Jonathan Lynn’s Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister is a slightly odd tome. Part autobiography, part an attempt to nail down the rules of comedy – while admitting that any such attempt is doomed to failure – it does feel like it would occasionally benefit from a little more focus. On the other hand, I found myself nodding along vigorously to pretty much every single page.
For instance, when talking about Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister:
“The series eventually ran from 1980 to 1988 but was not about the eighties. It was devised in the seventies and reflected the media-obsessed politics of the Wilson/Heath/Callaghan years, not the conviction politics of Margaret Thatcher. It was actually much closer to the politics of the years that followed, the years of Major, Blair and Brown. In any case, there is a timelessness about good comedy: the pleasure and excitement of recognition are not rooted in a particular time or place. Humanity remains constant.”
This dual nature of what comedy can be is key: it can be ostensibly linked to a particular time, and yet still leap easily across the years. I always shake my head in dismay when people tell me how easily comedy dates. Comedy is usually about people, and people don’t change either as much or as quickly as many would like to think.
SIR ARNOLD: What about the DHSS? John?
SIR JOHN: Well, I’m happy to say that women are well-represented near the top of the DHSS. After all, we have two of the four Deputy Secretaries currently at Whitehall. Not eligible for Permanent Secretary of course, because they’re Deputy Chief Medical Officers and I am not sure they’re really suitable… no, that’s unfair! Of course, women are 80% of our clerical staff and 99% of the typing grade, so we’re not doing too badly by them, are we?— Yes Minister, “Equal Opportunities” (1982)
BARBIE: Are any women in charge?
MATTEL CEO: Listen. I know exactly where you’re going with this and I have to say I really resent it. We are a company literally made of women. We had a woman CEO in the 90s. And there was another one at… some other time. So that’s two right there. Women are the freaking foundation of this very long phallic building. We have gender neutral bathrooms up the wazoo. Every single one of these men love women. I’m the son of a mother. I’m the mother of a son. I’m the nephew of a woman aunt. Some of my best friends are Jewish.— Barbie (2023)
Humanity remains constant indeed. Especially the terrible bits. Which is what an awful lot of comedy is about.
* * *
Recently I’ve been doing a fair amount of research about Yes Minister. And Comedy Rules has become one of my standard set texts whenever I’m writing anything about Hacker & Co.1
One section which caught my eye on my last read through is Lynn talking about the initial reaction to the show, back in 1980:
“No one took much notice of the second episode, but everything changed after the third week. This sudden surge of enthusiasm was the result of a lengthy article by Roy Hattersley in the Spectator. Hattersley was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party at the time and, like Jim Prior in the Tory Party and Jim Hacker in our series, was a centrist politician who could have belonged to either party.2 Hattersley described everything that the show had shown so far, confirmed that this was exactly what had happened to him when he first became a minister, and asked how on earth did we know?
Hattersley’s article galvanised the political press. Suddenly political correspondents took up the show and editorials started to be written about it. The TV critics, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon, and after the fourth episode the critic from the Evening Standard told his readers that Yes Minister was an excellent comedy show and he had said so from the start. He hadn’t.”
Which I thought sounded fucking hilarious. Wouldn’t it be fun to dig out those old Evening Standard reviews, and have a jolly good laugh at our hapless, grasping critic?
Let’s take a look. In fact, the review Lynn is talking about came after the fifth episode broadcast, not the fourth. It was published in the Evening Standard on the 25th March 1980, the day after the broadcast of the episode “The Writing on the Wall”.
Lynn kindly leaves out the actual name of the Evening Standard TV critic in question. In fact, it was none other than Bill “fucking rotter” Grundy himself. I am going to quote his entire review, so I can’t be accused of picking and choosing my arguments:
“It is exactly a month since I wrote about Yes Minister. I ended then by prophesying that it was going to be compulsive viewing for those of us who regard Whitehall and Westminster with horrified amusement.
I am glad to say I was right. A prophet is not without honour in his own estimation.
Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn are an unlikely sounding pair.3 But they have produced one of the wittier comedies of the year. The plot each week is quite simply that new Cabinet Minister Jim Hacker is continually frustrated in his designs by Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey.
But last night they were, for once, on the same side. There is an enemy at the gate. The Think Tank has come up with the idea that since Jim Hacker, the Minister for Administration, wants to slim down the Civil Service – “popular with the Party, Humphrey, and popular with the people” – he should start with his own department and abolish it outright and forthwith.
Jim is shocked. And he is not mollified by the suggestions that he will then be kicked upstairs and become Lord Hacker of Kamikaze.
