Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.
It all started back in 1962. Two men, one a thirty-two-year-old BBC current affairs editor named Antony Jay and the other a nineteen-year-old Cambridge law undergraduate called Jonathan Lynn, were both drawn, quite independently of each other, to the widespread media coverage of a political saga that, as it developed, seemed to epitomise the strange effect that the political system could have on a supposedly ordinary individual.
The story concerned the Labour MP Sir Frank Soskice, a sober-minded and well-regarded barrister turned politician (praised by the press for ‘his disdain for intrigue and his indifference to flattery’1) who was at that time the Shadow Cabinet’s spokesman for Home Affairs and a well-known campaigner against capital punishment. Sir Frank had just helped start a petition to secure a posthumous pardon for Timothy Evans, a semi-literate van driver with an estimated mental age of ten and a half, who had been executed back in March 1950 for the murder of his daughter inside the family’s top-floor flat at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill Gate, west London.
During his trial, Evans had accused one of the chief witnesses against him, his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, of being the real killer of his wife as well as his daughter, but his claims had been dismissed. Three years after Evans’ execution, however, Christie was finally exposed as a serial killer who had murdered at least eight women in the same house, secreting some of their bodies in various parts of the building. Shortly before his own execution in July 1953, Christie confessed to murdering Evans’ wife, and, although he continued to deny it, was strongly suspected also of strangling the daughter.
As public unrest over the soundness of the original ruling mounted, a private inquiry, led by John Scott Henderson QC, was promptly set up to examine the possible miscarriage of justice in Evans’ hanging. The result of the almost risibly perfunctory week-long investigation, however, was deemed such a whitewash in favour of the police that, far from defusing the situation, it only served to make it seem even more incendiary than before.
Questions continued to be raised in Parliament over the handling of the matter and, in 1955, the editors of the Observer, the Spectator, the National and English Review and the Yorkshire Post formed a delegation to petition the Home Secretary to grant a new inquiry. In the same year, a book about the case, The Man on Your Conscience by the solicitor Michael Eddowes, provided a compelling argument suggesting that Evans had actually been innocent, thus further stimulating widespread debate. Although the demand for a new inquiry was denied,2 the campaign for justice continued into the next decade, when another book on the subject, the television journalist Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place (1961), dramatically revived public interest in the case.
A large number of politicians, citing the evidence that had been set out so clearly and powerfully in Kennedy’s recent book, urged the then Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, to order a second inquiry, but Butler stood firm and refused. Claiming that ‘witnesses’ recollection of the events of 1949 must inevitably have been dimmed by the [passage] of time’, and deeming Kennedy’s book to be of interest only ‘in its presentation of the case for believing Evans to have been innocent rather than in its addition to the information already available’, he concluded that ‘a further inquiry could not bring any new information to light’.3 This only exacerbated the anger among many Opposition MPs, and one of them, Patrick Gordon Walker, initiated a new House of Commons debate on the subject in June 1961.
Sir Frank Soskice, predictably, was one of the first MPs to rise and contribute to the proceedings. ‘I desire to make a most earnest appeal to the Home Secretary,’ he said, ‘to accept the suggestion that there should be a further investigation into the circumstances of this case. […] If ever there was a debt due to justice, and to the reputation both of our own judicial system and to the public conscience of many millions of people in this country, that debt is one that the Home Secretary should now pay’.4
Once again, the Opposition was defeated and the controversy dragged on, with Sir Frank and others pledging their support the following year for the petition demanding that Evans be granted a posthumous pardon. It was at this point, as the various media summaries of the saga so far started to circulate, that Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, along with many other people, refreshed their memories of the case and looked forward with interest to how it might finally be resolved.
It did not seem as though they would have long to wait. When the Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell died at the beginning of 1963, he was replaced by the more incisive Harold Wilson, who, among other things, was an outspoken opponent of capital punishment and a strong critic of how the Evans case had been handled. One of the first promises he made, as the new Leader of the Opposition, was a vow to do whatever he could to push through a bill that abolished the death penalty.5 It seemed only a matter of time, therefore, once Labour won the October 1964 General Election, that Sir Frank Soskice and his fellow campaigners would finally see Evans declared innocent.
