The Ormskirk Advertiser, 19th January 1989.
The Saddest Short Story Ever Told
Published 25th October 2023
That Squalid Little Rag
Published 15th October 2023
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
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. ↩
92.
Published 10th October 2023
As I kid, I never really got on with films. Oh, I watched a few, don’t get me wrong. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was formative for all the obvious reasons. But they were long. I found it very difficult to sit still for 90 minutes, let alone for more than that. A half hour sitcom, brilliant. A film? Sounds a bit tiring.
And over the years, things calcified. I still watched the odd film. I even went to the cinema occasionally. But I was never a “film person”. I was too busy throwing myself into as many half hour sitcoms as I could find. That was my thing. I didn’t need anything else.
The problem: you can very easily end up starting to become a bit of a parody of yourself. At some point, I wasn’t that into film, simply because that’s what I’d told myself for years.
No.
Published 9th October 2023
I don’t often bother making fun of Google’s suggested questions in their search results. It’s rather a shooting/fish/barrel scenario. But I’m afraid the below just broke me.
The above is wrong in three entirely different ways:
- The last episode of the original series of Yes, Prime Minister was “The Tangled Web”.
- The last episode of the revived series of Yes, Prime Minister in 2013 was “A Tsar Is Born”.
- OK, fine, so maybe they’re just getting confused, and they mean the last episode of Yes Minister. That would be… “Party Games”.
Still, maybe I’m being unfair. Google trying to be helpful is usually fine, let’s just check their autofill—
You know what, never mind.
The Henderson Report
Published 8th October 2023
On the 23rd December 1982, BBC2 broadcast the final episode of Series 3 of Yes Minister. Titled “The Middle Class Rip-off”, it’s an amusing satire on arts funding, and the nature of “high” culture and “low” culture.1
SIR HUMPHREY: The point is, suppose other football clubs got into difficulties. And what about greyhound racing? Should dog tracks be subsidised as well as football clubs, for instance?
BERNARD: Well, why not, if that’s what the people want?
SIR HUMPHREY: Bernard, subsidy is for art. For culture. It is not to be given to what the people want. It is for what the people don’t want but ought to have! If they want something, they’ll pay for it themselves. No, we subsidise education, enlightenment, spiritual uplift. Not the vulgar pastimes of ordinary people.
You can probably guess which side Hacker is on.
HACKER: Why should the rest of the country subsidise the pleasures of the middle class few? Theatre, opera, ballet? Subsidising art in this country is nothing more than a middle class rip-off.
SIR HUMPHREY: Oh, minister! How can you say such a thing? Subsidy is about education. Preserving the pinnacles of our civilisation! Or hadn’t you noticed?
HACKER: Don’t patronise me Humphrey, I believe in education too. I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, may I remind you.
SIR HUMPHREY: Well, I’m glad to learn that even the LSE is not totally opposed to education.
Very droll, Humphrey. Still, the rights and wrongs of funding for the arts isn’t our big interest today. Instead, I want to look at the Radio Times capsule for the episode. Which features something rather unusual.
Take a look at those names. Eddington, Hawthorne, Fowlds: check. And John Nettleton, John Barron, Patrick O’Connell, and Derek Benfield: check. But what about Joanna Henderson, playing the Curator? She’s not in the episode at all. Nor is she in the end credits. What gives?
To answer that, I have to take you on a little expedition. And to tell the tale properly, we have to go right back to 1979.
For an alternative – and rather more negative – view of the episode, read Graham McCann’s A Very Courageous Decision: The Inside Story of Yes Minister, a book which comes highly recommended. ↩
Of Ministers and Mandarins
Published 5th October 2023
Much as I love Jonathan Lynn’s Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister, it seems that every time you poke it, another inaccuracy falls out. I’ve already talked about a certain set of Evening Standard reviews of Yes Minister. But that’s far from the only problem.
Let me quote that section of the book again.
“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. 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.”
As well as misrepresenting the Evening Standard reviews, commenters here were quick to notice other errors. David Boothroyd correctly points out that Hattersley only became Deputy Leader in 1983; it was Michael Foot in the role at the time of Yes Minister‘s first series. Worse, even the referenced article by Hattersley is incorrectly attributed: Simon Coward points out that there’s no evidence of such an article in The Spectator around this time.
