For fifty years he listened at the door. He heard some secrets and invented more. These he wrote down, and women, statesmen, kings, Became degraded into common things.
Antony Jay’s idea for a sitcom concerned ‘the corridors of power’.1 It would be set in Whitehall, in a typical Ministerial Department, and would feature the chronic tug of war between a leading politician and a senior civil servant. Illuminating what had hitherto been secreted deep in the system’s Stygian gloom, this sitcom would be different, revealing, controversial and, potentially, very, very funny.
There was only one problem. Jonathan Lynn did not want to do it: ‘I thought that was really the most boring suggestion that had come my way for a long time,’ he later explained.2 ‘Furthermore, I had just renounced sitcom writing. I told him I wasn’t interested’.3 That, it appeared, was that. Jay, for all his polymathic capacities, had no experience of writing a situation comedy, nor, on his own, did he feel confident about attempting to create one, and so, reluctantly, he shelved the idea and got on with his other projects, while, quite amicably, Lynn went off to concentrate on his new role at the Cambridge Theatre Company.
The idea, however, did not fade away. As various new political stories came and went, Jay could not stop wondering how they might have been covered in his sitcom. Lynn, meanwhile, recharged his batteries through his stage work, and, slowly but surely, started having second thoughts.
The two men got back in touch with each other early in 1977. Both of them agreed that, on reflection, this was indeed an idea that merited further consideration.
Why did Lynn now want to pursue it? The answer, he had realised, in a cool hour, was that he had unfinished business as a writer of sitcoms. Once he had stopped obsessing over what had gone wrong with his previous efforts, and once (after overseeing other writers’ work in the theatre) he had regained some of the old hunger to write something himself, he realised that Jay’s idea might be worth reappraising.
This time, the conversation was positive. They reacquainted each other with the basic premise, played around with possible options and reflected on real-life inspirations. The case of Sir Frank Soskice came up again, inevitably, as did a few more recent examples of politicians being caught with their hands looking distinctly dirty. Jay also related some of his memories of working with political guests during his early days at the BBC in Current Affairs (‘I realised how much difference there was between the way politicians spoke on air – as if they were responsible for everything – and the fact that behind the scenes they were constantly turning to their Private Secretary and asking, “What’s the answer to this?’”4) as well as the moans and groans about the struggles between political and bureaucratic officials that he was hearing while working with the recently retired Harold Wilson on his forthcoming television series, A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers.5 Reflecting on the obvious comic potential that lurked in such anecdotes, the pair of them laughed at the enduring truth of Will Rogers’ old saying: ‘There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you’.6
Eagerly expanding on his theme, Jay talked more about the work that now went on in Whitehall instead of Westminster, and how the real discussions, debates and decisions were made there, behind closed doors, rather than out in the playhouse of Parliament as such. The power of the sitcom, therefore, would come from the fact that it would, in effect, be taking the audience behind the curtain, backstage, to show them what goes on in rehearsal before each polished political performance is put on.
It would not only peel off all the masks and show politicians in a different, and far more realistic, light. It would also, Jay insisted, finally show civil servants as they really were, as individuals, as a community, in situ, behind the familiar but hopelessly old-fashioned caricature.
This was something that seemed particularly pertinent, as far as the novelty of the proposed sitcom was concerned. Up to this point, as Lynn would acknowledge, ‘All comedy shows that featured civil servants portrayed them as boring people who wore bowler hats and drank a lot of tea’.7 Jay, though, was determined to change that perception once and for all. Having served on a government committee (and seen, next to one of his own suggestions, the word ‘RESIST’ underlined twice in sober mandarin handwriting8), he had first-hand knowledge of who these people were, how they acted and interacted, not only with each other but also with politicians. ‘He had drafted part of the Annan Report,’ Lynn noted, ‘and after working with some senior civil servants he knew that the popular image of them was false.’9
It was this drive for accuracy as well as comedy, this conviction that the humour would be rooted in the truth, that most excited the two writers. This was going to be a sitcom very different from the normal formulaic fare. It was going to be about insight instead of escapism; a fiction founded on fact.
As a consequence, the first step would be to do some serious research to get the details right. Jay knew some tantalising bits and pieces, but to write a proper sitcom, to structure a series of episodes, they would have to dig deeper, court some insiders and piece together the bigger picture.
In this sense, it was their good fortune that an exceptionally rich, vivid and informative source had recently emerged in the public domain. Richard Crossman, a Labour Party politician and former Minister (who first served in the Cabinet at the same time as Sir Frank Soskice), had been a lifelong opponent of his country’s culture of secrecy, and of the multiple means whereby information was withheld from the masses in order to keep the demon of democracy safely at bay. In a principled act of rebellion, therefore, he had broken the Cabinet code of omertà and bequeathed to the nation an insider’s account of the workings of British politics.