The next time the issue was raised in Parliament, however, in February 1965, the new Home Secretary summarily declined the request, explaining without any sound or sign of regret that too many years had passed ‘to elicit the truth about this tragic case’, claiming that he himself was ambivalent about the matter (‘I certainly think it would be kinder not to express views one way or the other’), and then adding: ‘Even if the innocence of Evans were established, I have no power to make an official declaration of it’.6 In spite of a succession of loud and passionate pleas to think again, he flatly refused to relent, insisting: ‘I think it is much better that the matter should be left as it is’.7 Many people both inside and outside of Parliament would have been surprised at the Home Secretary’s ruling, no matter who he happened to be. In this particular instance, however, they were especially shocked, because this new Home Secretary happened to be none other than Sir Frank Soskice.
The sheer irony of the situation was astounding. Here was a Home Secretary effectively snubbing himself, or at least his slightly younger self, after years of campaigning, now that he finally had the power to do what he had always demanded.
The most cynical of insiders put this seemingly bizarre volte-face down simply to the exigencies of ambition: ‘Such are the unfortunate effects of office in general,’ observed the Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas, while betraying more than a trace of a smirk, ‘and the Home Office in particular’8. More idealistic voices raged at what they regarded as Sir Frank’s brazen hypocrisy (a visibly furious Ian Gilmour, a Conservative MP who had formerly campaigned alongside Sir Frank for justice on this very matter, asked him to explain to the House ‘why it would be kinder to the relatives of Timothy Evans not to say that he was innocent if he was, in fact, innocent’9). While Roy Jenkins, the man who would soon replace him as Home Secretary, was content to explain it away as the consequence of personal incompetence (claiming that Sir Frank had ‘practically no political sense and an obsessive respect for legal precedent’10).
The most common explanation, among the broader public, was simply that here was yet another politician whose principles had proven to be far more pliable than his passion for self-preservation. Following on from such recent political embarrassments as Tam Galbraith’s entanglement in a sex and espionage scandal;11 Harold Macmillan’s self-serving purge of one-third of his own Cabinet;12 John Profumo’s Parliamentary perjury when challenged about his alleged affair with the mistress of a Soviet spy;13 and the 14th Earl of Home’s eager use of the new Peerage Act – which he had formerly seemed so disinclined to support during its passage through the Lords – in order to disclaim his title and return to the House of Commons as Prime Minister;14 Sir Frank’s perverse case of self-betrayal struck many disenchanted onlookers as more or less par for the course in British politics.
A thoughtful few, however, were left pondering what could possibly go on within the country’s dimly lit and labyrinthine political system to convince such characters that there was any real logic to their illogicality. Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn were certainly among those whose imaginations were captured by this question.
It made them think more rigorously about politics. It also made them think more carefully about comedy. This was, after all, a sequence of events that, while very serious, also seemed, in a sense, far more strangely, sardonically amusing than anything most playwrights might have plotted. Truth, it appeared, really could be much funnier than fiction.
What both of these men shared, at this stage, was a perspective on such things that owed much to the modus operandi cultivated at their shared alma mater. Marked by a stringency less urbane and more restlessly reductive than the equivalent intellectual culture evident at Oxford at the same time, the dominant disposition in Cambridge, during that post-war age, was, as far as the humanities were concerned, the kind of dogged and disciplined disputatiousness epitomised by the followers of F.R. Leavis and the disciples of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Every discussion, at every level, seemed to rock to the same relentless rhythm of the classic Cantabrigian conjunction: ‘But what do you mean by … But could it … But should it … But what if …?’
Antony Jay had gone to Cambridge in 1949 to study Classics and Comparative Philology at Magdalene College. Jonathan Lynn had arrived in 1961 to read Law at Pembroke College.
Both of them witnessed at close hand the kind of characters who were already intent on becoming part of Britain’s political Establishment, rushing to sign up to the student version of their favoured political party and wasting no time before making their voice heard in the main debates. Jay was a contemporary of future Conservative Party Cabinet Ministers Douglas Hurd, John Biffen, Norman St John-Stevas and Cecil Parkinson, as well as the Labour MP Greville Janner. Lynn found himself stuck in the middle of a veritable glut of future Thatcherites that included Norman Lamont, Michael Howard, John Selwyn Gummer, Peter Bottomley and Peter Lilley, as well as a Liberal-leaning economist called Vince Cable.
Although both Jay and Lynn were, if anything, just as preoccupied by political ideas, neither was impressed by the naked ambition and tunnel vision these contemporaries all displayed. Lynn, in particular, found the vast majority of them ‘smug young men’ who oozed the kind of confidence that suggested they saw themselves as predestined for prominence in Parliament.
