MASTER OF WHITEHALL FARCE
THEY say that Sir Antony Jay was knighted for making Lady Thatcher laugh. If so it was richly deserved. As Cabinet colleagues, fellow world leaders and even her personal driver repeatedly testified over the years, our famously seriousminded prime minister rarely saw the funny side of life.
Jay, who died aged 86 on Sunday, pulled off this unlikely coup with the BBC TV comedy series Yes Minister, a show he wrote with co-creator Jonathan Lynn. It had Mrs T in stitches over the hilarious exchanges between fictional minister – and later prime minister – Jim Hacker and his permanent secretary in the Department of Administrative Affairs Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Set as it was in the corridors of power it is perhaps easy to see why the series would have been attractive to Lady Thatcher but the truth is this Whitehall farce had universal appeal. While Hacker and Sir Humphrey were both very British protagonists the themes the show addressed resonated with politicians and voters the world over. The BBC sold it to 84 countries including China and Libya.
It ran for five series, making the transition to Yes, Prime Minister after Hacker got the top job at the beginning of series four. Part of its success lay in the fact that Hacker’s political party was never revealed and so viewers – whether Left or Right – could enjoy the show without feeling victimised. This reflected the balance of power between its writers: Jay was an old-school Tory while his sidekick Lynn was on the other side of the divide.
BORN in 1930 Jay won a scholarship first to the prestigious St Paul’s School in London and then to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he gained a First in classics and comparative philology, the study of language. But he had showbusiness in his genes as the son of Ernest Jay, the actor who played Dennis the Dachshund on the children’s radio show Larry The Lamb In Toytown.
After university Jay joined the BBC and rose to become editor of the current affairs programme Tonight. “You saw a lot of politicians were just puppets,” he once recalled. “These compromises, driven by conflicts between ministers and permanent secretaries, had huge comic potential.”
The first series of Yes Minister was aired in 1980 but despite its success, it did not make Jay rich. The BBC paid just £1,200 for each script. It was not until 1989 when Video Arts, a company he had set up with John Cleese to make
The Commons TouCh: GreaT lines from The series
Who else is in this department? Sir Humphrey: Well briefly, sir, I am the Permanent Under Secretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary. I too have a Principal Private Secretary and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are 10 Deputy Secretaries, 87 Under Secretaries and 219 Assistant Secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretaries are plain Private Secretaries and the management training films, was sold that he made serious money: £10million to be exact.
Jay was a lifelong monarchist who was awarded a CVO by the Queen for his documentary series Elizabeth R, a sympathetic look at the Royal Family at a time when it was under scrutiny. A Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Under-Secretaries and you will be appointing your own Parliamentary Private Secretary. Hacker: Can they all type? Sir Humphrey: None of us can type. Mrs Mackay types, she’s the secretary. [There are two official replies to the Minister’s correspondence]
Hacker: What’s the difference?
Bernard: Well, “under consideration” means “we’ve lost the file”; “under active confirmed Eurosceptic he also deplored the transformation of the BBC into a media giant.
But he will be best remembered for a show that laid bare the inner workings of government in such a way that it had viewers rolling in the aisles. consideration” means “we’re trying to find it”.
Hacker: I don’t want the truth. I want something I can tell Parliament! Hacker: Europe is a community of nations, dedicated towards one goal.
Sir Humphrey: Oh, ha ha ha.
Hacker: May we share the joke, Humphrey?
Sir Humphrey: Oh Minister, let’s look at this objectively. It is a game played for national interests and always was. Why do you suppose we went into it?
Hacker: To strengthen the brotherhood of free Western nations.
Sir Humphrey: Oh really. We went in to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans.
Hacker: So why did the French go into it, then?
Sir Humphrey: Well, to protect their inefficient farmers from commercial competition.
Hacker: That certainly doesn’t apply to the Germans.
Sir Humphrey: No, no. They went in to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race.