Since 1951, as a backbench MP and then as a Cabinet Minister during the second half of the 1960s, he had religiously recorded his experiences in a series of diaries. A disciple of Walter Bagehot (whom he hailed as ‘the only Englishman who saw right through our politics without losing faith in freedom’10), his original intention had been to use the material selectively and reasonably discreetly as a source not only for his memoirs but also as the basis of a twentieth-century version of Bagehot’s 1867 classic, The English Constitution. By the early 1970s, however, when his health was failing rapidly and he realised that such projects were now beyond him, he changed his mind and resolved instead to publish the diaries as they were, in order to provide the public with ‘a daily picture of how a Minister of the Wilson Government spent his time, exactly what he did in his Department, in Cabinet Committee and in Cabinet itself, and … outside his office’. It would, he vowed, be ‘a true record of how one Minister thought and felt’ and would thus be of ‘quite special historical value’.11
Crossman died in April 1974 at the age of sixty-six, but plans for the publication went ahead – much to the horror of the British political Establishment, which proceeded to do all it could to stifle the spilling of its secrets. Advance excerpts, scheduled to appear in The Sunday Times during the autumn of 1974, were delayed repeatedly by the Cabinet Office (which had insisted on assessing the proofs, extremely slowly, for possible breaches of confidentiality), and the publication date for the first of three intended volumes was also pushed back indefinitely due to various legal objections and veiled threats. Eventually, on 1 October 1975, after endless debates in Parliament and the press, the Lord Chief Justice brought the high-profile saga to an end when he refused to grant the Attorney General an injunction to prevent publication, ruling that an outright ban would not be in the public interest, and, at long last, the books began to appear.12
The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1975, 1976 and 1977) had very much the great impact that Crossman had expected and many of his former colleagues had feared, demystifying Cabinet government to an unprecedented extent and inviting the public not only to reflect on all the stories of unseemly political infighting but also, and more importantly, to consider the hitherto largely hidden influence of the Civil Service. The reviewers duly hailed the diaries as ‘a plain man’s guide to the political jungle’,13 bringing out the difference ‘between the way we are governed and the way our governors wish us to suppose that we are governed’,14 and the 688-page first volume sold more than twenty-five thousand copies within weeks of its publication.15
What immediately engaged the reader was Crossman’s vivid depiction of himself as a newly appointed Cabinet Minister in October 1964: tumbling down the Whitehall rabbit hole and finding himself dazed and confused inside an unfamiliar office that seemed ‘like a padded cell’, feeling as though he had been ‘suddenly certified a lunatic’ who was ‘cut off from real life and surrounded by male and female trained nurses and attendants’.16 It was in these first few diary entries that he shared with his readers the growing realisation about ‘the tremendous effort it requires not to be taken over by the Civil Service’.17
Uprooted and disoriented, he reflected with a mixture of awe and alarm how the venerable machinery of each Whitehall department was more than capable of rumbling on, regardless of who the latest arrival was from Westminster. The new Minister might be male or female, young or old, left wing, right wing or centrist, but the undeniable fact was that they were a transient part of a permanent process, and ‘one has only to do absolutely nothing whatsoever in order to be floated forward on the stream’.18 This view was soon reinforced by the obliging Private Secretary who assured Crossman that, in every instance, his civil servants would draft every option for his consideration and, if ever he preferred not to make a choice, all he needed to do was move everything from his in tray to his out tray ‘and if you put it in without a mark on it then we will deal with it and you need never see it again’.19
What further focused the attention as the entries continued was the growing significance of the relationship between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary. Crossman’s first Permanent Secretary was a strikingly redoubtable woman named Dame Evelyn Sharp, who had been in the Civil Service since 1926 and, in 1955, was the first woman to have reached the highest executive position within a Ministry. Having already served and seen off four Ministers, and achieved a level of expertise in her Department’s field of responsibility (Housing and Local Government) that by this stage in her long career was probably second to none, she looked upon her latest Minister, who (fresh from a stint in Opposition as Education spokesman) had neither the experience nor the expertise to stamp his signature on his new subject, with ill-disguised disdain.
Crossman’s initial opinion of her, in turn, was similarly negative. He described her as a ‘tremendous patrician’ who was ‘utterly contemptuous and arrogant’, treating local authorities as ‘children which she has to examine and rebuke for their failures’, most external experts as ‘utterly worthless’, the general public as ‘incapable of making a sensible decision’ and her own Minister as a lowly creature of ‘stupidity and ignorance’ who represented a threat to the efficiency of a Department that she treated like her own ‘personal domain’.20
As a consequence, the earliest stage of Crossman’s time as Minister was marked by his chronicling the constant tension and struggles between his Permanent Secretary and himself, with his retiring at the end of each day, bloodied and bruised, to record the many times when she had failed to consult him, or furnish him with information, or blocked his access to outside advisors and alternative ideas and generally contrived, albeit very discreetly, to frustrate all of his personal schemes. Complaining bitterly of how her loyalty was obviously exclusively to the Civil Service rather than even partially to him, he ended up, after no more than a month, exclaiming to his Prime Minister: ‘I have had enough of the Dame’.21
In time, the dynamic, and mood, began to change. She warmed, subtly, to his indefatigable commitment to certain policies, and he (after realising that she had been fighting hard to prevent their Department from being broken up and abolished) came to admire, just as subtly, her desire to do what she believed was the right thing.
