Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
The idea was pitched during the summer of 1977. Jay and Lynn typed up a brief outline of what Yes Minister was going to be about and sent it off to the BBC’s Head of Comedy, James Gilbert. He opened it, read it and, contrary to their fears, he liked it. He wanted to sign this sitcom up.
What followed would come to seem like a deliciously ironic echo of the Sir Frank Soskice saga. Gilbert, in order to get the green light for the project, needed to have his decision ratified by his immediate superior, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment. By the time it was submitted to him, however, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment was none other than James Gilbert.
The proposal had arrived only a few days before the BBC was due to make one of its periodic executive reshuffles, with the then Head of Light Entertainment, Bill Cotton, being promoted to Controller of BBC1, Gilbert succeeding him as Head of Light Entertainment and a young producer, John Howard Davies, succeeding him as Head of Comedy. Gilbert, therefore, was able simply to take the proposal with him from one office to the other, sit down behind his new desk, reach into his in tray and then, in stark contrast to Sir Frank Soskice, show perfect consistency by rubber-stamping his own request.
It was happening. The proposal had been accepted and, on 13 October, a pilot would be formally commissioned with a view to making a series for screening on BBC2.1
‘We were very pleasantly surprised that BBC 2 wanted it,’ Lynn would say. ‘I was very surprised that anybody wanted it.’2
The next step, now that a pilot script had been requested, was to settle down and actually write it, so Jay and Lynn started to plan their first story. ‘Hypocrisy was the name of the game,’ Lynn later remarked on their starting point for this, and every subsequent, story-making session. ‘[We would focus on] the contrast between the public face and the private face; the difference between what was being fed to the public and the reality.’ The next stage, Jay would say, would be to tighten the focus further by looking for the most pertinent context: ‘The guiding factor always was to explore themes that would produce conflict between the political side and the administrative side of government.’3
The two writers would then search through these scenarios for the ones that offered a ‘hideous dilemma’ that would generate the right degree of dramatic tension: ‘There had to be a truly appalling situation for Jim Hacker or Sir Humphrey, or preferably both of them,’ Lynn would recall, ‘there had to be a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Without a hideous dilemma you do not have an uproarious comedy, and if we could not find the dilemma we would put the subject aside, because we did not want to write a preachy programme.’4 The final stage, Lynn added, was to narrow down the remaining options ‘to particular themes that amused or annoyed us, after which we would go out and find sources.’5
For their first script, they decided, the topic would be what seemed like the most fundamental issue of all: open government. A newly elected government would come to power in part due to its promise to replace secrecy with transparency. Gerry Hacker, once given ministerial responsibility for Administrative Affairs, would be the politician whose task it would be to turn this promise into a reality, while Sir Humphrey, as the Permanent Secretary attached to Hacker’s Department, would be the bureaucrat whose task it was to ensure that the promise went unfulfilled.
It seemed the ideal set-up. The main political theme would be introduced explicitly and immediately, and the basic dynamic of the Westminster versus Whitehall, Hacker versus Sir Humphrey, relationship would be animated right from the start. It was a plot that both writers were happy to tackle.
What still had to be decided, however, was how they would write it together. There were no rules about how any pair of writers should collaborate on a sitcom. It depended on their respective personalities, typing skills and creative habits.
Some liked to do it standing up and others liked to do it sitting down. Some preferred to type and then read out loud, others to improvise and then transcribe. Some wrote separately and then met up to synthesise the sections; others worked face to face and bounced ideas off each other until every line had been agreed.
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson created both Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son inside a large and airy office in London, with Simpson seated behind a desk with a typewriter and Galton usually stretched out on the floor, staring up at the ceiling.6 David Croft and Jimmy Perry gradually changed how they collaborated on Dad’s Army, starting out by meeting up to agree on a series of plots and then going their separate ways to write several whole episodes each, and then, in later years, teaming up at Croft’s country home in Suffolk to work on each story together.7 Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais cobbled together many of their scripts for The Likely Lads in the former’s house in Kentish Town, with Clement writing in longhand at the kitchen table while La Frenais walked back and forth over the lino.8 John Cleese and Connie Booth wrote most of Fawlty Towers while sitting side by side at a large desk in an upstairs room at their home in Kensington, with Booth scribbling on a notepad and Cleese poised over a typewriter.9
The crucial difference for Jay and Lynn, however, was the fact that, unlike these illustrious predecessors, creating a sitcom was not their primary concern. They would have to write it, so to speak, ‘on the side’.