Their natural habitat was the unnatural habitat of the Union Society’s debating chamber, situated behind the Round Church in Bridge Street. A wooden-floored, leather-seated, stuffy Victorian construction modelled loosely on the House of Commons, it was the place where these young men, looking prematurely middle-aged with their flat, brilliantined hair, bow ties and dinner jackets, spouted their ‘pimply puerility’ on a regular basis. ‘Their unwarranted confidence in their own abilities,’ Lynn would later recall, ‘was a sight to behold’.15
It was, in its own quaint way, a kind of theatre, but this was a theatre devoid of all deliberate irony. The only appeal it held for Jay and Lynn was of a limited anthropological nature, suited to a short period of study before being consigned to the mind as a memory. The only effect that it had on either of them was to push them away from conventional political participation and towards critical commentary: ‘It became clear to me,’ Lynn would recall, ‘that my only role in politics could be to ridicule the system’.16
Jay, outside of his formal studies, preferred to seek out the kind of pastimes that would relax and refresh him, rather than frittering away his free hours squabbling with the student politicians. His extra-curricular interests included ‘cricket, hockey, bridge, squash and editing the college magazine. I did think about joining the Footlights – my parents were both on the stage – but it would have meant abandoning my hopes of a decent degree, which considering I had a major classical scholarship seemed a pity. After all, I could act later, but I couldn’t get a degree later’.17
He also began to feed what would be a lifelong fascination with the politics of organisations, quickly understanding, in his own environment, how the image of Cambridge as one big university ruling over a collection of little colleges obscured a reality that was its opposite, with the colleges (which he likened to ‘feudal baronies’18) combining to keep the university impotent and thus ensure that any proposed reforms (unless the biggest and wealthiest colleges really wanted them) would be thwarted.
Jonathan Lynn, once alienated from the Union debates (the fact that his parents had paid for him to be a life member, in the hope that he might end up as its president, obliged him to linger a little longer than he would otherwise have liked), was soon drawn to the more conventional and inclusive form of theatre provided by the University’s Footlights Society. He continued to find elements of interest in his studies (and was particularly impressed by the teachings of Brian King, an unusually progressive Lecturer in Jurisprudence, who brought a more worldly, sociological and psychological perspective to how laws actually work in practical reality19), but, increasingly, it would be the Footlights that consumed most of his time. It was here, along with such talented contemporaries as future Pythons John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, and Goodies Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie, as well as future director Richard Eyre, writer/actor Tony Hendra and producers David Hatch and Humphrey Barclay, that Lynn first explored his potential both as a writer and performer.
It was certainly propitious that he was based at Pembroke, because, in those days, the place had acquired the informal name of ‘the comedy college’. The huge influence of its most precociously talented alumnus Peter Cook, who had graduated in 1960 and immediately gone on to find national fame as part of the Beyond the Fringe quartet, remained rich and widespread in Cambridge when Lynn, along with his friend Eric Idle, performed a sketch together at a Pembroke ‘smoker’ (an annual revue that served as a showcase for new talent), which led in turn to a reprise at a Footlights smoker and earned them entry into the University’s broadest-based comedy troupe.
There was no instant impact: at the end of Lynn’s second year as a student, his first contribution to a Footlights revue (A Clump of Plinths), saw him limited to playing the drums (he was a keen jazz drummer) down in the orchestra pit. He did much better at the end of his third and final year, however, appearing onstage as a bona fide member of the cast in a revue entitled Stuff What Dreams Are Made Of, which also featured Graeme Garden, Eric Idle, John Cameron (later known for his work on TV and in movies as a composer and arranger), David Gooderson (an actor and director who would end up being best known for playing ‘Davros’ in Dr Who), Sue Heber-Percy, Flick Hough, Mark Lushington (who went on to serve as a union leader for the NUT in Hackney) and Guy Slater (another member who would forge a career as an actor, writer and director).
As with so many students whose attention was distracted from their formal studies by the glare and glamour of the Footlights, Lynn ended up in the summer of 1964 underperforming academically with a disappointing Lower Second degree, and consequently abandoned the idea of a life in Law in favour of pursuing his interest in writing and performing. Jay, on the other hand, had graduated in 1952 with a flawless First and, after a couple of years of compulsory National Service in the Royal Signals (where he rose to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant), had embarked on a broadcasting career at the BBC.