He actually started to feel a strange kind of affinity with her, acknowledging that, although both of them had started off wanting to see the back of each other, they had come, in time, to see each other as something more like kindred spirits. ‘[We] really do quite like each other,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and regard each other as exceptions to a dreary rule,’ adding that ‘we are two people who know their own value and know the other’s value’.22
There was also a more pragmatic reason for the change of heart. Dame Evelyn, who was edging ever closer to retirement, knew that it was not in her interests to antagonise her latest Minister too acutely when her beloved Department badly needed stability. Crossman, meanwhile, realised that any sign from him to suggest that he was planning to push her out would mean that ‘the whole of Whitehall hierarchy would be against me’, as well as ‘questions in Parliament’ and ‘a hell of a row’. Moreover, he was reminded, privately but somewhat brusquely by the Head of the Civil Service, that a new Permanent Secretary would last much, much, longer than a new Minister ever would (the average was several years compared to several months23), and that it was therefore deemed far more important that any replacement should suit the Department over whoever happened to be its current Minister.24
The result was that, until Dame Evelyn finally moved on, the two of them continued working together, while working apart, to ensure that their Department remained intact. She guided him, and sometimes manipulated him, as well as she could, while he drew on her expertise, and sometimes defeated her preconceived designs, as well as he could.
During this uneasy truce, Crossman reflected on the routine processes that linked Whitehall with Westminster, and realised, as a consequence, how quietly effective the Civil Service was at influencing government policy. It achieved it, he believed, mainly through two basic means: first as the ‘keeper of the muniments’, and second via the imposition of a single ‘official’ view on all of the Ministers.25
The Civil Service was keeper of the muniments in the sense that, through the Cabinet Secretariat, it not only recorded but also minuted Cabinet discussions. This duty, quite unintentionally, bestowed on permanent officials, in Crossman’s view, an extraordinary power of discretionary prerogative. As only what was recorded ranked officially as precedent, it followed that precedent had become whatever the Civil Service chose to recognise as such.
It also imposed its own ‘official’ view on politicians, in two intimately linked ways. First, each Permanent Secretary could work to convince his or her own Minister of a certain opinion about a policy, and then, if anything remained disputed, some discreet coordination could ensure that a ‘cohesive interdepartmental view’ would be echoed by most if not all of the other Ministers once they assembled together in Cabinet.
First-hand experience of this deft, devious and discreet manner of manipulating the decision-making process more or less convinced Crossman, within six months or so of arriving in Whitehall, that unless an individual Minister had the full backing of the Prime Minister, or at least one of his most eminent lieutenants, ‘the chance of prevailing against the official view is absolutely nil’.26 Here, he concluded, ‘is the way in which Whitehall ensures that the Cabinet system is relatively harmless.’27
This insight was more than enough to guide Jay and Lynn a fair distance in the right direction. It gave them an invaluably authentic model for the basic situation, dynamics and key relationship of the sitcom that they wanted to craft, and would remain an essential source of authoritative information (‘We referred continuously to it,’ Jay would confirm28).
Crossman’s diaries also provided them with a title. On the very first page of the first volume he had talked about the deceptive obsequiousness of the civil servants who greeted him in his Department, all of them saying, ‘Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it, Minister!’ while clearly thinking the opposite.29 ‘Tony suggested that Yes Minister would be a good, ironic title for our show,’ Lynn later recalled, and he agreed. Yes Minister would indeed be the name of their sitcom.30
Greatly encouraged by the insights they were gleaning from the Crossman diaries, the two writers started looking further afield for similarly enlightening sources. They wanted, ideally, more recent anecdotes and opinions from contemporary politicians, as well as perspectives from the other side of the institutional divide from well-established civil servants.
Their first significant living source was Marcia Falkender, the long- serving Political Secretary to Harold Wilson, whom Jay had got to know while working on the A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers series. An ever-present figure at Wilson’s side since 1956, Falkender had been on the inside at Number Ten during two spells in government, as well as on the outside during Wilson’s periods in Opposition, and had been privy to all of the major discussions, crises and strategies that had shaped the past thirty years of Labour’s political history. Elevated to the House of Lords as a Baroness in 1974, a couple of years prior to Wilson’s retirement, she was still active in public life and politics when Jay called on her for advice.