This will obviously never do. It is one thing to be clear there must be cuts. It is another to be clear they must first apply to your own jobs. Clarity does not begin at home. And unity is strength. So they win, although not without some fairly beastly blackmailing of the Prime Minister.
Paul Eddington as Jim Hacker and Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey are excellent. They now seem to be playing it a little more broadly than in Episode One, but there is nothing wrong in that. Both are such artists they will never go over the top. They are excellently supported by the small cast, notably Derek Fowldes [sic].
Sidney [sic] Lotterby’s4 production is a masterly miniature. As for relevance – well, what was one of last night’s new stories? Michael Heseltine complaining about the difficulty of making cuts in administration. Touché!”
Here’s the thing. At no point does Grundy say “Yes Minister was an excellent comedy show and I said so from the start”. What he actually says is the following:
“It is exactly a month since I wrote about Yes Minister. I ended then by prophesying that it was going to be compulsive viewing for those of us who regard Whitehall and Westminster with horrified amusement.
I am glad to say I was right.”
Which isn’t quite the same thing. Sure, Lynn is paraphrasing – it obviously wasn’t meant to be a direct quote – but I don’t think it really captures what Grundy was going for here.
A seed of doubt in my mind, it seemed worth checking back further. What did Grundy actually say about the first episode of Yes Minister? Here is his column from the 26th February 1980, the day after the broadcast of “Open Government”. Again, this is the complete column, with no eliding of any arguments or facts.
Crucially: did he actually say it was going to be compulsive viewing?
“Let us name drop. Or rather let us not name drop, since I prefer to keep the name secret to protect the innocent. Or guilty, depending on which way you care to look at it.
This Cabinet Minister once said to me: “I didn’t mind the loss of the election so much. I didn’t mind the loss of office so much. What really cut me up was when the Post Office came in and took away my scrambler phone.
“I knew then I was no longer at the centre of power.”
Whether he had ever been at the centre of power is the question behind the new series which started last night on BBC-2.
Yes, Minister is by Antony Jay, not normally known as a stand-up comic, and Jonathan Lynn, an actor who has yet to make the welkin ring.5
Jaylynn Scripts Ltd., as they are probably known to the Inland Revenue, have shown that all you need to do if you want to write a comic series about the clash between a Minister of the Crown and his Oh-so-civil so-called servants, is to know something about the subject.
For instance how the civil service works – or doesn’t. Do they still like the fountains in Trafalgar Square, play from 10 til 4?
All you then need to do is get two very good actors and they will look after the rest for you.
Paul Eddington, as the newly appointed Minister, was his usual splendid self, the artist concealing his art.
Nigel Hawthorne, as Sir Humphrey, his senior Civil Servant, was Niccolo Machiavelli personified.
Even the Borgias would have found him a handful.
The first 10 minutes of the show were dire. Every joke about expectant fathers, already exploited in Robin’s Nest recently, was used again, but this time adapted to expectant politicians.6
Did the phone ring? Is it the PM? Is it the PM? “Good morning PM. Ah, I see. You aren’t the PM. You are the BBC’s PM programme. Ah.”
After that, the programme could only get better. And it did. The subtle, or not so subtle, battle between the new Minister and his principal secretary – “call me Jim.” “If you don’t mind, I would rather call you Minister, Minister” – is going to be fairly compulsive viewing for those of us who regard the Whitehall warriors with one auspicious and one drooping eye.”
Now, if we wanted to, we could poke a little at Grundy changing from “fairly compulsive viewing” in his initial column, to “compulsive viewing”. And sure, that initial column is more critical than his second, and one could fairly accuse it of hedging its bets into the bargain.
But regardless, Lynn’s recollection now just seems entirely incorrect. Grundy said that he told everyone four weeks ago that the show would be “compulsive viewing for those of us who regard Whitehall and Westminster with horrified amusement”, and that’s exactly what he did. Lynn misrepresents what Grundy said twice over; not only does he distort his view of the show, but he indicates that Grundy blatantly lied about his earlier column in his later one. He very clearly didn’t do anything of the sort.
All of which is faintly amusing when talking about Yes Minister, a show which spends an awful lot of its time meditating on the nature of truth. But spin is everywhere, it seems, rather than just the corridors of Whitehall. And why shouldn’t grumpy comedy writers be allowed their share of it?
