A Very Courageous Decision
Page 44
19 Nigel Hawthorne, quoted in the Independent, 7 November 1995, p. 10.
20 Nigel Hawthorne, Daily Express, 24 November 1984, p. 17.
21 Nigel Hawthorne, interviewed for the ‘Cranky Critic’ website: http://www.crankycritic.com/qa/nigelhawthorne.html.
22 Ibid.
23 Hawthorne, Straight Face, p. 291.
24 Observer, 5 September 1999, p. G14.
25 Hawthorne, Straight Face, p. 324.
26 Ibid. p. 290.
27 Yes Minister, series two, episode two, ‘Doing the Honours’.
28 Nigel Hawthorne, speaking on BBC news, 23 February 1999.
29 Trevor Bentham in Hawthorne, Straight Face, p. 328.
30 Derek Fowlds, BBC Radio 5 Live, 6 November 1995.
31 Derek Fowlds, quoted in the Daily Express, 10 January 2002, p. 24.
32 Inspector Morse: ‘The Settling of the Sun’, first broadcast on ITV, 15 March 1988.
33 Boon: ‘Best Left Buried’, first broadcast on ITV, 4 December 1990.
34 Van der Valk: ‘The Little Rascals’, first broadcast on ITV, 6 February 1991.
35 The Darling Buds of May: ‘The Season of Heavenly Gifts: part one’, first broadcast on ITV, 23 February 1992.
36 Derek Fowlds, interview with the author, 3 February 2014.
37 Derek Fowlds, interview with the author, 3 February 2014.
38 Derek Fowlds, interview with the author, 3 February 2014.
39 South China Morning Post, 30 October 2012, p. 8.
40 The premise of the Yes, Prime Minister computer game was that, as Jim Hacker, one had to survive for one week as Prime Minister by overcoming various political crises and challenges, assisted by Bernard Woolley and undermined by Sir Humphrey Appleby.
41 Sky Television had begun a four-channel service of general entertainment (Sky Channel), movies (Sky Movies), sport (Eurosport) and rolling news (Sky News) on 5 February 1989, and British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) brought several more channels to the air early on in the following year, but in November 1990, a fifty-fifty merger was announced to form a single company, operating as British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), but marketed as Sky. UK Gold was launched in 1992, but expanded its operation and increased its sitcom content in 1997.
42 Jonathan Lynn, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
43 Jonathan Lynn, quoted by IGN Entertainment website, 25 August 2013: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2003/08/25/an-interview-with-jonathan-lynn.
44 The BFI ‘TV 100’ poll was chosen by members of the TV industry throughout the UK (1,600 programme-makers, critics, writers and executives were invited to give their professional opinions and personal tastes). Each voter was given a ‘big list’ of 650 programmes in six genres, along with spaces for any titles not included. The resulting top ten – announced in September 2000 – was as follows: 1 Fawlty Towers; 2 Cathy Come Home; 3 Doctor Who; 4 The Naked Civil Servant; 5 Monty Python’s Flying Circus; 6 Blue Peter; 7 Boys From the Blackstuff; 8 Parkinson; 9 Yes Minister/Yes, Prime Minister; 10 Brideshead Revisited.
45 Britain’s Best Sitcom was broadcast by the BBC in 2004. The top five were as follows: 1 Only Fools and Horses; 2 Blackadder; 3 The Vicar of Dibley; 4 Dad’s Army; 5 Fawlty Towers.
46 30 Greatest Political Comedies was first broadcast on Channel 4 on 11 December 2006; an updated poll formed the basis of a second programme that was broadcast on 17 April 2010.