Lynn, meanwhile, found another promising contact in the form of an academic: Nelson Polsby, Professor of Political Science (and later Head of the Institute of Governmental Affairs) at Stanford University in California. Although he was an American who specialised in the study of the US Presidency and Congress, Polsby was currently based in England as a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and, as a worldly, witty and well-informed outsider, he offered a refreshingly non-partisan, less parochial perspective on Britain’s contemporary political system. Never distracted from patterns and processes by the dazzle of particular personalities, Polsby described his analytical, almost anthropological, approach as ‘a job of fundamental importance, because facts rarely speak for themselves. There are usually too many facts and not infrequently too many different versions of the facts. Rather than speaking for themselves, various facts have what we have come to refer to as spokespersons’.31 He was, as a consequence, well suited to engaging with what was fast becoming an age of spin.
It was actually through Polsby that Lynn was introduced to another invaluable adviser, Bernard Donoughue. A former LSE academic who in 1974 had moved into politics as founder and first Head of the Number Ten Policy Unit, where he worked as Senior Policy Adviser to Harold Wilson and his successor James Callaghan, Donoughue was not just eminently well placed to provide Lynn and Jay, very discreetly, with an up-to-the-minute account of the country’s governing class, but was also blessed with a subtly mischievous spirit that made him unexpectedly well attuned to the sensibilities, and most urgent needs, of these two sitcom writers.
‘It was all very hush-hush,’ he would say of his role. ‘I was very nervous initially, because I didn’t want to appear publicly as an inside source, especially if something was going to be critical of the Civil Service, and so forth. But it was to be done on the grounds of anonymity, so that reassured me and, from that point on, I felt able to relax and talk fairly freely’.32
These three figures – Falkender, Donoughue and, to a much lesser extent, Polsby (‘I did meet Nelson,’ Antony Jay would say, ‘but he didn’t have any particular influence on me’33) – would form the unofficial think-tank on which Jay and Lynn would rely for their most reliable off-the-record insights and advice. Each had something different to offer, each had a wealth of experience and admirable expertise and each trusted the writers to use, rather than abuse, whatever they cared to share.
The writers were careful to ensure that no source would be distracted by anxieties about what the others might be saying. Polsby, as an individual academic transplanted from his natural habitat, never presented a problem (and only really spoke at any length with Lynn), but the other two, as creatures of the same intensely competitive political culture, were always kept strictly apart and, to some extent, in the dark. ‘We never mentioned to either of them that we were also regularly talking to the other,’ Jonathan Lynn would later reveal. ‘This was not difficult. We kept all our sources completely confidential, and still do. The only people who are known to be our sources are those who have publicly identified themselves. Also, although we had a slight sense that [Falkender and Donoughue] didn’t get along with each other, we had no idea how acrimonious their relationship really was.’34
The strategy worked. Each of the sources proved to be an invaluable guide.
Lady Falkender, for example, not only furnished them with numerous tales of what used to go on inside Number Ten, the hotels at party conferences and the ministerial cars, but she also ‘decoded’ current events, explaining what was really happening and how and why it was being misrepresented for public consumption. Donoughue, similarly, not only fed them snippets of information (such as the story about how, on his first day inside Number Ten following the General Election of February 1974, a civil servant had proposed a Prime Ministerial visit to China because, as one world-weary colleague put it, ‘civil servants are only interested in trips abroad’35), but also, extremely discreetly, opened doors for them within Westminster, introducing them to an increasingly wide range of gossipy grandees.
Jay and Lynn would meet these figures at a good central London restaurant for a long and well-lubricated lunch (‘with some fine wine, they’ll tell you plenty’36). The tactic generally proved to be hugely effective. ‘We discovered they would tell us practically anything we wanted to know,’ Lynn would recall, ‘firstly, because they knew that they were not going to be quoted; secondly, people had a political axe to grind and wanted a particular view aired; and, thirdly, we discovered the higher up people were, the closer they were to real power, the more indiscreet they would be.’37
Nelson Polsby, meanwhile, was always available as a sounding board if ever there was a need to find universal themes in specific occurrences. ‘He was full of insight,’ said Lynn.38
Having secured these three invaluable political contacts, Jay and Lynn still needed to find sources for the bureaucratic side of their research, but, predictably, Whitehall proved far less receptive than Westminster to requests for regular advice. They were thus left with no choice but to flit from one figure to another, battling wits as they tried to prise stories from out of the notoriously tight-lipped members of the Civil Service.
Realising that most civil servants would only volunteer information that they assumed Jay and Lynn already knew, the pair resorted to various kinds of subterfuge to trick their quarry into admissions. For example, Jay had a strong suspicion that there was a rivalry, to the point of antipathy, between the Home Civil Service and the Foreign Civil Service, so, rather than ask an insider to confirm it, he asked them to explain it: ‘I said, “Why do the Home Civil Service dislike the Foreign Civil Service so much?” And he said: “Well, I think it’s partly because …” and admitted it by default.’39
The nearest the writers came to finding the Civil Service equivalent of a Crossman was by reading Leslie Chapman. Like Crossman, Chapman was a well-placed whistle-blower whose revelations about the institution to which he once belonged caused widespread controversy and debate.
