A Very Courageous Decision Page 6
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 ea
sy 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.