A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  In addition to these internal notes and queries, there was also a polite intervention from a few BBC executives who, having heard rumours that this new show would be unusual in its use of British politics as the basis for a sitcom, started expressing their concerns about possible objections from Whitehall and Westminster on the grounds of some kind of alleged ideological bias. This was one anxiety that was assuaged not by John Howard Davies but rather by Antony Jay.

  As a former editor of the Tonight programme, as well as the head of a current affairs documentary department, Jay – uniquely for a writer of a situation comedy – knew and understood the BBC’s political policy a great deal better than anyone in its Light Entertainment department, ‘who practically never came across it and who were terrified of it’. The result was that he could reassure the more nervous of Davies’ colleagues that there would always be a safe pair of hands dealing with anything potentially controversial in the show’s content. ‘I took charge of that side of the script-writing,’ Jay later confirmed, ‘and so there was never a problem with BBC policy. It was rather like being a libel lawyer: a really valuable one can tell you what you can do and say. It was the same with BBC policy: the more familiar you were with it, the more things you knew were perfectly acceptable; so it enabled us to be less timid about what we said about politics and the political system.’39

  The one other issue that, at this stage, needed to be addressed was the thorniest one of all: the director.

  There was still deep dissatisfaction with the whole approach of Stuart Allen, which for some bordered on outright hostility. Even though the writers and actors had combined to force him to adhere to the words as written, he had still managed to make certain moments in the pilot seem just a little broader than had been intended – the bottom wiggling, though greatly subdued, was still glimpsed – and the overall impression had been of a director going through the motions.

  It was clear, in fact, that the ill feeling was mutual. At that point Allen himself was well aware that he was not suited to this kind of material, or rather that this kind of material was not suited to him, and it therefore came as no surprise when he jumped at the chance to oversee another new ITV sitcom, Mind Your Language, which mainly revolved around immigrants who spoke in ‘funny’ accents. The job of producer/director of Yes Minister was now vacant.

  John Howard Davies, appreciating that his last choice had been a rare aberration on his part (although the main reason for it had been that none of the BBC’s in-house producer/directors had been available40), took more time on this occasion to find a director who fitted, and, after consulting Jay and Lynn and the actors, and sounding out a number of experienced figures, he eventually came down in favour of Sydney Lotterby. A BAFTA-winning veteran of BBC sitcoms, Lotterby (who had joined the Light Entertainment department back in 1958) had worked on such successes as Sykes and A …, Up Pompeii!, The Liver Birds, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, Last of the Summer Wine, Porridge, Going Straight and Open All Hours, and his calm, good-natured professionalism (along with his dry wit) had won him the trust and affection of many writers and performers (including Marty Feldman,41 who teased him in no fewer than three sketches for the At Last the 1948 Show – ‘The Four Sydney Lotterbys’, ‘The Return of the Four Sydney Lotterbys’ and ‘Sydney Lotterby Wants To Know The Test Score’ (all 1967)42 – and John Cleese, who would go on to name one of the characters in his 1997 movie Fierce Creatures after him, as well as Ronnie Barker, who treated him as a mentor).

  Davies knew that, first of all, Lotterby could be relied on to improve morale substantially. As Geoffrey Palmer (one actor who worked with him on numerous other projects) testified, he was ‘immensely painstaking and just creates the most lovely working atmosphere’.43 Davies also knew that, in the longer term, he would work hard to ensure that there was a smooth transition from script to screen.

  A Lotterby sitcom could be trusted to avoid lurching towards one or other of the genre’s two extremes: on the one hand, slapstick, overacting, and the mechanical repetition of set-up and punchline, and on the other, self-regarding artiness, aimless inaction and listless chatter. This is not, however, to suggest that there was anything meekly middle-of-the-road or cravenly mediocre about his programme-making approach. What he always aimed for was a well-written, well-paced, well-acted show that, as the BBC’s traditional light entertainment dictum put it, gave ‘viewers what they wanted – but better than they expected it’.44 A man who had the utmost respect for those who contributed the words and the performances, Lotterby (like such similarly talented colleagues as Duncan Wood, John Ammonds and Dennis Main Wilson) regarded his role as being one that cultivated rather than commodified what the creative talents did. As a consequence, his appointment was warmly welcomed by all those involved.

  With this and all of the other changes in place, the team could look forward at last to making the series. It was still going to be quite a logistical challenge, as neither of the writers (who were set to be paid a fee of £1,200 per script, minus agents’ commission, between the two of them45) could afford to give up their day jobs, and all of the actors had various theatre commitments inked into their diaries, but everyone involved was now determined to bring this sitcom to the screen.

  It was at that very moment of optimism that something strange happened. All of a sudden, the production was put on hold.

  The Labour Government was beginning to crumble, the widespread industrial unrest (exacerbated by a failed attempt to maintain pay restraint for another year) was worsening by the week and there were increasingly urgent calls for a General Election. The BBC, panicking about the need to be seen to avoid political controversy during the run-up to voting, feared that Yes Minister, among its other overtly ‘political’ programmes, might well end up reaching the screen right in the middle of what was promising to be an exceptionally fierce and fractious campaign … so it pulled the plug.