Their own particular modus operandi as a writing team was thus largely determined by the demands that their respective solo careers placed on their time together. Jay continued to be Chairman of and chief writer for Video Arts, while Lynn was still Artistic Director at the Cambridge Theatre Company, so neither had much room left for a new project, and what little they did have was further constrained by the fact that Jay had a strict policy of reserving evenings and weekends solely for rest and relaxation (‘Life has most people by the throat,’ John Cleese often said of his friend. ‘Tony has life by the throat’.)10 Matters were further complicated by geography: Jay, at the time, lived in Ealing, while Lynn was based about ten miles away in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and, thanks to the fact that they were connected by a North Circular Road that seemed to be in a permanent state of reconstruction, the drive to one or the other’s home would often take up to an hour each way.
There was no choice but to eschew all creative self-indulgence and approach writing Yes Minister in the most disciplined and businesslike manner they could devise. A strict schedule was agreed: no more than two weeks to construct a story, and no more than five mornings to write a script. Alternating between one home and the other, they would start work between 8.30 a.m. and 9 a.m.; if Jay had an appointment at Video Arts, they would finish at noon; if Lynn was rehearsing a play they would stop at 11.15 a.m. On those very rare occasions when both men had a relatively clear day in the diary, they would work on together until 12.30 p.m. or 1 p.m., but, even then, never any later. ‘For Tony,’ Lynn would recall, ‘afternoons were Yes Minister-free zones. They were for Video Arts, sitting in his garden or napping.’11
Physically, both of them favoured the desk-bound writing tradition, sitting opposite each other across a table and verbally exchanging ideas. After working hard to refine that morning’s material, whichever one of them felt the more energetic would pick up a pen and start writing out what they had talked through so far. Then the pad would be passed over to the other, who would study it, cross out the odd word, revise a sentence here and there and sometimes add a small detail, comic line or telling phrase. Occasionally one of them would stare at the page for a while and then decide, on reflection, that they had drifted off in the wrong direction, at which point they would scribble over the whole section and start all over again.
The relationship was kept scrupulously equal – each had the right to veto the other’s ideas – and admirably equable. ‘There were no rules,’ Lynn would say, ‘and no hurt feelings. Mostly, by the time the script was completed, we genuinely didn’t know who had written what, and we didn’t care.’12 They never rowed, always encouraged and supported each other’s efforts and certainly regarded their collaboration as mutually beneficial. ‘Tony often says that he learned how to write comedy from me,’ Lynn would recall, ‘but I don’t think that could be true, for he is a very funny man and a very experienced writer. I do know that I learned from him how the world works. I learned a little detachment, too, though that’s never been my strong suit and still isn’t.’13
If there was any unofficial division of labour between them, it concerned the management of the two main characters. Jay would come to describe himself, somewhat tongue in cheek, as ‘the guardian of Sir Humphrey’s soul’, while Lynn, he said, was the guardian of Hacker’s. Although they always wrote both characters – and everything else – together, Lynn would agree that the distinction did indeed make some sense. ‘Tony,’ he observed, ‘like Sir Humphrey, has a First in Classics, is fluent in Latin and Greek and has an academic, analytical mind. He would probably have become a Permanent Secretary, had he joined the Civil Service instead of the BBC.’14 Lynn also accepted that, at least at first glance, he was not unlike Hacker: ‘a frustrated and disappointed idealist who regularly fails to practise what he preaches.’15
As they wrote together, therefore, Jay would sometimes be the one to suggest how Sir Humphrey might act, or what he might say, and Lynn would then seize on that to develop some comic dialogue between him and Hacker. The best ideas for Bernard Woolley’s donnish interjections, however, would come about far more naturally and accidentally over the course of a writing session.