Until recently, he had been a regional director of what in those days was the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, where, from 1967 to 1974, he had made it his business to identify and suggest ways to eliminate instances of inefficiency and waste, saving in the process some £3.5 million out of an annual budget of £10 million in his own area of authority. His repeated attempts to get his methods adopted nationally, however, had always been thwarted by his superiors. Even when he persuaded Ministers (Labour and Conservative alike) of the potential scope for cutting waste nationally, instructions from them were either blocked high up in Whitehall or heavily watered down. Chapman, growing frustrated by such stubborn resistance, decided eventually that it was no longer worth fighting for his cause on the inside, and resolved instead to retire and continue the fight on the outside.
Writing became his weapon, and, early in 1978, his first book, Your Disobedient Servant: The Continuing Story of Whitehall’s Overspending, was published. A bestseller for which he declined to take payment, it was an excoriating critique of how the Civil Service was run, supplying the reader with an extraordinary collection of shaming cases of incompetence and irrationality. Among his many eye-catching examples were the twelve dockets that had to pass through eighty-two bureaucratic processes before a tap could be mended; the use of ministerial cars by junior staff when taxis would have been cheaper; the continued use of a depot railway system when public roads would have served just as well for a fraction of the cost; the pointless insistence on heating stores that were the size of aircraft hangars to normal office temperatures; an army depot that stored enough mule shoes to fight another Crimean War; and welfare officers travelling up to two hundred miles a day to see staff who had no desire to be visited.
The conclusion was that the institution was guilty not only of a lack of care but also a lack of contrition. ‘The trouble is,’ he complained bitterly, ‘the Civil Service in this country hates to admit that it is wrong and will do almost anything rather than admit that it has erred.’40
Just like the Crossman diaries had done to Parliament, Chapman’s book – which was backed up by two hard-hitting television documentaries (in the form of special editions of BBC2’s Man Alive and ITV’s World in Action41) and then followed by an equally caustic sequel, Waste Away, in 1981 – put the Civil Service under the harsh media spotlight, alarming many people (the new Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, most notably, among them) – with its depiction of a Whitehall that was complacent, profligate, overmanned and overindulged. At a stroke it pushed the subject of bureaucratic waste (and secrecy) high up on the political agenda, where it would stay throughout the next decade.
Jay and Lynn could not believe their luck: here, landing in their laps, was a treasure trove of raw material that was ripe for comedic dramatisation. Although Chapman himself had been adamant that nothing in his account should be regarded as a laughing matter – ‘To make jokes of such examples,’ he warned, ‘obscures the seriousness of the waste involved’42 – to the two writers the satirical value of his revelations was plainly apparent. ‘We absolutely devoured them,’ Antony Jay later said of the two books, ‘and in fact we got ideas for plots which we altered to fit our needs.’43
Having amassed such a wealth of material on both sides of the Westminster–Whitehall divide, the writers could now start to collate it and shape it into the basis of a believable fictional world. They were ready to begin crafting their sitcom.
Antony Jay already knew how they should proceed, because, in a sense, they had done it before. The template, he reasoned, was the kind of training film that he and Lynn had made for Video Arts:
It is not an accident that Jonathan and I had worked on the Video Arts training programmes because we had to do a lot of research [for them], the object of which was to find out what, for example, were the correct ways of running a meeting, conducting an interview or a negotiation, or dealing with an angry customer. The bulk of research for these training films involved finding credible instances of situations being handled wrongly which were entertaining while at the same time were painfully recognisable, and then we would show salespeople what should have been done: that they should not stress the features rather than the benefits of something they were trying to sell; that they should not reel off a long list of a machine’s revolutions per minute and oil consumption to an old lady who just wants to buy a hoover or lawnmower. [ …] In a way in Yes Minister we just carried on doing what we had been doing except we did not show what the correct lessons were.44
It was in this spirit that the two writers set about creating their biggest and most important training film so far. The lesson on this occasion was: how not to govern a representative democracy.
Their first step was to fashion a context in which the action would happen. To succeed, this context needed to be two things: small enough to keep a sharp focus without losing the dramatic truth (anything that even tried to resemble a fully staffed government department, on screen, would have over-complicated the action as well as drained the budget), and pliable enough to justify it covering practically any and every area of domestic policy (a specific department would have restricted all the storylines to a specific subject).
Jay and Lynn met both of these requirements by inventing an ‘umbrella’ department of their own: the Department of Administrative Affairs. Simplified by keeping most of the staff off camera, and purified by eschewing any possible associations with actual and particular areas of specialisation, this fictional department was to symbolise ‘the ultimate bureaucracy: that wing of the Civil Service that was only concerned with running the Civil Service; the administration that administered administrators’.45
The next thing they needed was to populate this context with a core group of characters, and, as far as this part of the process was concerned, the writers did at least have some precedents to consider from the sitcom tradition. Most of the classics of the genre, on British television, had, up to this point, been either ‘buddy’ comedies or ‘family’ comedies, thus relying on no more than four key characters: Hancock’s Half Hour, Steptoe and Son, The Likely Lads and Sykes made do with two; Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? used three; and Till Death Us Do Part, Porridge, Rising Damp, The Good Life and Fawlty Towers had focused on four. The only really notable exceptions to this rule were the more American-style, ‘gang show’ sitcoms that David Croft made with Jimmy Perry and Jeremy Lloyd, such as Dad’s Army and Are You Being Served?, which required an immense amount of planning (and plenty of diplomacy and tact) to ensure that all members of each troupe received their fair share of lines and screen time.
