running a pig club during the war27). More of a Pooter than a Candide, he was, nonetheless, particularly fascinating, it seems, to Eddington for what in the shifting political climate of the time was coming to seem like an oxymoronic personality – a committed pragmatist, a defiant moderate, whose old-fashioned ‘softly, softly’ approach inside a Shadow Cabinet that now favoured a ‘shrilly, shrilly’ approach, made him seem as if on a collision course with his uncompromising leader, who had already branded him (off the record) as one of the ‘wettest’ of her current lieutenants.

  Eddington always refused either to confirm or deny the link. There was certainly, however, a family resemblance between Hacker and Prior that would sometimes catch the eye as the fictional minister fretted over his latest political puzzle.

  Nigel Hawthorne, meanwhile, was volunteering his own views on Sir Humphrey. Unlike Eddington, he claimed to have no interest at all in politics; although English-born, he had grown up in South Africa and only returned as a refugee from the apartheid regime, and, while he was an instinctive liberal, he would always feel something of an outsider when it came to domestic current affairs.28 He was also not inclined to analyse his character as an individual. He preferred to think of him simply as an archetype, a kind of bureaucratic Everyman. Antony Jay, he was pleased to find, thought much the same, explaining that he and Lynn had performed a kind of ‘principlectomy’ operation on the figure, removing all of his moral principles and personal ethics, leaving him to ‘operate entirely by what it took to succeed in the job’.29

  When it came to the question of Sir Humphrey’s motivation, Jay said that, as with politicians, there were two answers – the publicly acceptable one and the real one. ‘The civil servant’s declared motivation,’ he said, ‘is to carry out the wishes of the government efficiently, economically and impartially, working conscientiously and tirelessly to turn ministers’ policies into just, beneficial and workable laws. Their real motivation is to raise their personal status, to enhance the importance of their department, to avoid blame, to gain credit, to minimise work, to resist change, and to retire with an index-linked pension, a knighthood and the chairmanship of a couple of quangos and a seat on the board of a blue-chip company.’30 Hawthorne nodded in recognition; this was precisely how he had come to think of Sir Humphrey.

  The differences in outlook between Eddington and Hawthorne would lead to Jay and Lynn employing different tactics to talk each one of them through the rest of their scripts. Eddington, always arriving for rehearsals with a well-thumbed copy of the Guardian folded tightly under his arm, could see the big picture as far as the show’s satire was concerned, and so whenever he asked what the significance of any of the more arcane details might be, the writers were quick to place it in the broader political context. Hawthorne, on the other hand, would tend to look blank and bored in the face of such a strategy, and so Antony Jay hit upon an alternative method of exposition. If ever Hawthorne looked at an episode and said that he was puzzled by how Sir Humphrey was behaving, Jay would take him to one side and explain: ‘Well, he’s like Malvolio this week’, or ‘This week it’s Iago’.31 At this kind of insight, Hawthorne’s eyes would light up, he would gasp a triumphant ‘Aha!’ and would be off and running.

  The easy-going Derek Fowlds, on the other hand, was quite content to keep playing Bernard Woolley exactly as the pilot script had suggested, providing the link between the two main protagonists. Woolley, he agreed with the writers, was ‘both sides of centre, with slight leanings to the right and left’,32 and he was there not just to act but also (and perhaps even more importantly) to listen and react. There was no need to build up much of a backstory for Bernard. ‘You begin with the script, you end with the script,’ Fowlds would say, ‘and if you’re a good actor you can just stand there and say the lines.’33

  He had also, by this time, been admonished by Paul Eddington for attempting to act too much while they were filming the external scenes for the pilot. ‘I don’t know why, but I’d got these little glasses,’ Fowlds would recall, ‘and I put them on and I started to talk a bit like thet. And Paul and I were in the taxi, rehearsing, and he said, “Derek, why are you talking funny?” So I said, “Well, you know, Bernard’s a PPS, so, er, I thought I’d do something rather like thet.” So he said, “Why?” And then he said, “And what have you got those glasses on for?” I said, “Well, it’s all character stuff.” So he said, “Derek, take the glasses off. Just be you!”’34

  Apart from the characterisations, one other thing that everyone wanted to discuss were the caricatures that had formed part of the opening credits sequence. No one liked them. The actors, in particular, hated them.

  Drawn – in something of a hurry – by a hastily hired hand,35 the clumsiness of the execution had rather alarmed the performers.36 It was not hard to see why: Hacker looked like a bloated Regency roué, Sir Humphrey resembled the bastard child of Sid James and Tony Hancock, and Woolley appeared to be a badly drawn Beatle.

  A round-table discussion was duly held to determine what should be done to remedy the situation before the rest of the series was filmed. Hawthorne insisted that they hire another artist and, when asked who this should be, replied: ‘There is only one, and that’s Gerald Scarfe.’37 The suggestion – of a man whose work was driven with the precision of a Gillray-like satirical eye – met with unanimous approval (although Jonathan Lynn had initially been considering contacting Ralph Steadman), and
it was agreed that John Howard Davies would commission a new set of caricatures from the artist.

  Another complaint concerned the theme tune. Written by Max Harris (an experienced composer who had written the music for Anthony Newley’s experimental 1960 comedy series The Strange World of Gurney Slade as well as, more recently, Porridge, Open All Hours and the On the Buses movie), there had always been something half-hearted about the composition. Given little time to experiment, and little knowledge of the kind of show Yes Minister was likely to become, Harris had rushed to produce something – anything – that sounded right enough for the pilot edition. His piece had done the job without also doing what the best of such tunes did, namely capturing the real character of the sitcom. A jaunty yet aimless piece of music, dominated by trumpets and trombones, it had sounded rather like a marching band that had ended up in a cul-de-sac.

  The consensus, once again, was that it needed to be replaced, and so John Howard Davies decided to commission (for the modest sum of £157.5038) a new theme tune from the doyen of sitcom composers, Ronnie Hazlehurst. The new piece that he eventually came up with – a far more polished and stately affair complete with Big Ben chimes, spoiled only by the kind of rickety guitar sounds that were practically de rigueur in 1970s television music – would, though arguably not quite matching Hazlehurst’s very best work, certainly be deemed an improvement on its predecessor and was accepted as the new theme for the series.

  Capitalising on this climate of constructive criticism and piecemeal change, Paul Eddington could not resist also requesting that they do away with the traditional warm-up man. Yes Minister, he insisted, was not the sort of show that needed its audience to be given a sugar rush of forced hilarity prior to every recording. It would do well enough by trusting the script and respecting the viewers’ intelligence. Not everyone else felt as strongly about this as he did, and John Howard Davies certainly still believed that there had to be someone around to keep people alert and cheerful during the various lulls in action, but, after giving the matter some thought, he agreed to a compromise: they would use a warm-up man, but, rather than rely on a run-of-the-mill comedian (who would also have demanded a fee) they would instead settle for the more informal PR skills of the floor manager, Brian Jones (who would do it for nothing).