Which clearly should have been a sequel to CBBC’s Hacker Time. ↩
As David Boothroyd points out in the comments, Lynn has got his timing wrong here – Hattersley only became Deputy Leader in 1983. Michael Foot was in the role at the time of Yes Minister‘s first series. ↩
I mean: are they? Really? What is it about those names which gives Grundy pause? It’s not like they’re called Chris Piss and Andy Testicle. ↩
Poor old Sydney Lotterby must be the most misspelt name in comedy history. ↩
A phrase you don’t often hear these days. It means to make a loud noise, or in other words, to make an impact. ↩
This point is by far the most interesting thing about Grundy’s review. While I don’t agree that the first ten minutes of the show were “dire”, the comparison with Robin’s Nest is apposite; Yes Minister is still a sitcom, and it takes existing sitcom ideas and uses them for its own purposes. Hacker being an expectant minister instead of an expectant father is a genuinely useful insight.
My argument against that opening scene is different: Annie’s disinterest in Jim’s phone antics isn’t really credible. It might be, if we suspected that she was trying to either prick his pomposity, or simply stop him worrying. But when she genuinely asks him to leave the phone and go to the shops to get her some cigarettes, I just don’t believe it. No matter how stressed or irritated she is.
I quite liked my partner’s idea for a fix: Hacker’s daughter could have been involved in the scene. Teenagers being selfish in these circumstances is a far more believable idea than Annie. She could even have been trying to monopolise the phone… ↩
12 comments
David Boothroyd on 1 October 2023 @ 12am
Lynn also mis-times the period when Hattersley was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party – he didn’t get that post until September 1983, some three and a half years after the review was written.
And although Hattersley was a moderate, I suspect he’d quibble at the suggestion he might easily have been a Conservative.
John J. Hoare on 1 October 2023 @ 10am
Cheers David, an excellent point. Have added a small footnote on this.
Simon Coward on 1 October 2023 @ 1pm
Looking at the indexes for The Spectator magazine (available via archive.org), I can find no reference to Yes Minister in either 1980 or 1981. Similarly, Roy Hattersley’s name does not appear in the lists of contributors which form part of those indexes. This seems a little odd, but perhaps Mr Lynn has mistaken the publication in which RH’s piece appeared.
Rob Keeley on 1 October 2023 @ 6pm
Fascinating article as ever, John. I respectfully disagree about the opening scene of episode 1, though – I think it works magnificently. Almost every scene we ever have with Annie shows that Hacker is utterly obsessed with his political career and she finds it impossible to get him to be a husband, a father or to interest himself in domestic matters. We can see her frustration from that first scene. Once they’re in No. 10 it gets worse. It also shows the world Hacker is about to be lifted out of and into government (which is why Frank Weizel doesn’t work and is irrelevant almost straight away).
But yes, Lucy hogging the phone to talk to her boyfriend could have been really funny. :)
John J. Hoare on 1 October 2023 @ 8pm
Simon: Cheers for that, that’s very interesting. I didn’t even bother checking that, because it didn’t seem likely he would get it wrong! The more you poke Comedy Rules, the dodgier the research seems, sadly. I *did* think it was a little odd that Hattersley wrote for The Spectator, mind – maybe it was The New Statesman instead? Worth some further research.
Rob: I do know what you mean. I think my reticence is that the event just seems a little *too* important, and important from the outside looking in, as well as from Hacker himself. It’s not “an” important call, it’s *the* important call. And it’s an easy parallel to understand for a non-politician too: would Hacker really ask Annie to go to the shops for him if *she* was waiting to hear about a job?
Come to think of it, Hacker is so selfish, he probably would. I think a little more of Annie, though!
Scurra on 1 October 2023 @ 10pm
Hattersley’s column moved to The Guardian during the 1980s I think (rather than the Statesman) so it’s more likely to have been there.
I agree that it would have been good to have had Hacker’s daughter in that opening sequence – perhaps they hadn’t thought of her as a device when writing the pilot?
