On the 9th March 1981, BBC2 first broadcast the Yes Minister episode “The Death List”. It’s a particularly good episode for many reasons, not least Graeme Garden marching into the programme for one show-stealing scene, and turning it into The Goodies.
But that’s comedy, and we don’t deal with comedy around here. We deal with far more important things. Such as: which issue of Private Eye is Jim Hacker reading from here?
Is it a real issue of the magazine? Or is it a prop, made from scratch?
Let’s see what we can dig up. Our first point of call is, of course, Private Eye‘s covers library, which usefully gives us an image of every single cover since the magazine’s first issue. And to help narrow down the search, we also know that “The Death List” was recorded in studio on the 1st February 1981. Did they just grab the latest issue of the Eye and bung it in Paul Eddington’s hands?
Not quite. The above cover doesn’t appear in Private Eye‘s cover archive. But Issue 497, dated the 2nd January 1981 – just a month before the studio date – looks rather suspicious:
That purple background is very distinctive. Which gave me ideas. But there was only one way to know whether I was right. Luckily, the back page of the magazine is very prominent in the episode as well, with the obvious wording of CAMP AFRICA in the top left.
A quick eBay later, and I held a copy of Issue 497 in my sweaty, desperate hands. Was my gut feeling correct?
Yes indeed. The prop department simply got a recent issue of Private Eye, stuck a new picture on the front over the old one, and job done. Lovely.1
* * *
But the above isn’t the end of the mystery. It’s all very well proving which issue the prop was based on; but what about the new image pasted over the top? Can we trace that?
Answer: nearly.
The first thing to check is the paperwork. This gives us the following piece of information:
STILL: Queen on walk-about.
Black and white: The Scotsman Publ. STLD 189630(9)
Good news. This gives us both a description of the picture – the Queen tottering around, meeting the nation – and which photo library it comes from.2
Next up is to force the existing screengrab we have from the programme into a slightly more recognisable form. With thanks to @elbows_selbo, we can at least begin to get a vague idea of what the original picture looked like:
The white blob is clearly not part of the original photo, but is a speech bubble, used as a joke on Private Eye covers since the year dot. What joke the prop department thought would be funny is sadly lost to the mists of time.
Next up, I cheated. I did try searching in the online version of The Scotsman‘s photo library myself, but got precisely nowhere. Luckily, I can crowdsource any difficult research these days. So @spankybackpack was the first to reveal that the image almost certainly comes from the Queen visiting the Gorbals housing estate in July 1972. And here’s a video – the relevant part is at 39 seconds in.
Note the very distinctive barrier, which you can also see on the Private Eye cover:
Next up, @Frosted_Green suggested a photo which is very similar to what we’re looking for, but a little too close:
Credit: Photo by Biggins/Daily Mail/Shutterstock (896351a)
But we still don’t have our actual picture. Jonathan Dent linked to a couple of Scotsman pictures which aren’t correct either, but are perhaps getting closer. We only have low-res thumbnails publicly available, sadly:
We feel tantalisingly close… but not there yet. Can anybody make the final leap? Or do I have to make a pain of myself at the Scotsman editorial desk?
The question is: why exactly did Yes Minister bother to change the picture? Is it because the original cover has TV-am stars on? Could they not get the rights? Or did the Beeb literally not want to advertise ITV?
It’ll be something like that, anyway. But I would suggest there’s another reason why it makes sense to have a mocked-up Private Eye cover. The world of Yes Minister isn’t quite our world. Sure, there are newspapers dotted around the series which have real-life headlines, but they aren’t usually plot-relevant props. As soon as something gets drawn into the story, it makes sense for the issue of Private Eye to not be a “real” one. Things are supposed to be slightly askew. ↩
Sadly the reference number – sometimes so useful – hasn’t proved to be any help. So far, at least. ↩