One example of this, which arose during work on a later episode,16 concerned an exchange between Sir Humphrey and Hacker about a policy that might prove to be a vote winner. Hacker declared that, if that was indeed the case, he would not want to look a gift horse in the mouth. This prompted Jay to give Sir Humphrey the line, ‘I put it to you, Minister, that you are looking a Trojan horse in the mouth’, which in turn caused Lynn to have Hacker say, ‘You mean, if we look closely at this gift horse we’ll find it’s full of Trojans?’
When Lynn then slid the writing pad back over to Jay, his partner frowned at the latest line and then said, ‘Well, no. If one had looked the Trojan horse in the mouth one would have found Greeks inside, because the Greeks gave the horse to the Trojans. So technically it wasn’t a Trojan horse at all, it was a Greek horse. Hence the tag Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, which is usually and somewhat inaccurately translated as “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”.’
Lynn could not resist asking his partner what a better translation of the Greek tag might be. ‘No,’ Jay replied, warming to his theme, ‘it’s a Latin tag. It’s obvious, really, the Greeks would hardly have advised other people to beware of Greeks. But there’s another way you can tell: the tag is clearly Latin rather than Greek, not because timeo ends in “o”, because the Greek first person also ends in “o” – actually, there is a Greek word timao meaning “I honour” – but because the “os” ending is a nominative singular termination of the second declension in Greek and an accusative plural in Latin. Incidentally, Danaos is not only the Greek for Greek but the Latin for Greek, too.’
Lynn, listening to this, realised that it was perfect for one of Bernard Woolley’s jaw-droppingly irrelevant yet well-meaning contributions to a conversation, so, as Jay went on, he quickly scribbled it all down and slipped it into the latest script.17 It would end up getting some of the loudest laughs of the episode. ‘Tony,’ Lynn later recalled, ‘was benignly pleased that his arcane academic knowledge struck other people as amusing.’18
The bulk of their work on the pilot script, though, involved making the situation, as well as the characters, seem as believable as possible, so they had to think carefully not only about what was going to happen but also who, on screen, would be involved. Neither Sir Humphrey nor Woolley, it was felt, would require any real glimpse into their lives beyond Whitehall, as having civil servants seem permanently in situ was part of the point, but it was felt that Hacker, as a public figure, would need to be shown to have some kind of life, and a separate set of relationships, outside of his department.
He was therefore given a wife (and later on a daughter) because the pilot needed to see him at home waiting to know his fate as far as the new Cabinet was concerned, and also because the tensions between a Minister’s real family and the surrogate one inside his department promised plenty of future comic opportunities. He was also given a political ally, his special adviser Frank Weisel (pronounced ‘Wy-sel’), partly because Ministers did indeed like to make use of such outside figures, and partly because Permanent Secretaries tended to hate them.
Some of the biggest, and most common, clashes between the Minister and his Permanent Secretary that were recounted in Richard Crossman’s diaries concerned his attempts, as a painfully isolated social democratic politician surrounded by conservative-minded bureaucrats, to seek out advice from beyond the walls of Whitehall, and Dame Evelyn’s strenuous attempts to stop him from doing so. It was a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and something that struck many senior civil servants – bristling at the prospect of more and more outsiders undermining and second-guessing them from a constitutionally questionable position – as the cue for chaos unless they could snuff the fashion out as swiftly as possible.
One of Crossman’s early favourites was Arnold Goodman, a left-leaning lawyer who later became Lord Goodman and one of the country’s most influential political grandees. When Dame Evelyn first heard that her Minister had been acting on Goodman’s unofficial advice, after he intervened in a bill that their Department was in an advanced stage of drafting, she burst into his office incandescent with rage, telling him that she had never been so insulted in her life, and had almost resigned in protest.19 Although shaken by the severity of her reaction, Crossman continued to crave ways to challenge the Civil Service’s monopoly on guidance and advice, and Dame Evelyn continued to devise more and more devious ways to defeat him.