For Yes Minister, it was decided that a comic triangle of characters would be the most coherent and practicable option. Pitting one typical politician against one typical civil servant, the show was going to be, essentially, an ‘anti-buddy’ sitcom, so a third, intermediary, figure, whose loyalties and sympathies would flit back and forth from one to the other, was added to moderate the conflict and ensure that the centre would hold.
This template had the appeal of working on several levels: double act and stooge; only child and warring parents; solitary agnostic versus a duo of dogmatists; and an audience representative interacting with the main comedy couple. Most importantly, it allowed Jay and Lynn to turn a long shot into a close-up and still capture the truth of the dynamics that epitomised the workings of Whitehall.
The inspiration for the main two-man relationship within the triangle came from a number of sources. There was, obviously, the real-life partnership between Minister and Permanent Secretary that had been captured with such clarity by the likes of Richard Crossman, but there was also a rich heritage of comic combinations that influenced how the writers depicted the central union of their sitcom. There was, for example, the tussle between master and servant in Beaumarchais’ La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (1784) and Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro (1786); between peer and butler in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1902) and between young gentleman and valet in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories (1915–74) – all of them sharing the comic conceit of the subordinate who outwits his superior.
This notion suited perfectly Jay and Lynn’s own vision of a relationship defined by the contrast between its appearance and its reality, with a supposedly all-powerful Minister who is frequently tricked and trumped by his ostensibly meek and obedient Permanent Secretary. The world of Wodehouse, especially, did not seem too far away from the world of Whitehall, and it was fairly easy to imagine Bertie Wooster and Jeeves transplanted, mutatis mutandis, from the drawing room of a country house to the office of a government department, with Bertie, slumped behind the ministerial desk, bristling at the memory of the latest subtle show of impertinence by his deceptively humble assistant (‘I don’t want to seem always to be criticising your methods of voice production, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘but I must inform you that that “Well, sir” of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your “Indeed, sir”’46) while realising how much he needed this unflappable mastermind to guide him away from trouble: ‘It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can’t help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet’.47
The language of Wodehouse, and in particular the contrast in styles of phrasing and cadence between his two main characters, was another obvious influence. Listening to Jeeves’ elaborate, ornate and orotund orations, and Bertie’s short, scatty and staccato responses, it was easy to imagine how the sound of such dialogues would suit the exchanges between a polished and poised civil servant and an impatient but poorly briefed politician:
JEEVES: |
The stars, sir. |
BERTIE: |
Stars? |
JEEVES: |
Yes, sir. |
BERTIE: |
What about them? |
JEEVES: |
I was merely directing your attention to them, sir. Look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. |
BERTIE: |
Jeeves–– |
JEEVES: |
There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest, sir, but in his motion like an angel sings, still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. |
BERTIE: |
Jeeves–– |
JEEVES: |
Such harmony is in immortal souls. But whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. |
BERTIE: |
Jeeves–– |
JEEVES: |
Sir? |
BERTIE: |
You couldn’t possibly switch it off, could you? |
JEEVES: |
Certainly, sir, if you wish it. |
BERTIE: |
I’m not in the mood. |
JEEVES: |
Very good, sir.48 |
There was yet one more influence that helped crystallise the new relationship. Antony Jay, like Jonathan Lynn, had always been a great admirer of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s sitcom Steptoe and Son – one of the truly great, groundbreaking contributions to the genre, in terms of both using character actors instead of comic personalities, and of blending drama with laughter – and, the more that they thought about their own show, the more the cruel but comical inextricability of the Steptoe scenario seemed to resonate with their own idea of what should root Yes Minister to the spot.
Steptoe and Son was all about the ties that bound two people together. It was about a father and son, both too poor to go it alone, and both (deep down) too attached to the other to part company, even though the relationship was polarised on a day-to-day basis by their respective personalities and ambitions. Theirs were the ties that trapped. Harold, the son, was always dreaming of soaring off to the stars, while his father, Albert, constantly reminded him that he had grown up in the gutter, and it was always painfully clear that neither was going to go anywhere other than back out onto the streets to collect junk.