47 Armando Iannucci, speaking on Britain’s Best Sitcom, first broadcast on BBC2, 7 February 2004.
48 The Thick of It, series one, episode one, first broadcast on BBC Four, 19 May 2005.
49 Veep, season two, episode two, first broadcast by HBO in the US on 21 April 2013.
50 Tony Benn, Hansard, HC Deb. 20 May 1992, vol. 208 c. 316.
51 Richard Spring, Hansard, HC Deb. 5 June 1998, vol. 313 c. 653.
52 Vince Cable, Hansard, HC Deb. 21 December 2000, vol. 360 c. 147.
53 John Major, Hansard, HC Deb. 13 July 2000, vol. 353 c. 1115.
54 George Osborne, Hansard, HC Deb. 1 July 2002, vol. 388 c. 49.
55 Peter Hain, Hansard, HC Deb. 13 January 2004, vol. 416 c. 668.
56 Michael Portillo, Sunday Times, 14 December 2008, p. 11.
57 Tony Blair, A Journey (London: Arrow, 2011), p. 516.
58 Lord Donoughue, interview with the author, 25 March 2014.
59 Yes, Prime Minister, series two, episode seven: ‘The National Education Service’.
60 The so-called ‘Granita pact’ dated back to 1994, when Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were alleged to have had an after-hours têteà-tête at the Granita restaurant on Upper Street, Islington on 31 May. It was there that the two frontbenchers were supposed to have forged the agreement that led Brown to announce the following day that he would not be standing for the vacant Labour leadership. The Shadow Chancellor duly announced that he would not be a candidate for the leadership, but would instead ‘encourage’ his friend, the Shadow Home Secretary, to run. In return for dropping out of contention, Brown was alleged to have secured an apparent ‘guarantee’ from Blair that a Labour administration would be driven by a Brownite ‘fairness agenda’. Some sources also claimed that another agreement was that Blair would eventually step down, probably by 2001, and allow Brown to succeed him. When the Blair Government subsequently veered away from the Brownite agenda, and Blair showed no signs of stepping down, the acrimony between the two men grew increasingly intense. Gordon Brown himself, however, addressed the whole story in an interview in 2010, three years after he had finally become Prime Minister. He said: ‘There was no deal struck at Granita’s. That’s been one of the great myths and people have written about it. I’d already agreed with Tony before that dinner that he would stand for the leadership and I would stay on as the Shadow Chancellor, as the person in charge of economic policy. And there’s an understanding that at some point Tony would stand down and he would support me if, when, that was the case. And that’s where we left it’ (Life Stories: Gordon Brown, first broadcast on ITV1 on 14 February 2010).
61 Yes, Prime Minister, series one, episode three: ‘The Smoke Screen’.
62 David Cameron, quoted in the Guardian, 13 April 2012, p. 4.
PART FOUR
Frontispiece quotations:
Benjamin Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’ (1819), trans. Biancamaria Fontana, Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 326.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (1840), trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen, Fourth Book, Chapter VI (New York: Vintage, 1945), p. 339.
13 The Revival
Header quotation: John Lennon, speaking at the end of the live recording of ‘Get Back’ (1969).
1 Jonathan Lynn, Financial Times, 20 August 2011, p. 2.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Antony Jay, interview with the author, 3 February 2014.
5 Jonathan Lynn, 1 February 2014.
6 Jonathan Lynn, publicity interview, 2010.
7 Lord Donoughue (interview with the author, 25 Match 2014): ‘I contributed three bits to it. One was the global warming bit, one was the BBC bit, and there was one other little subplot.’
8 Jonathan Lynn, quoted in Saga Magazine, 15 January 2013, pp. 58–61.
9 Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, New Statesman, 20 June 2011, p. 35.
10 Ibid.
11 Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2008, p. 1; La Repubblica, 28 April 2009, p. 1; Corriere del Mezzogiorno, 28 April 2009, p. 1.
12 Jonathan Lynn, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
13 Jonathan Lynn, quotes in The Times, 7 May 2010, p. 12.
14 Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 21 May 2010, p. 59.
15 Michael Billington, Guardian, 21 May 2010, p. 40.
16 Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2010, p. 31.
17 Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 21 May 2010, p. 59.