By the mid-1970s, however, the fashion for special advisers (who were now starting to be nicknamed ‘spads’) had grown far more widespread, with no fewer than thirty-eight being appointed by the Labour Government following its 1974 election victory. Not everyone on the political side liked them – James Callaghan, for example, viewed them with intense suspicion and blamed them for government leaks – and not (quite) everyone on the bureaucratic side disliked them – sometimes the value of their specialist knowledge and insight was simply impossible to deny – but, at the time when Yes Minister was brought to life, they were indubitably newsworthy and controversial.
Jay and Lynn (who, of course, had the benefit of two of the most eminent exemplars of the breed – Marcia Falkender and Bernard Donoughue – as their guides) believed that Hacker’s special adviser would have a similarly unsettling effect on Sir Humphrey to that which the likes of Goodman had had on Dame Evelyn, so they wove the figure of Frank Weisel into the picture. A passionate, persistent, pushy little party dogmatist, Weisel could be relied on to bully Hacker into taking on the bureaucrats, and to berate him whenever he seemed in danger of settling for pragmatism before pure principle. Sir Humphrey would not even bother to hide his contempt for such an interloper, deliberately mispronouncing his name as ‘Weasel’ and suggesting that he base himself a safe way away in darkest Walthamstow, while Weisel would be open in his eagerness to see ‘Sir Humphrey Bloody Appleby and Mr Toffee-Nosed Private Secretary Snooty Woolley’ taken tightly ‘by the short and curlies’.
One thing that neither Jay nor Lynn wanted to add to the sitcom was the identity of Hacker’s own political party. They would scrupulously avoid any mention of its name, called its headquarters ‘Central House’ – an amalgam of the Conservative’s Central Office and Labour’s Transport House – had Hacker wear a white rosette when attending his election count, and (since Margaret Thatcher’s rise to the top of the Tory Party had finally made gender a feature of the political firmament) only referred to his leader as ‘the Prime Minister’.
This apparent coyness was mainly to satisfy the BBC policy to strive for political impartiality, even in a sitcom, but, as Jay later explained, it also helped to keep the focus on the fundamentals of the fiction:
The party in power was bound to be either Conservative or Labour – there was no other option at the time of devising it. Or there were the Liberals, if you count them as an option, but no one would have done. If we had identified the party then it could have been construed as a consistent and unremitting attack on one or other political party; obviously we did not want to do that. However, we also did not want to identify the party because we did not see the series as being about how the Labour Party or the Conservative Party when in government interacted with the Civil Service. Moreover, between some opposition politicians and government ministers there was often only a tiny gap in terms of their political beliefs and practice: as, say, between the Conservative William Whitelaw and Labour’s Merlyn Rees as Home Secretary. Therefore, following BBC policy was useful for our purposes.20
Once the pilot script was completed it was sent, at the end of 1977, on to the BBC’s new Head of Comedy, John Howard Davies, to review. Davies was a sharp-witted, imaginative and very experienced programme-maker who had produced and/or directed such hugely successful comedy shows as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Goodies, Steptoe and Son, The Good Life and, most notably, Fawlty Towers before rising up the ranks as an executive. He was, as a consequence, supremely confident in his own ability to judge the potential of any new sitcom, and, when he read the pilot script of Yes Minister, he felt sure that it had the ‘legs’ to be a success.
Not only did Davies like the idea of the show, but he also already had some fairly clear ideas concerning which actors to cast as the two leads – and his views on such a subject tended to be treated as authoritative. The son of the scriptwriter Jack Davies and a former child actor himself (making his debut in 1948 as the eponymous young hero of David Lean’s adaptation of Oliver Twist), and described by John Cleese as ‘a very, very good judge of comedy’,21 he had an impressive track record for picking the right performers for the right roles. While planning Fawlty Towers, for example, he had taken primary responsibility for choosing most of the members of the cast (selecting, among others, Prunella Scales as Sybil Fawlty, Andrew Sachs as Manuel and Ballard Berkeley as Major Gowen), and had also brought together the talents that worked so well as a team in The Good Life.
When, in January 1978,22 he first met up with Jay and Lynn in his office at Television Centre, he was keen to get straight down to business. He wanted to discuss the casting.