  This had been a sad tradition at the Corporation since the early 1960s, when That Was The Week That Was was abruptly cancelled when unofficial but nonetheless very intense pressure was brought to bear on the BBC to stop broadcasting satire in the months leading up to the 1964 General Election.46 Ever since then, certain tabloid (and a couple of broadsheet) newspapers, notorious for their progressively bitter anti-BBC agenda, had seized on anything screened that might have been thought to cause political divisions during such periods, and all of the main political parties themselves, in a similar spirit of cynical opportunism, followed suit, protesting long and loud at the supposed BBC bias against them in anything from conventional current affairs programmes to playful sketch shows and sitcoms. The consequence was that, by the late 1970s, few people at the Corporation seemed to have the stomach for fighting such high-profile complaints, and the tendency was to err well on the side of caution. Yes Minister, alas, was one of those productions that ended up as collateral damage.

  To be fair to those who reacted so rashly, the political portents did indeed seem exceptionally ominous at the start of 1979, just when the remaining episodes of Yes Minister were meant to go into production. The ailing Labour Government, which had been left with no overall majority following a by-election defeat in March of 1977, had only survived in subsequent months due to a fragile pact with the Liberal Party,47 and that agreement finally snapped apart in September 1978. As a result, the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, was widely expected to call a snap General Election, but he decided instead to gamble and go on as the leader of a minority Government in the hope that circumstances would improve before he was forced to go to the polls.

  The gamble, however, was destined to fail, and instead of the Prime Minister the media had dubbed ‘Sunny Jim’ emerging revitalised into a much warmer and more benign political climate, he would instead be plunged into a so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’, when the country was plagued by industrial action, economic disarray and administrative incompetence. From the last few months of 1978 through to the beginning of 1979, Britain would effective
ly be strikebound, with public servants staging mass walkouts, leaving food and fuel supplies undelivered, rubbish uncollected and, most notoriously, bodies unburied.

  While the BBC’s decision to slip Yes Minister onto the shelf was hugely disappointing, it was hardly inexplicable. As the first sitcom to deal so openly, honestly and accurately with Britain’s political system, it found itself the victim of its own novelty. It should have been allowed to go on, impartially satirising the system rather than mocking any of its constituent parts, but the backbone in broadcasting was no longer there.

  Everyone involved with the show was left feeling angry, frustrated and depressed. Stranded at the start of 1979, with the Government dragging itself doggedly on, there was not even a light at the end of the tunnel. They would just have to wait for however long it took until, ludicrously, it was deemed safe again for the BBC to screen whatever it wished.

  Reluctantly, the two writers went off to busy themselves with their other, solo concerns, and the actors, always anxious about ‘resting’, immersed themselves with diverse theatrical ventures. Nigel Hawthorne signed up to appear in a new production of Uncle Vanya (which was due to open in November at the Hampstead Theatre), while the similarly restless Paul Eddington was about to commit to co-starring with his old Good Life friend Richard Briers in the new Roger Hall comedy Middle Age Spread (which was set to start in the same month at the Lyric). Derek Fowlds, meanwhile, took on a number of one-off roles in various television dramas.

  Everyone waited. Although the Government might have given up at any moment, time seemed to pass more slowly with each uneventful day. Calendars were studied; clocks were watched. All that anyone could do was keep reading the newspapers and hope for news of an election.

  The papers, however, only added to the agony with their seemingly endless swathes of speculation. On 7 February, for example, it was widely reported that Labour Party whips, in response to the depressing-looking polls, were urging Callaghan to delay polling day until, at the very least, the autumn.48 On 15 February, a vague-sounding ‘concordat’ (dismissed by the Opposition as a ‘fig leaf’) was announced that suggested the TUC was prepared to prop up the Government for the foreseeable future in return for certain sympathetic deals with the unions.49 On 26 February, Callaghan took to the television, in a hastily arranged interview with BBC1’s Panorama programme, to make a desperate attempt at countering the calamitous-sounding opinion polls that were still rushing in. Then, on 4 March, there were more reports that, in defiance of the mounting pressures to resign, he was planning to ‘cling on until the autumn’.50 The scattered Yes Minister team now knew that there might be months more to wait until they could all reunite and resume their project.

  There were no doubts, Jonathan Lynn would say, that it would, eventually, be resumed, because the pilot had been so well received within the BBC. ‘But I had doubts,’ he later admitted, ‘about whether the series would interest enough people. I predicted a total of six episodes on BBC2, and would have been quite happy with that.’51

  The waiting game did not, as it happened, go on as long as was feared. It lasted until late on the night of 28 March, when the Government lost a motion of no confidence by a single vote.52 A General Election was finally called for 3 May, and the campaign duly began.

  The Conservatives won it, and a triumphant Margaret Thatcher stood on the steps of Number Ten and expressed the improbable wish that her Government would replace discord with harmony. She then stepped inside, the big black door shut behind her and life, officially, went back to normal.