The dynamic was quintessentially British: idealism undermined by realism, optimism by pessimism, pretentiousness by irreverence. When Harold tries to intimidate with forced verbosity – ‘You frustrate me in everything I try to do. You are a dyed-in-the-wool, fascist, reactionary, squalid, little know-your-place, don’t-rise-above-yourself, don’t-get-out-of-your-hole, complacent little turd!’ – Albert smacks him down with casual brevity: ‘What d’yer want for yer tea?’ Similarly, when Harold attempts to impress with his ethereal ambitions, such as when he talks of transforming his shared junkyard hovel into a fashionable salon, a ‘powerhouse of intellectual thought’ so full of ‘choice wines, superb food and elegant conversation’ that the likes of ‘C.P. Snow and Bertrand Russell will be busting a gut to get in’, Albert punctures the inflated pose with his earthbound actualities: ‘Oh yeah! There’ll be plenty for them to do here: table tennis, rat hunting … I can see you all now, going for long tramps across the yard deep in intellectual conversation and horse manure!’49
The contrasts struck a chord for the writers of Yes Minister. ‘If you think about it,’ Jay would say, ‘young Steptoe was the minister, having lots of bright ideas which wouldn’t work, and old Steptoe was a kind of secretary just deflating everything, going, “Nah, that won’t work!” He was the Sir Humphrey. It was the conflict between the two of them that seemed to me could be just as well translated into Whitehall.’50
Just like in Steptoe, they reasoned, the explicit division was counterbalanced by an implicit interdependence. As Jay put it:
Comedy, like drama, comes from the tension between characters in conflict of intention. Therefore it seemed to me that the two characters, the Minister and the Permanent Secretary, symbolised the two halves of the conflict perfectly and what made the comedy, and indeed the drama, work was that although the two had quite different and often opposing ambitions, nevertheless, each needed the other. The Minister needed the Permanent Secretary for support, to get the facts right, for briefings, for the provision of the necessary administrative back-up and for advice. The Permanent Secretary needed the Minister to publicise the things the Department had done well – and thus to get kudos for himself. He also needed the Minister to fight the Department’s corner in Cabinet and to fight for its share of the budget at the public expenditure round. They could not just walk out on each other. Their relationship was like a marriage and they both had a great deal invested in it. Therefore, if the story line could put strong pressures to force them to the point of separation, the drama and the comedy would be created.51
There was, however, a third person in this marriage: the Principal Private Secretary. Another ingredient inspired primarily by the contents of the Crossman diaries, which had described this figure as the key link between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary, he was the obvious choice to serve as their comic foil. According to Crossman, the Principal Private Secretary’s job was ‘to make sure that when the Minister comes to Whitehall he doesn’t let the side down or himself down and behaves in accordance with the requirements of the institution’.52
Crossman’s own Principal Private Secretary was a young, tall, owlish-looking man named John Delafons, whom he depicted as a kind of amiable double agent. Positioned in the office outside that of the Minister, like the host of ‘a grand vizier’s waiting room’, he liaised between his political and bureaucratic bosses, advising both on how best to deal with the other. Delafons, wrote Crossman, was thus able to appear simultaneously as one of ‘us’ and one of ‘them’, part friend and part foe. It was a role whose essential ambiguity clearly fascinated, and more than a little unnerved, the Minister, who valued the way that Delafons ‘really does try to get my ideas across to the Department’, but also feared that ‘his main job is to get across to me what the Department wants’.53
It was for this reason, rich in comic potential, that Jay and Lynn saw the Principal Private Secretary as the obvious third point of the triangle. Never entirely under the control of either one of his two superiors, he would, as a consequence, undermine the authority and composure of both of them simply by standing between them instead of behind them.
He would also serve as a natural means to elicit exposition. Whereas the line of least resistance with the Minister would result in his hiding behind the jargon of policy, and with the Permanent Secretary would result in him playing with the parlance of procedure, the Principal Private Secretary could be relied on to step in and ask each of them to explain himself plainly and simply, and thus provide the audience with whatever background information they might require.
Another invaluable aspect of his role involved him serving as confidant to each of his two bosses. ‘You had to have scenes of them apart,’ Antony Jay would say of Sir Humphrey and Hacker, ‘because you had to tell the audience what Jim was planning that he didn’t want Humphrey to know, or Humphrey was planning that he didn’t want Jim to know, so that was where Bernard came in. He was piggy in the middle. He was confided in by both of them, trying to be loyal to both of them, and it made his part a very funny one’.54
When it came to shaping these three characters, the writers remained, for a while, relatively cautious. Lynn, in particular, as the sitcom veteran of the duo, knew how each part only really started to grow and evolve once an actor had been assigned to play it, and so, at this early planning stage, the focus remained on building up the bare bones rather than adding too much of the fleshy substance.
They decided to call the Minister ‘Gerry Hacker’,55 because, as Lynn would later explain, the name Hacker (in that pre-Internet era) ‘evoked an image of a lost and desperate politician, blindly and hopelessly hacking his way through the undergrowth of the Whitehall jungle’.56 There was no particular reason why he was dubbed ‘Gerry’ other than the fact that it sounded socially non-specific.