Jay and Lynn had some ideas of their own about the cast. ‘The person I originally had in mind for Sir Humphrey,’ Jay later revealed somewhat whimsically, ‘was an actor called Cecil Parker. He was not available for two reasons: one was that he was too expensive, and the other was that he was dead [he died in 1971]. He was marvellous at playing anguished butlers who were superior to their employers but had to cloak it in deference. His style was very funny as it thinly concealed the fury and contempt that were hiding, stifled, beneath.’23
Given the absence of Parker, Jay agreed with Lynn that the actor now most suited to playing Sir Humphrey was Nigel Hawthorne (‘We each think we suggested him first’24), and the one best equipped to capture Hacker was Paul Eddington. They would therefore be very relieved to discover that John Howard Davies, completely independently, had come to exactly the same conclusion.
Jay and Lynn had seen Hawthorne onstage playing a frustrated schoolmaster in Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged (1975) and a Blimpish major in Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade (1977), as well as on television in numerous productions, and they had already worked with him briefly in a Video Arts film called Decisions, Decisions (‘He’d been terribly good,’ Jay would say25). His ability to play calm, cool-headed, superior types, who were nonetheless prone to the odd apoplectic explosion, convinced them that he would be perfect for the part of their Permanent Secretary.
Lynn, meanwhile, had been an admirer of the artful and amiable Paul Eddington ever since, as a teenager, he had seen him at the Bristol Old Vic in the 1961 production of George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart, and had got to know him a little when, in 1975, he joined him in one episode of The Good Life.26 Jay had also seen and admired Eddington over the years in countless plays and programmes, and, like Lynn, was very keen to have him as Hacker.
Davies knew both actors well, and, indeed, had been the one who had chosen Eddington for The Good Life (and had promised to find him another vehicle for his talents27). So when Jay and Lynn began the meeting by proposing Paul Eddington for Hacker, Davies agreed immediately. In turn, when Davies suggested Nigel Hawthorne for Sir Humphrey, Jay and Lynn were similarly quick to accede. At which point both parties agreed that that was that, and the meeting was deemed to be over. ‘It was the easiest casting session in my career,’ Lynn later said.28
What would prove to be far from easy, however, was convincing the actors. Neither, it would soon seem, was particularly keen to commit himself to the project.
Jay and Lynn had no real reason to anticipate such reluctance, so they pressed ahead with their plans. After making one small revision to the pilot script – on John Howard Davies’ advice, Hacker’s first name was changed from ‘Gerry’ to ‘Jim’, in order to avoid associations with Eddington’s previous sitcom incarnation, Jerry Ledbetter – they sent off a copy to each of their two targets.
According to Nigel Hawthorne’s later recollection of his first sight of the initial script (‘It was like being handed a pot of gold’29), he was immediately impressed by the ‘brilliance of the dialogue’ and was fascinated by the ‘central, complex relationship’ between the politician and the civil servant: ‘I recognised the potential in Sir Humphrey the moment I’d reached the end of the first page and, long before finishing the last, had decided to do the job.’30 Paul Eddington would end up saying much the same thing: he loved the script and was drawn just as quickly to the project, even though he ‘thought the appeal would be very small’.31 It seems, though, that neither actor’s memory was entirely reliable on this point.
Their actual reaction at the time, according to John Howard Davies, was positive, but curbed by a certain degree of caution. ‘They wanted to see more scripts,’ Davies would later reveal. ‘Both of them really liked the first one – Nigel, especially, was pretty dazzled by it, in fact – but I think because of that, they wanted to be reassured that it wasn’t a one-off, a flash in the pan. They wanted to see if that quality could really be sustained.’32 Eddington in particular was, it seems, very wary about getting carried away by the accomplishments of a first script. He was painfully aware of other actors who had signed up for a series on the basis of a solitary sample script – unaware that it had actually taken several months to shape, hone and polish – only to discover, soon after the contract had been signed, that the writing on subsequent episodes fell far below the standard of the original.
Eddington also let it be known that, on the evidence of this first script, he would much rather play Sir Humphrey than Hacker, because he had noticed that Sir Humphrey always had the last line. Davies assured him, however, that the writers had always envisaged him as the actor who could best make Hacker seem real, and pointed out that, while Sir Humphrey would always be more or less the same, Hacker offered much more chance for character development. This seemed to satisfy him, but, like Hawthorne, he continued to harbour doubts about agreeing to do a series.