Matthew Davis on 1 October 2023 @ 11pm
If you are going to do a series on “Yes, Minister”, I’d recommend you dig up David Frost and Antony Jay’s “To England with Love” (1967). It’s effectively “The Frost Report” the book, taking a lot of the jokes and comments from throughout the series and tying them together. However there’s also a lot of genuine argument and attempts at contemporary sociology and classification of institutional behaviour – all of which I suspect originates with Jay. For instance:
“What makes it impossible for him to govern is someone at his Ministry called the Permanent Secretary. The Permanent Secretary will listen attentively and respectfully to all the new Minister’s suggestions and theories, then he will demonstrate that all those of which he and his staff disapprove are impossible in practice. Yes, we tried putting the drugs contract up for bid, but all the bids were about the same. Yes, that was suggested four years ago but the Hospital Workers Union refused to co-operate. Yes, we’d like to integrate the clinics with the hospitals, but the Local Authorities refuse and we have no powers of coercion. Yes, house physicians should be paid more but the Treasury won’t release the money. Yes, we did a contingency study for modernizing Mental Hospitals in 1960, and the minimum cost was £260 million—and that was at 1960 prices. What—you want to abolish the prescription charge? Oh well, that knocks out all the other schemes forever. It was the only fund for raising doctors and nurses pay, modernizing the pre-1900 hospitals. . . .The new Minister, hopelessly at sea, will find that the Permanent Secretary has everything at his fingertips. All the facts and figures, the stumbling blocks, the precedents, the past experience, the practicalities. He knows all the right people and all the right dodges. He alone knows what is desirable, what is possible, what is impossible, and what is unthinkable. And if the Minister, foolishly, tries to influence matters by going below the Permanent Secretary to the more junior officials he will find that, since he has no influence on their careers, no power of hire and fire, they have not the slightest interest in ingratiating themselves with him. In a year or two, he will be gone. The Permanent Secretary will not. It is not difficult to guess which damages a Civil Service career more—frustrating a Minister or irritating a Permanent Secretary. In short, the Minister finds that while he is, indeed, in office, he will never be in power.”
David Ashton on 2 October 2023 @ 12am
I can totally believe that a writer would read a review of their show with the sentence “The first 10 minutes of the show were dire” and remember absolutely nothing else.
Simon Coward on 2 October 2023 @ 9am
I may have resolved the Hattersley problem. On this page (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619460903080135) there is an abstract for a piece in the publication ‘Contemporary British History’ entitled “Downing Street’s Favourite Soap Opera: Evaluating the Impact and Influence of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister”. Among the notes there is a reference to “Roy Hattersley, ‘Of Ministers and Mandarins’, The Listener (20 March 1980)”.
I don’t know how The Listener is dated. Clearly 20 March follows the fourth rather than the third episode of Yes Minister but whether that’s the date on which the magazine appeared, the date on which it was due to be taken off the shelves, or something else altogether, I don’t know – hopefully someone more knowledgeable can advise. Even if it is the first of those then, because of print deadlines and so on, it may well be that Hattersley was writing about the series at the time that only three episodes had been broadcast.
John J. Hoare on 2 October 2023 @ 4pm
Matthew: Cheers for that. I did indeed grab a copy of To England With Love when it was recommended to me last year for a similar reason. I haven’t made my way through it yet, but I should bump it up my list!
David: I presume that is indeed exactly what happened. I would suggest that it’s the kind of thing you sit around with your friends and get grumpy about, but shouldn’t have escaped into an actual book. But then I’m sensitive on this point. My criticisms about Red Dwarf were once pounced on by one of the show’s producers, and then entirely misrepresented in a podcast…
Simon: That does look very likely indeed, doesn’t it? Brilliant work. I can certainly imagine “Spectator” and “Listener” getting confused in Lynn’s head, too. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Comedy Rules really could have done with a fact-checking draft!
John J. Hoare on 2 October 2023 @ 5pm
The full Listener article has magically appeared in my inbox! I’ll transcribe and publish it when I get a moment later in the week.
Matthew Davis on 2 October 2023 @ 5pm
I dug my copy out and had a real browse through “To England With Love” last night and there are quite a few points when (at the very least 15 years old) general ideas have been refined and turned into sharp dialog, including the famous bit about dividing Europe.
However I also discovered that one of the more often quoted bits of dialogue in “Yes, Minister” is in fact an adapted quote from a real civil servant. Sir Thomas Padmore made submission to a 1953 Royal Commission on the Civil Service in England:
“What I have said has demonstrated that it is very difficult to find an answer to that question; but, if I were pressed for an answer, I would say that, so far as we can see, taking it rather by and large, taking one time with another, and taking the average of Departments, it is probable that there would not be found to be very much in it either way.”
This got dug up and featured in the very first episode of the Frost Report: On Authority (approx 18:30 in)
https://archive.org/details/monty-python-audio-rarities/Monty+Python+Audio+Rarities/The+Frost+Report/The+Frost+Report+On+Authority+S1E01+10-03-1966.mp3
It gets repeated in “To England with Love”, and after that it has a gray half life in books of humorous quotations.
Then when “Yes, Minister” has cause to base an episode on an investigation into civil service reform, Sir Humphrey offers:
“Well Minister, if you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn’t very much in it one way or the other as far as one can see, at this stage.”
So happy hunting.
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