Some would speculate, once the show was up and running, that Hacker’s character was modelled on one particular politician or combination of politicians, and it became something of a game in the bars and tea rooms of the House of Commons to guess who the most likely ‘Hacker’ might be. The writers, however, always remained adamant that their minister was never modelled on anyone in particular. Hacker, Jonathan Lynn would stress, ‘is completely fictional. But we did want him to be a centrist politician who could have belonged to either party, like Jim Prior or Roy Jenkins. He’s not as intelligent as either of them, though, and rather more venal.’57
The Permanent Secretary, meanwhile, was christened ‘Humphrey’, because, when Lynn tried to think of someone suitably upper class, urbane and incisive, his old Cambridge and broadcasting colleague, Humphrey Barclay, came to mind. The surname of ‘Appleby’ was chosen because ‘it seemed suitably English and bucolic’, and the knighthood – as usually happened in real life – came with the job.58 Once again, as Antony Jay would make clear, the character of Sir Humphrey, just like that of Hacker, was dreamed up from what struck him and Lynn as most typical of each tribe: ‘They were [both] drawn from imagination, and from the logic of the job that they were in and the constraints and opportunities that those jobs created.’59
As for the Principal Private Secretary, Lynn resorted to a spot of nominative determinism, calling him ‘Woolley’ to signal his vague nature. His first name, ‘Bernard’, had no conscious inspiration, but it did benefit from its connotations of hard-working and helpful St Bernard dogs.
The only real decision the writers made, at this early stage, as to their characters’ respective backgrounds, concerned their academic training and the impact it had had on their personalities. They saw Sir Humphrey as a classicist and Hacker as an economist because, as Lynn would put it, ‘A classicist lives within certain established principles and attitudes. An economist exists on quicksand.’60
Sir Humphrey would have been educated at Balliol College, Oxford, it was decided, because ‘Oxbridge represented privilege’ and so many senior civil servants were Oxonians or Cantabrigians in real life (the estimated figure at the time was 75 per cent61). His Classics training would have furnished him not only with a deep appreciation of history, tradition, continuity and change, but also a mastery of the mechanics of language and culture, enabling him to remain calm in the face of any local crisis while deciphering, or dissembling, his way to an acceptable solution.
Gerry Hacker, on the other hand, was deemed to have been educated at the London School of Economics, where he would have learned, both as a student and as a fledgling lecturer, how to claim, and sometimes feign, authority in a subject that, notoriously, can never quite forgive practical human reality for not being as predictable as mathematics. As Lynn explained:
There was a famous joke about a successful economist who went back to see his old professor at Cambridge. He saw his professor marking exam papers and commented that the questions were the same ones set for his own finals 30 years before. The old economist said, ‘I set the same questions every year. The students know that the questions are the same.’ ‘Then why don’t they all get 100 per cent?,’ asked his former student. ‘Because,’ the professor replied, ‘each year the answers are different.’
Therefore, it seemed very suitable that Hacker should be an economics lecturer at the LSE. We also wanted him to be more typical of most members of the House. A great many of them are teachers, university lecturers and journalists. We did not want him to have the same mental framework as Sir Humphrey. We wanted him to approach questions from a different perspective.62
Woolley, meanwhile, was handed the Civil Service’s standard Oxbridge background, but, as befitted his name and nature, little else was considered relevant about him at this stage in the process. Such sparseness of biographical detail did indeed suit a figure whose role would rarely warrant the need to volunteer much, if any, personal information. Richard Crossman, when writing after about a year of daily interaction with his own Principal Private Secretary, had reflected on the fact that ‘we don’t know each other much better [now] than we did on the first day’,63 so it made perfect sense to allow for an air of mystery to surround young Bernard. The only notable distinguishing characteristic that the writers did decide to give him was an obsession – ‘to a fault’64 – with language, causing him to play with it via ‘comically irritating’ puns or pedantically pause it in order to parse it. This would be the main means whereby his puppy-like gaucheness would be revealed, contrasting quite endearingly with the enculturated self-awareness of his two superiors.
With Woolley now formed as an outline alongside Hacker and Sir Humphrey, the writers were finally in a position to start working on their first script. It was at this moment, though, that a degree of doubt started to creep in.
They knew that they would soon have to pitch the idea to a broadcaster, but, in an age when there were only three television channels – BBC1, BBC2 and ITV – the competition for commissions was intense. The more they reflected on their own proposed programme and compared it to the range of recently launched sitcoms that were currently succeeding on the screen (such as the cartoon-like Citizen Smith, the creakily crude George and Mildred and the sugary Robin’s Nest), the more they feared that Yes Minister ‘had none of the ingredients for a popular television show’.65
‘There was no target audience,’ Lynn would recall, shaking his head at the seeming naivety, or bravery, of it all. ‘Antony and I had an idea for a comedy show, but we did not think anyone would be much interested. It was about three middle-aged men sitting around and talking about the government of Britain. It had no sex, no violence, no action.’66
It still made sense, however, to Jay and Lynn. They still believed that it could work. They were determined to make it work.
They were ready to sell it. They just had to hope that someone, somewhere, would be willing to buy into their vision.