The result was that, on 7 February 1978, Davies commissioned a second script from Jay and Lynn (for a joint fee of £1,35033), which they duly wrote and submitted by the agreed deadline of 13 March, and which he then sent on to the actors. Eddington and Hawthorne responded in much the same manner as before, praising what they had read but asking for more. Thus began a cycle.
On 13 April a third script was commissioned. This time Jay and Lynn were paid an increased joint fee of £1,450 (with an additional £50 being sent to an unnamed ‘third party’ for assisting the writers with their research). The deadline was 5 June.34
A fourth script was then ordered on 26 May. Jay and Lynn were again paid £1,450 between them. The deadline on this occasion was 18 August.35
Eventually, after submitting their fourth meticulously researched and stylishly written episode, an exasperated Jay and Lynn decided to draw the line. ‘No,’ Lynn would recall the two of them saying to John Howard Davies as he began, somewhat sheepishly, to suggest yet another submission, ‘four scripts are enough, they must make up their minds, yes or no.’36 Davies put the question to the two actors at the end of August, and both of them finally came up with an answer: ‘Yes’.
The sense of relief on all sides was palpable. Neither Eddington nor Hawthorne, in spite of their anxieties, had really wanted to pass on such an enticing part, and neither Jay nor Lynn (nor Davies) had wanted to lose them. The prevarication had been agonising to endure, but, now that the decision was made, the worries disappeared and the confidence came through. The two main characters had been cast.
Davies then commissioned two more scripts from Jay and Lynn, bringing the total to what he thought, at that stage, would be a series of six episodes.37 He could now concentrate on moving ahead with the rest of the production.
Most pressingly, the actor to play Bernard Woolley still had to be chosen, and, in stark contrast to the two leads, there was no immediate consensus as to who should be at the top of the list. John Howard Davies had a famously bulging book of TV and theatrical contacts, and, in such situations, could always be relied on to draw up an impressive collection of candidates (he had, for example, considered a list of fifteen possibilities to play Sybil in Fawlty Towers before settling on Prunella Scales38), but, given that the role was at this stage deliberately underwritten, the sheer range of options was almost overwhelming.
Initially Jonathan Lynn had considered putting himself forward for the part. There was, after all, a precedent for such a move, as his friend John Cleese had written Basil Fawlty for himself with great success. There was also, on the other hand, a precedent for resisting such a temptation: Jimmy Perry had been blocked from playing the role of Private Walker in Dad’s Army (even though he had conceived it expressly for himself) because, it was decided, having a writer among the cast might have caused resentment over the distribution of lines.39 In the case of Yes Minister, however, the issue was soon rendered redundant because, after some reflection, Lynn decided to put his Cambridge Theatre Company commitments first and withdrew from consideration.
John Howard Davies then sounded out several candidates for the role, but all of them declined because, as they saw it, on paper the part seemed far too insubstantial. Undaunted, Davies persisted, trying a number of other actors, but he kept getting the same negative response: the character said little, did little and thus held little appeal.
It took a chance encounter to solve the problem. There is, however, a difference of opinion between the two main protagonists as to when and where that chance encounter took place.
According to Jonathan Lynn’s recollection, the setting was Holloway Prison, where he was one of the guests at a dinner party hosted by the Governor and his wife. Seated next to him was the actor Derek Fowlds, who had worked in theatre and television on a wide range of productions over the course of about eighteen years, but who, at that stage, was best known to the general public for being the much-loved human sidekick to a hand puppet in the very popular children’s series The Basil Brush Show, from 1969 to 1973. Lynn liked him personally, and knew that his open, understated and amiable manner made viewers warm to him rapidly. He decided then and there that Fowlds would be just right for this new role.