  Whatever else the Yes Minister team might have thought about the result – and, as the vast majority of them (with the notable exception of Antony Jay) were either Labour or Liberal supporters, it seems unlikely that the reaction was positive – they could at least look forward, after months of miserable inactivity, to getting back to work. This time the sitcom really was going to happen.

  John Howard Davies signalled his intent by commissioning a seventh and final script for the series on the day after the election. Paying them a fee of £725 each, he set the writers a deadline of 30 September 1979.53

  There was still a delay, however, as each member of the team needed to deal with their various other commitments and find space in their respective diaries, and Davies himself still needed to negotiate an appropriate schedule for the production, but, after a few more months, everything, and everyone, was back in place and the process was ready to be restarted. There was little to be done to the scripts, because, although all but one of them had been written during what was now an outdated period in politics, Jay and Lynn had always eschewed overt topicality, and so the themes remained just as relevant as they had been the year before. The same was true of the characters, who were never meant to be suggestive of any particular party or person, and so required no rethinking.

  Once the whole team could reconvene, therefore, the hard work could begin, and – after the longest tea break in sitcom history – production started again towards the end of the year. Brian Wenham, the Controller of BBC2, had made plans to start broadcasting the series in late February 1980, so there was no time to be lost.

  First, the series fees had to be agreed. The actors were remunerated mainly in terms of their perceived status within the show, so Eddington, as its ostensible star, would receive £750 per episode (a modest figure compared to, say, the £1,500 that David Jason would soon be receiving for Only Fools and Horses54), followed by Hawthorne on £550 and Fowlds on £275, with the supporting cast receiving sums averaging around £165 per programme. Jay and Lynn, meanwhile, received a modest increase for the filming of their scripts, rising from the £600 each of them earned for the pilot to £750 apiece for the subsequent episodes.55

  The next priority was to record the external scenes and shots ahead of the studio sessions, so all of them were filmed in one busy week from 9 to 16 December 1979. The Welsh Office in Whitehall was chosen to pass for the outside of the Department of Administrative Affairs (a practice that would continue for subsequent series), and other locations included RAF Northolt in Ruislip, a street of shops in Kingston upon Thames, The Metals Society in London’s Carlton House Terrace and the north end of Platform 1 at King’s Cross Station.56

  The new signature tune came next. Ronnie Hazlehurst recorded it in one session at Lime Grove Studios on 18 December.57

  Meanwhile, the set designers were taking great care to ensure that all of the interiors within Whitehall would be as detailed and believable as possible. An indication of this can be found in the prop requests from this time. For Hacker’s office, for example, the items acquired included: one oval conference table; six upright chairs; two armchairs (one brown velvet and the other upright leather); twelve copies of Hansard; two Ministerial red boxes; two telephones; a selection of government stationery; a pair of large in and out trays; a desk writing set; a noticeboard; two zip-up document cases; a dictating machine; a copy of all the daily newspapers; a drinks cabinet; one bottle of Bell’s whisky; one bottle of Queen Anne whisky; one bottle of Booth’s gin; two bottles of Tio Pepe sherry; three small bottles of bitter lemon; three small bottles of dry ginger ale; two bottles of Malvern water; two bottles of ginger cordial; one bottle of blackcurrant cordial; six plain whisky tumblers; six gin glasses; six sherry schooners and a metal ice bucket with tongs. It was to be an office that did not seem to belong to any particular Minister, an office that was more suited to anxiously entertaining a wide range of visitors rather than satisfying its actual incumbent.58

  Sir Humphrey’s office was decorated with similar thoughtfulness. There were more books (usually leather-bound and mainly about the law), more tasteful paintings, more ashtrays and more expensive and elegant creature comforts. It was a lair, a den, a place for intrigue, introspection and, eventually, gloating. Even the contents of his own drinks cabinet were made to look distinct from Hacker’s in order to complement his character: all of the glasses were mock crystal, with a choice of small and large ones for his bett
er brands of sherry, and he was also given an expensive-looking soda syphon.

  Rehearsals began back inside Room 601 at the ‘Acton Hilton’ on New Year’s Day. Paul Eddington, by this time, was back on the West End stage as the star of Middle Age Spread, and so, as with preparations for the pilot episode, the schedule had to be nipped and tucked to cope with his occasional absences.

  The actors would join Sydney Lotterby on a Tuesday for a read-through of the latest episode, followed by a first basic rehearsal; they met again on Wednesday morning for a few more hours’ work before Eddington had to set off for a matinee; Thursday was the first full day for everyone to start really mastering their performances, and Friday would be another full day of rehearsal. Saturday would see them perform a technical run-through and another complete performance, and then they would reconvene on Sunday at 10 a.m. for a long sequence of technical and dress rehearsals. Then, at 8 p.m. (either in Studio 4 or 8) the recording would commence. There would be a quick drink at 10 p.m. after the show, and everyone would drift off into the night.

  This was the strict, rigorous, intense timetable, repeated week after week throughout January and most of February, which would enable Yes Minister to be ready and recorded in time to reach the screen. No one complained about the rush; after waiting for so long, there was, if anything, an impatience to get everything done.