Jay would later describe his outlook during the nine years that he spent working in talks and current affairs at the Corporation as that of ‘a card-carrying media liberal’,20 and, according to his own recollections, such an outlook was fast becoming the norm in Britain’s metropolitan culture. He was part of a new generation of young writers, editors, producers and reporters who, having grown up during an era defined by a world war, in a country ruled by censorship, identity cards, rationing and relentless regimentation, were now, as adults, eager for greater freedom and deeply suspicious of those who seemed content with the status quo.
Jay’s first major job was to help bring to the screen a new kind of current affairs programme that reflected the change in the national mood away from deference and paternalism towards a more informal, critical and questioning attitude. Championed by two of the BBC’s most innovative and iconoclastic young programme-makers, Donald Baverstock (a future Controller of BBC1) and Alasdair Milne (a future Director-General), this new programme, which was to be called Tonight and would be broadcast live five nights a week, was designed to sweep away British television’s traditional approach to covering the news and current affairs – an approach which relied on a starchy, stiff-lipped style that Baverstock and Milne found far too dull, submissive and condescending – and replace it with something that was lively, varied, relaxed, seriously journalistic, occasionally very playful but also essentially moral.21 The idea, as one of their bosses Grace Wyndham Goldie would later put it, was to create a programme that was firmly and clearly on the side of the viewer rather than the rulers, and would speak up for them rather than down to them. ‘Power,’ she wrote, ‘even the power endorsed by election in a democratic society, did not confer wisdom, and those who wielded it could be questioned’.22
Jay could not have been more suited to supporting such a venture, and, initially as film director, later as editor, he would help make the programme one of the great success stories of British television’s post-war era, launching the careers of a tidal wave of memorably distinctive reporters (including Cliff Michelmore, Alan Whicker, Fyfe Robertson, Magnus Magnusson, Julian Pettifer, Michael Cockerell, Cynthia Judah, Macdonald Hastings, Brian Redhead and Kenneth Allsop). First broadcast on 18 February 1957, the Tonight programme grew rapidly in popularity – to the point where it attracted a nightly audience of around seven million viewers – and won unprecedented critical prestige. Perhaps inevitably, given that it began just over a year after Harold Macmillan arrived at Number Ten and ended in 1965 about twenty months after he departed, the new Prime Minister became one of the most enduring targets of its opprobrium – but he was far from being alone.
‘[We] were not just anti-Macmillan,’ Jay would recall, ‘we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority’.23 This was a somewhat misleading exaggeration – the programme sought to apportion praise as well as blame, and could be constructive as well as destructive – but it certainly did refuse to accept, prima facie, any explanation by the Establishment designed to justify its actions. What it showed politicians, in particular, was that, from this point on, television existed to make them accountable rather than merely visible, and, as a consequence, the programme set a new and higher standard for the way current affairs was covered.
While Antony Jay was making his name as an editor and producer, Jonathan Lynn was beginning to establish himself on the stage and screen as an entertainer. Shortly after graduation, he had been recruited by his old Footlights colleagues John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie, who had renamed their old Clump of Plinths revue Cambridge Circus and restaged it in London’s West End. One of their fellow cast members, Chris Stuart-Clark, had since dropped out to pursue other interests, and so, in May 1964, Lynn was enlisted just in time to join them on a short tour of New Zealand before transferring in September to New York; first for a short run at the Plymouth Theater on Broadway, and then, for the remainder of the year, at a cosier café theatre in Greenwich Village.
Encouraged by the experience, which had not only exposed him to large theatre audiences but also given him his television debut on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show, Lynn returned to Britain and began working steadily over the next few years as an actor in repertory, spending time in companies based in Leicester, Edinburgh and at the Bristol Old Vic, as well as the odd production in London, appearing in everything from The Taming of the Shrew to Fiddler on the Roof and receiving a nomination for a Plays and Players award as ‘Most Promising New Actor’ for his performance in Paul Ableman’s 1965 two-act comedy Green Julia.
He also joined his old Cambridge contemporaries Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tony Buffery, along with Oxford graduates Terry Jones and Michael Palin, to make a short-lived but memorable sketch show called Twice a Fortnight. Produced and directed by Tony Palmer (‘in front of a tanked-up audience’24), it was screened on BBC1 during 1967, ran for ten editions and featured not only the kind of fresh, irreverent and unconventional humour that would help create the culture in which the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus would soon thrive, but also, with its regular musical guests (which included Cream, The Who and The Small Faces), paved the way for a new style of youth-oriented variety show that mixed comedy with popular music.
