The man who made Mrs Thatcher laugh
Sir Antony Jay, who has died aged 86, was one of the two writers behind Yes Minister – the brilliantly incisive political comedy that, in the Thatcher era, “exposed the workings of Whitehall to a public not previously encouraged to consider such matters”. At the show’s heart, said Jenny Mccartney in The Daily Telegraph, are two men – Jim Hacker, the guileless, perpetually alarmed minister for administrative affairs, played by Paul Eddington, and Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), the devious permanent secretary who, with “sinuous logic and droll cynicism”, preserves bureaucratic control “at the expense of Hacker’s livelier ambitions”.
Running for a total of just 38 episodes, from 1980, Yes Minister and its successor, Yes, Prime Minister, came to be regarded as essential viewing, not least by the politicians whose wranglings they so artfully satirised. Though not known for her sense of humour, Margaret Thatcher loved it so much that, in 1984, she wrote a Yes Minister sketch (starring herself) to mark the series winning a National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association award. Its stars took part in this skit very reluctantly, partly because they didn’t think Hacker should be identified with a party; but Jay admired Mrs Thatcher, and when he was knighted in 1988, it was said to have been for making the PM laugh (though officially it was for his work, years earlier, on the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts).
Anthony Jay was born in London in 1930. His parents were both minor actors and money was tight, but Jay won scholarships first to St Paul’s School, in London, and then to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he took a first in classics and comparative philology. After national service, he joined the BBC. Working on the news show Tonight, he gained useful insights into the machinery of government. In 1962, he was one of the team that launched the groundbreaking satirical news show That Was The Week That Was.
Jay left the BBC in the late 1960s to work as a freelance writer and producer; then, in 1972, he and John Cleese – whom he’d first met in the Cambridge Footlights – founded Video Arts, making management training films with a comic angle. It was Cleese who introduced Jay to his Yes Minister co-creator, Jonathan Lynn, said The Times. Lynn was a left-leaning actor, Jay a free-market conservative, but they became good friends. Their scripts were carefully researched, written months in advance (which meant that they had to draw on recurrent government crises, rather than topical events) and read by a group of 60 government advisors.
Yes Minister was broadcast in almost 50 countries, and often repeated. Yet its creators were only paid £1,200 per episode between them. However, Jay pocketed a reported £10m when Video Arts was sold in 1989, and was able to retire with his wife, Jill, to Somerset, where he wrote several books, and (with Lynn) a stage version of Yes, Prime Minister. He also wrote a number of trenchant articles on subjects including the BBC, which he accused of institutional left-wing bias and said should be drastically scaled back. He is survived by Jill and their four children.