Luckily, I have very good readers who do all my work for me. A bit more digging from Simon revealed that the article wasn’t in The Spectator at all; it was in The Listener instead. Silly similar syllable sounds. And then your friend – and indeed he’s my friend as well – John Williams kindly bunged me a copy of the whole article.
Titled “Of Ministers and Mandarins”, and published in the 20th March 1980 issue of the magazine, this was clearly written after the third episode of the series was broadcast: “The Economy Drive”, on the 10th March. It represents one of the very first serious pieces of analysis of Yes Minister – perhaps the very first – and so is an important document in our understanding of the initial reaction to the show.
It seems worth, therefore, replicating the article in full. Take it away, Roy Hattersley.
I Hate Doing Research, Part Five
Published 4th October 2023
When you’re deep in research mode – I mean truly, the deepest you’ve ever gone – sometimes inspiration hits you like a coruscation from the azure. Surely, nobody has ever thought of checking this document before. It could reveal everything.
You delve down into the archive, and hastily flick through. Enlightenment is just within your grasp, you can feel it. Ah, here it is—
I really need a new hobby. Pottery, or winemaking, or something.
Don’t Tell Me About the Press
Published 1st October 2023
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.
I Hate Doing Research, Part Four
Published 25th September 2023
The other day, I was browing through an old article on Dirty Feed. I do this quite a lot. Perhaps this should be an embarrassing thing to admit. Well, if everyone else has better things to do than write articles about inaccurate Fry & Laurie TX dates, I’ll just have to read my own again.
So there I was, scanning down this particular piece, and suddenly… my heart sank. Because something unpleasant had happened. It’s happened many times before, but it never stops being disappointing.
Because what I saw was this:
A crucial link in the puzzle of working out that correct TX date: gone. Disappeared into the ether. Worse still, that deleted video isn’t archived anywhere on the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t even tell you which account it was which closed, let alone anything else, so I have no way of getting in contact with the people who originally uploaded it to acquire the material for myself.
Luckily, kindly soul Ben Baker supplied me with an alternative video link which more or less does the same thing. So with a small update, the article makes about as much sense as it used to. But it’s a reminder that just because you fully intend to keep your stuff online, it doesn’t mean everyone else is going to. And if you’re relying on other people’s work or content to make your point, you’d best make sure you keep your own copy of everything you reference, lest it’s yanked offline, leaving a gaping hole.
Entropy is a bitch, ain’t it?
New-Old Films on the BBC
Published 21st September 2023
BBC Two showing the same old films has become a running joke in our house. If you check the page on the BBC website for 1960’s School for Scoundrels, we can find out it’s been shown no less than 14 times since 2013. I don’t care how much you like Terry-Thomas, that’s surely overkill.
Which means that when the BBC does start showing some “new” old films which they haven’t actually broadcast for years1, they can get somewhat lost in the schedules. So consider the following a public service announcement. The first two have already gone out and are on iPlayer, and the other two are on this weekend:
Funny Face (1957)
Recent BBC TX: 16th Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 4th May 1998 (Genome)
A film that more than one person has cited as a possible inspiration for parts of Barbie, quite aside from the more obvious elements from another film directed by Donen: Singin’ in the Rain.
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Recent BBC TX: 17th Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 17th Mar 1996 (Genome)
One of Judy Garland’s final film performances. A strong film to show on BBC Two before the watershed due to the use of real Holocaust footage, which garnered an equally strong warning from continuity beforehand.
Moulin Rouge (1953)
Next BBC TX: 23rd Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 19th Feb 1978 (Genome)
This one in particular feels very strange that it hasn’t been on the BBC since 1978! It should have been on every bank holiday! (Although Channel 4 had rights for years.)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Next BBC TX: 24th Sep 2023 (Schedule) • Previous BBC TX: 7th Sep 2001 (Genome)
This was remade as In the Good Old Summertime in 1949, which is one of my favourite musicals. Oddly, despite my recent sojourn through Golden Age Hollywood, I have somehow conspired to see none of the above films. So this is an ideal opportunity to rectify this.
Other interesting things are popping up here and there; it’s so widely-seen that I didn’t think it was worth adding to the above list, but BBC Two are also showing the original Psycho for the first time in years this Sunday the 24th. So it’s worth keeping an eye out for other shards of joy/terror in the schedules during the upcoming weeks.
Other channels will have shown them more recently, of course – I’m only talking about the BBC here. ↩