By the end of the decade, however, Lynn was looking to develop a second, complementary career as a writer, and he got his chance after joining the cast of a new ITV sitcom (adapted by, among others, Lynn’s fellow Footlights alumni John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden from the bestselling stories by Richard Gordon, and produced by another old college friend Humphrey Barclay), called Doctor in the House (1969). Although he was dropped as an actor when the show returned for a second series, entitled Doctor at Large (1971), the friendship that he had formed with one of the show’s main stars, George Layton, led to them collaborating (with Layton using his occasional pseudonym of ‘Oliver Fry’) on a script for one of the episodes.25
It helped that Lynn came from a family of doctors, so he could draw on a fund of real-life medical stories, but there was also a freshness and paciness about the comedy that he crafted with Layton. The episode slipped slyly from a mundane-sounding first act about nurses ‘with big bazookas’ into a surprising second act that mocked male hypocrisy and consequently stood out. Barclay, indeed, was so impressed with their writing that he went on to use them regularly in future series, including Doctor in Charge (1972–3), Doctor at Sea (1974) and Doctor on the Go (1975), and they also started supplying scripts for a number of other sitcoms, including several episodes in 1972 of ITV’s creakily coarse but consistently popular On the Buses.
Even though he was confined by the context of such formulaic fare, Lynn still showed an intriguing ability to slip in some detail, exchange or sequence that gave an otherwise anodyne scenario a little more character and clout. In a predictably farcical episode of Doctor in Charge entitled ‘Which Doctor’, for example, viewers were treated to a brief but unusually sardonic glimpse (for ITV at least) of the old boys’ network, as one insufferably smug senior Harley Street surgeon, after cheerfully bidding farewell to a now useless dying patient (‘I’ll miss his money’), brags to his NHS equivalent about his busy practice (‘business is booming’) and recent knighthood, and hints that a lesser gong might be obtainable via one of his glamorous cocktail parties (‘We’ll get an OBE for you yet, Geoffrey!’). It was this good sense of when and how to give such conventional shows a bit of bite that made producers increasingly appreciative of Lynn’s ability to shape a script.26
It did not take too long, however, for him to feel as though, in spite of such signature touches, he was fast becoming the servant of the sitcom ‘sausage machine’,27 stuffing in a tiny bit of meat with plenty of filler and artificial flavourings, to keep each familiar format going. He wanted to try to write episodes that were more ‘grown up’, featuring less conventional and more satirical themes and situations, but, time and again, the producers of existing sitcoms kept passing on such proposals. Eventually, for want of another option, he and Layton decided to create a show of their own.
Entitled My Brother’s Keeper, it was envisaged by Lynn as a fairly daring affair that explored the idea, which he had been pondering ever since his undergraduate days, that there was a surprisingly slender psychological line separating law enforcers from law breakers (a criminology study of identical twins separated at birth had found that, of thirteen persistent offenders, nine of their long-lost brothers had also grown up to be persistent offenders, while the other four had become policemen28). He planned to play a petty criminal, called Pete Booth, whose twin brother Brian, played by Layton, was a dutiful policeman. Slowly but surely, however, the premise was prodded and poked by ITV producers until it was deemed safer and more suitable for one of its prime-time comedy slots, with the criminal being replaced by a comically militant student.
Reaching the screen in 1975, it ran for two series and performed well in the ratings, but, given the knowledge of what it might have been, it proved a profoundly frustrating experience for Lynn, who felt that a career was being crushed. Looking back to trace the trajectory of his writing partnership with Layton, he would later describe it as evolving up to this point in the following manner: ‘Initially, enthusiasm. Later, gloom. Not about him, though. My own depression’.29 His mood was made worse as he surveyed so many of his old Footlights friends doing work that, in his eyes, seemed much more distinctive and rewarding, such as John Cleese’s achievements on TV, first with Monty Python and now Fawlty Towers, and Richard Eyre’s efforts in the theatre, where, in his capacity as artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse, he was commissioning and directing a succession of interesting new plays, including Trevor Griffiths’ critically lauded Comedians.