18 Jeremy Kingston, The Times, 28 September 2010, p. 54.<
br />
19 Following the allegations about sexual abuse concerning the late Jimmy Savile, which started being publicised in September 2012, a police investigation dubbed ‘Operation Yewtree’ was launched in October. After a period of assessment, it was made into a full criminal investigation, involving inquiries into living people as well as Savile, about the alleged sexual abuse of victims ranging from prepubescent girls and boys to adults.
20 Myron Meisel, Hollywood Reporter, 14 June 2013, p. 14.
21 Jonathan Lynn, quoted on the comedy news website Chortle: http://www.chortle.co.uk/interviews/2013/01/04/16891/i%92m_perpetually_shockable._and_the_fact_that_i%92m_shocked_means_i_have_to_write_about_it.
22 Jonathan Lynn, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
23 Antony Jay interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
24 Jonathan Lynn, speaking to Public Media for North Texas, 24 June 2013.
25 Source: BARB.
26 Tom Sutcliffe, Independent, 16 January 2013, p. 36.
27 Mark Monahan, Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2013, p. 32.
28 Sam Wollaston, Guardian, 16 January 2013, p. 21.
29 Comments quoted from Twitter, 15 January 2013.
30 Among those questioned by me were David Cameron, Ed Miliband, William Hague, Alan Johnson, Tessa Jowell, Jacqui Smith and Theresa May.
31 In March 1998, the ‘unfair’ imprisonment of Deirdre Rachid, a gravel-voiced fictional character in the ITV soap Coronation Street, moved the Prime Minister of the time, Tony Blair, as well as his Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition, to make public statements about her case. Blair, for example, was said to have urged the Home Secretary to investigate ‘and is set to press for a rapid appeal or even a retrial’ (see Mark Lawson, ‘Stranger than fiction’, Guardian, 4 April 1998, p. 21).
32 In November 2008, Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister, took time out from perusing the works of David Hume and Adam Smith, and dealing with the country’s economic crisis, in order to pen ‘good luck’ letters to his favourite contestants in the ITV revamp of Opportunity Knocks, The X Factor. ‘Whatever the final outcome,’ he gushed to one of them, ‘yours is one of the great stories of this year’s competition, and I know you will go on to great success in the future’. (See the Daily Mirror, 17 November 2008, p. 7.)
33 Derek Fowlds, interview with the author, 3 February 2014.
34 Antony Jay combined the two concerns in December 2011 when he took the opportunity at the launch of a report (for which he had written the Foreword) by the Global Warming Policy Foundation to claim that the BBC was biased in many ways, including over climate change.
35 Yes, Prime Minister (2013), series one, episode four: ‘A Diplomatic Dilemma’.
36 The Times, 16 February 2013, p. 32.
37 Source: BARB.
38 I’m indebted to my editor at Aurum, Sam Harrison, for encouraging me to think about this point.
Epilogue
Frontispiece quotations:
Huw Wheldon, The British Experience in Television (London: BBC, 1976), p. 1.
George Orwell, ‘Funny, but not Vulgar’ (1945) in Essays (Everyman: London, 2002), p. 781.
1 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, Introduction to the 2nd edn (1872), p. 278.
2 See John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), section XII, in Gray (ed.) On Liberty and Other Essays, pp. 378–9
3 Ibid, section XII, p. 381.
4 Antony Jay, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
5 Jonathan Lynn, interview with the author, 1 February 2014.
6 Derek Fowlds, interview with the author, 3 February 2014.
7 Sydney Lotterby, interview with the author, 8 July 2014.
8 Lord Donoughue, interview with the author, 25 March 2014.
9 Armando Iannucci, ‘Yes, Minister: nothing changes’, Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2004, p. 19.
10 See Bagehot, The English Constitution, p. 31.
11 See Hansard, HC Deb. 20 November 1985, vol. 87 cc. 277–366.
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YES MINISTER
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