According to Derek Fowlds himself, however (‘I have been to Holloway Prison – the Governor and his wife, Tony and Patricia Heald, were friends of mine – and I did meet Jonathan there for a dinner, but that wasn’t when he mentioned anything to me about playing Bernard. He might have been thinking about me for the role, but that wasn’t when he first mentioned it’40), the encounter took place a little later in the considerably more conventional and respectable environment of the West End of London in the foyer of a theatrical agency:
Johnny [Lynn] and I had the same agent. And I was there at the office, sitting waiting to go in and see our agent, when I saw Johnny come out. I knew him then as an actor. So I said, ‘Hello, Johnny, how are you?’ You know, the usual. And then he left and I went in and said to my agent, ‘What’s he doing here?’ And my agent said, ‘Oh, he’s so pleased, because they’re doing a new series, he’s co-writing it, and he’s thrilled because they’ve just cast Nigel Hawthorne.’ So I said, ‘Well, what is it? Is there something in it for me?’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ So we chatted about other things, and then I went home.41
Wherever the chance encounter really happened, what is clear is that the next morning Lynn talked to Antony Jay and then called John Howard Davies to suggest Fowlds for Bernard Woolley. Davies agreed, and sent him a script.
Fowlds, unlike all of the previous candidates, would immediately see the part’s potential, realise how he could help develop it, and would not hesitate before calling to accept:
My agent had phoned me and said, ‘Well, we have a script, because I asked Johnny Lynn and he said, “There is a part, and let Derek have a look at it”.’ So I said, ‘What is it? What’s it called?’ He said, ‘It’s called Yes Minister.’ So I said, ‘Oh, is it about vicars?’ I thought it must be some Derek Nimmo-style, All Gas and Gaiters sort of thing! He said, ‘No, no, it’s political, it’s very new, very different. Read the script – the part is Bernard.’
So he sent me the script, and I read it, and I just wet my breeches, really. I thought, ‘This is so exciting!’ And I knew Paul and Nigel – I’d worked with Paul and I knew Nigel as a friend – and I really couldn’t wait to team up with them to do it.42
The comic triangle had its trio of players. Now the rest of the casting could be concluded.
Diana Hoddinott was hired (for a fee of £165 per show43) to be Hacker’s wife, Annie. She had been working fairly steadily in television since the early 1960s, mainly in dramas rather than comedies, popping up in one-off episodes of such popular shows as Suspense, Maigret and Dixon of Dock Green. John Howard Davies chose her mainly because, with her ability to blend a cool demeanour with subtle wit, she could portray a typical modern politician’s wife: a liberated woman forced to hide behind a submissive-looking image, realistic enough to know that she was obliged to seem pleasantly anodyne when thrust into the public spotlight, one step behind him physically while one step ahead of him mentally. 44
Davies also decided to cast Neil Fitzwiliam as Frank Weisel. This was, he would admit,45 something of a gamble, as the actor had been more noticeable over the past decade or so as a dancer than as a thespian (his credits included spots on The Eartha Kitt Show, Half a Sixpence and The Slipper and the Rose), but Davies had also seen him in a few dramatic roles and had liked his portrayals of edgy, snappy types. He had wanted someone who could make Weisel seem as physically, verbally and irritatingly weaselly as possible, and Fitzwiliam seemed capable of fitting the bill.
Finally, Davies needed to find someone suited to playing the Civil Service’s capo di tutti capi, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Arnold Robinson, a crusty, testy, imposing figure who needed to seem sufficiently threatening as to make even Sir Humphrey appear a little insecure. A number of actors were considered for this small but memorable part, but, eventually, Davies settled on selecting John Nettleton, a sober-looking man with a voice that sounded as though it had been marinated in Earl Grey tea and who, over the past couple of decades, had huffed, puffed and harrumphed his way through a wide variety of world-weary majors, colonels, admirals, barristers, spies and detective superintendents (as well as, in the sitcom If It Moves, File It, a senior civil servant). Davies felt Nettleton would bring just the right air of understated but menacing authority to such a formidable éminence grise.
Once Nettleton accepted the offer of the role – which he did quickly and eagerly – the casting, for this initial stage, was complete. Davies, reflecting on all of his choices, was satisfied with the company that he had assembled. They would make Yes Minister work.
Now everyone was keen to press on with the production process. They had the scripts and the stars and the supporting players. All of the key ingredients were, at last, in place. It was time for the pilot to be made.