Ready for a change but unsure of what to do, on 29 April 1976 Lynn glanced, quite by chance, at an advertisement in the latest edition of the weekly industry publication The Stage. It was for someone to fill the vacant position of artistic director of the Cambridge Theatre Company. Tired of being a ‘joke machine’, and impatient to stretch himself, Lynn decided the time was right for him to apply.30
The career of Antony Jay, meanwhile, was developing in a different direction. He left the BBC (where he had risen to the lofty position of Head of Television Talk Features) in 1964, although he remained so highly thought of at the Corporation that he was given a succession of long-term contracts that retained his services as a consultant. Working for a number of companies as a freelance writer, adviser and producer, he helped develop several arts programmes, contributed satirical material for The Frost Report (BBC1, 1966–7), wrote the commentary for the dramatic ‘let in daylight upon magic’ documentary Royal Family (BBC1, 1969), and assisted in a wide variety of other projects. He also popularised his views on politics, bureaucracy and individual liberty via a number of bestselling books, which included the elegantly analytical Management and Machiavelli (1967), the quasi-anthropological Corporation Man (1972) and a drily amusing self-help pamphlet entitled The Householder’s Guide to Community Defence against Bureaucratic Aggression (also 1972).
His great gift, as it emerged from all of these diverse enterprises, was to be able to deconstruct complex institutions and processes as if they were tangible mechanisms, grasping the intricacies of their internal structure and then not only explaining, simply and clearly, how they functioned, but also suggesting how, if at all, they might be made more effective. On his own classically educated terms, he was more of a hedgehog than a fox, more of a man who knew one big thing rather than one who knew many little things; in the sense that wherever he looked, be it business or government or any other organised form of activity, he felt that it could be reduced to the way that the formal rules of engagement were interpreted and enacted.
Rather like Walter Bagehot had done before him, Jay had a rare flair for connecting the paper description to the living reality. It was this gift for animated enlightenment that provided the pattern that united all of his projects.
He found yet another venture through which he could channel his ideas and expertise when, in 1972, he teamed up with John Cleese and two old BBC colleagues, Peter Robinson and Michael Peacock, to form Video Arts, a production company designed to make concise but exceptionally engaging training films for a wide range of business organisations. Dealing with everything from committee meetings to consumer complaints, the films would use humour to demonstrate how the dynamics of any typical situation could best be managed to everyone’s advantage. Using an impressive unofficial repertory group of well-known performers, including Terence Alexander, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Connie Booth, Nigel Hawthorne, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and John Cleese himself, the company soon established itself as the leader in its field, garnering numerous awards, plenty of critical plaudits and countless contented customers.31
There was still a restless curiosity about Antony Jay, and it was therefore no surprise when, in 1974, he accepted an offer to become a member of Lord Annan’s Committee on the Future of Broadcasting. Launched by the Labour Government’s Roy Jenkins, it was charged with the challenging task of assessing the extent to which Britain’s broadcasting industry, organisationally, technologically and financially, could and should be modernised and democratised. The process, which lasted for three years, turned Jay temporarily from outsider to insider, and afforded him the priceless opportunity to gorge himself on privileged gossip and insights, and to assess at close quarters the routine connections between Whitehall and Westminster.
It was during this period that the paths of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn finally came to cross. When Video Arts started making its first few training films, Lynn was one of the people John Cleese persuaded to get involved (for an initial sum of ‘thirty quid plus a deferred fee’32) both as a writer and performer. This work, which included such titles as the award-winning Who Sold You This, Then? (1972),33 It’s All Right, It’s Only a Customer (1973) and Selling on the Telephone (1975), also brought him into contact with Cleese’s fellow director, Antony Jay.
Lynn’s first impression of Jay, looking at him through the eyes of someone well used to casting characters, was that of ‘a typical BBC producer or an Oxbridge don’: ‘He was tall with thinning, wispy, long greying hair, a tweed sports jacket, worn-down suede shoes and a characteristic, slightly knock-kneed stance. He talked very fast in a voice that became slightly squeaky when enthusiastic’.34 Jay, in turn, already recognised Lynn from his television and stage performances, and, face to face, warmed to his quick wit and unforced expertise. ‘I was rather impressed,’ he later remarked, ‘by his professional knowledge of actors and audiences’.35 In some ways, they made an unconventional pair. Although they shared a common cultural background of public school (Jay at St Paul’s in London and Lynn at Kingswood in Bath) and Cambridge, they were, in many respects, very different.
There was, for example, a thirteen-year age gap between them (Jay was born in London in 1930, and Lynn in Bath in 1943), and while Jay had experienced growing up in an era that had witnessed Britain going to war, Lynn had grown up in a period that had seen the country struggle to cope with the austerities of peace. Jay had been through the enforced regimentation of post-war National Service, while Lynn reached the same age just after the compulsory call-up had been cancelled. The effect, arguably, was to give Jay’s youthful liberalism something of a nostalgic character, yearning for a ‘glorious revolution’ that would restore the freedom of the pre-war years, while lending Lynn’s early rebelliousness more of an inchoate, anticipatory feel.
They also projected, unaffectedly, quite distinct kinds of social personae: Jay was actually an unusually complex soul who was the product of a lineage that was part quintessentially English (on his mother Catherine’s side) and part Jewish immigrant (on his actor father Ernest’s side36), but, superficially, he exuded the kind of effortless assuredness that epitomised a creature of the Establishment. Conversely, Lynn, whose awkward teenage years had been marked by him being the only Jewish boy at a Methodist school (‘If you want to create an outsider,’ he would later observe, ‘that’s a good way to go about it’37), had settled into the image of an obvious and somewhat prickly anti-Establishment figure.
The snapshot impression was thus of contrasts: tall and short, reserved and outspoken, conservative and radical, insider and outsider. Jay, on top of all of this, was primarily an analyst and an observer, a man who had made his mark behind the scenes, while Lynn was an actor and an artist, best known for what he had contributed out on the stage and in front of the cameras.
Once the two men had spent some time in each other’s company, however, they found that they complemented each other surprisingly well. Each had acquired a degree of specialist expertise and a range of experiences that impressed and interested the other. Each had the kind of character that had a pleasingly moderating effect on the other. Even their respective political outlooks, which, with Jay’s located recognisably to the right of centre and Lynn’s some way to the left, appeared at first sight to suggest a possible conflict, were in fact far closer than they looked, as Jay’s sceptical and strongly libertarian brand of conservatism had more in common with Whig traditions than Tory ones, while Lynn’s radical instincts were far more redolent of Paine than Tawney or Marx.
They were thus, beneath the superficial contrasts, kindred spirits. Both of them were deeply suspicious of privilege and power. Both were passionately egalitarian and meritocratic. Both had an instinctive sympathy for the individual, the eccentric and the outsider against any form of oppressive hegemony. Both hated hypocrisy and humbug. They could tell, as they talked, that they were on the same side.
The two of them got to know and like each other even better once John Cleese became distracted by his work on Fawlty Towers and, in his absence, Jay started collaborating with Lynn. By the time that Lynn had taken on the role of artistic director at the Cambridge Theatre Company, Video Arts was doing so well that it was looking to increase its annual output significantly, so when Jay invited him to contribute on a more regular basis, Lynn, whose theatre position was aesthetically rewarding but poorly paid, saw it as ‘an insurance policy’.38 ‘It was,’ Jay would say, ‘a very happy and successful partnership.’39
It was at this time, during a break from writing, that Jay began to reminisce with Lynn about one of the strongest and sharpest political memories they shared: that extraordinary moment, about a decade before, when Sir Frank Soskice stood up in the House of Commons and dismissed the demands of Sir Frank Soskice. They laughed again about the absurdity of the saga, and were further amused when they reflected on the fact that, soon after, Sir Frank was rewarded for his troubles by being elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Stow Hill of Newport.
Warming to the subject, Jay then proceeded to tell Lynn other stories he had heard about the various ways that politicians, once they became drawn deep into Whitehall’s maw, had their plans rethought or thwarted. He talked, for example, about a memorably candid lecture that the redoubtable Labour MP Barbara Castle had given at the Civil Service College at Sunningdale in 1972, bemoaning all of the problems that she had encountered, when Secretary of State for Transport, with her Department’s Permanent Secretary, and warning that the Civil Service (‘the best spying organisation I have ever known’) had now become ‘a state within a state’.40 He also recounted the various recent broadsides that Castle’s colleague, Tony Benn, had fired at Britain’s unelected bureaucracy for having the effrontery to undermine the plans of its elected representatives.41 It was through thinking about such things, Jay said, that he had come to the realisation that ‘there was something called “Ministry policy” which was not the Minister’s policy’,42 and that, as a consequence, he now saw ‘the conflict between the politicians in government and the civil servants as being far more interesting and far less understood in Britain than the conflict between Government and the Opposition’.43
Jay then went further, and told Lynn that he found this dynamic so intriguing, so revealing and so rich in satirical potential, that it had given him an idea. It had given him an idea for a sitcom.