"Britain's Best Sitcom" - Yes minister (3/4)

may I propose that I recall that after careful consideration the considered view of the committee was that while they considered that the proposal met with broad approval in principle that some of the principles were sufficiently fundamental in principle and some of the considerations so complex and finely balanced in practice they were impossibly difficult to learn and Nigel was very much her about learning lives Porter to say for God's sake dear just write it down somewhere you know here's a pen put it here but he wouldn't wouldn't nigel got very tense in the early episodes and I remember he I saw him taking a pill I said what's that he said it's a beta blocker I still give me one I'll take anything and I didn't know where I was I so spaced out but Nigel said it helped him enormous Lee he took one and this was the beginning of a second series and I was astonished because I'd turned round like he wasn't him a particular scene turn round found his sitting in the audience chatting to everybody around I thought he's out of his mind on beta-blockers what we got to do here but anyway from that moment on he never needed to take them again but he always carried them and that kind of solved a great problem for him I was quite horrified to find well into the series that Nigel still remembered every word of every long speech I thought we here's a man with a decent brain we're cluttering up with all this junk it is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every members recollection of them differs violently from every other members we're consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and it isn't so it was told you sir but the program's famous verbal diarrhea was often stymied by even more sublime scenes that were practically monosyllabic I pulled your report I'm appalled I just can't believe it I'm I'm appalled what do you make of it bad I'm appalled semi appalled it's appalling Paula guy I I just don't know how to describe it appalling the next reason was the classic opening title sequence the music was fairly serious and Porsche it didn't have the traditional old sitcom theme tunes but what's at the titles apart were the drawings Pajero scarf which indicated that something was amiss something was strangely distorted and hats off to the cast for allowing themselves to look absolutely hideous Joseph is a genius sundar and a brilliant man he has this marvelous power to to do what we were trying to do which was really massive distortion that is still amazingly recognisable I devised this way of actually drawing under the camera I would draw a tiny bit of line take two frames of film click click not a bit of lime click click and so on and when of course when you ran the film at normal speed it all built up the drawing built up in front of you Paul had this big beak and I just knew this long face I think I have this curved nose with these things under my eyes I wanted to buy the original but couldn't afford it the extorter thing is I give a series of talks around the country and I worked with Walt Disney and Pink Floyd and so forth all quite big hitters but the thing people remember most of all is Yes Minister the next reason for nominating Yes Minister is its tremendous authenticity Jonathan Lynn and Anthony J based their stories on secret information passed on to them by Whitehall insiders some of whom were as well placed as water gates deep throat so not only was it funny it was true I can say that about Blackadder what I always puzzled about was where Anthony Jay really got his civil service approach and language from he must have done an enormous research among civil servants the higher they are the less discreet they are low-level civil servants are worried about losing their jobs MPs at a very low level but they don't know anything anyway so they're not really relevant for high-level civil servants and high-level political advisors and cabinet rep members will tell you anything if you take them out to a good lunch and give them a couple of glasses well know three or four glasses of claret they'll tell you pretty much anything you want to know there was a secret source which surely J and Johnson then had and they used to whip up there with the beautiful of claret to various places in Smith square like I know who they're talking about but unfortunately I cannot tell you my life is not ready well I am willing to be beaten up and left for dead by thugs with briefcases as this program reveals for the first time just how well placed those sources were there were two sources who we always talked to along with there were several reasons for keeping their named quiet the most important reason was that they were both powerful political advisors during the Wilson or Cullen government Wawa's marcia falconer who'd been Harold Wilson's private secretary they bring the scripts to me at my home and we sat we spent the morning working on it and laughing about it too and generally making a scene and bernard donahue who had been the head of the policy unit for wilson and phone for callahan for years and years and years i never told anyone I worked on it with I think it helped the whole mystery and credibility of it but they seemed to have inside sources they said unit can't to become public and I said no of course not because at that time politicians were very very scrupulous about not talking about anything to anybody no one quite knew who were the deep throats because Yes Minister is like documentary truth it's devastating we're laughing at peculiar plots and bizarre behavior but it actually happened to her actual MPs quite a number of the scenarios for yes minister series were based on actual events certainly which I experienced there was but they always added something I mean there was one about when we went on a visit to Pakistan and there were no drinks allowed and how we pretended that we had to have an office immediately outside the reception to communicate with number 10 where we had large bottles of very Brown orange juice because whiskey had been put in it and I used that well sir I'm excuse me Minister there's an urgent call for you in the communications room a mr. Haig I don't know whether it's okay to say I think I probably still shouldn't but it happened to annex it with a very very well-known British politician on a I'm on official visit to a Muslim country yes he wanted in the communications from mr. John Walker yes from the Scotch office Scottish office that's an example of the kind of thing that we would not have thought of if we just sat at home trying to make up stories and be funny it was only because we were out and about and asking questions that we were able to find out about that and numerous other bizarre things that really happen in government yes the Soviet embassies on the line sir Humphrey and mr. Smirnoff your father has one for me well there was a message from the British Embassy compound the school a delegation of teachers let's go and greet the teachers before the bells goes the next reason may seem like a pretty obvious one it's the studio audience it would have been really easy to play up the realism in Yes Minister and play down the comedy but having the audience there forced the writers to take their skills to a higher level Minnie and they constructed a sitcom that was every bit as funny and as satisfying as anything set in a hotel or an office and of course what better protection against your opponents who'd love to have you taken off air than the sounds of millions laughing I mean it was recorded in front of a studio audience on Sunday evenings we'll be there all day a camera rehearsing and then they would all come in two hundred and fifty people and none of none none of us really enjoyed that because it was a pressure that we felt we could do without professor Henderson might drop in to have a cup of tea with his province that'd be a happy Kirsten swooned it Brian Oh Brian there were two reasons why we absolutely had to have the audience the first is that because we weren't playing obvious jokes in the way that a lot of situation companies do we actually needed I believe that you need an audience on the soundtrack because comedy is a communal thing laughing is a communal affair I don't think we want to drag through all that again a more important reason and the real reason for an audience being essential yes Ben Australia's Prime Minister was that it was insurance there's always a risk if you do political comedy of it that somebody Whitehall will have a word with somebody at the BBC if there's no audience they can just say well this is some smart people being clever at the expense of our great democratic system and and put pressure on the BBC to say you know do you really want to run this sort of nonsense I mean it doesn't do anybody any good does it if an audience of 250 people is falling about with laughter they can't say that Yes Minister never treated its audience like morons and it's hard to imagine a program as wordy and as static sitting comfortably in today's schedules in between celebrity are swap and kettles from hell in today's five-second teen culture in which the camera has to keep moving in case of viewer drops dead of boredom a program in which three middle-aged men talk about M or D personnel displacement would be thrown to the Lions after the first week Yes Minister raised the bar for comedy and it wasn't afraid to be intelligent about how it got its laughs good morning mr. Humphrey do you see it as part of your job to help me this has make fools of themselves well I've never met one that needed any help public is a lot more intelligent than a lot of people think they are a lot of TV shows especially situation comedies talk down to the public and patronize them what are we going to do about Ron Jones's peerage give him one too with respect Prime Minister we can't send to Lord Ron Jones to the upper house it looked like a job lot given something I promised well what's he interested in does he watch television hasn't even got a set fine make him a governor of the BBC we believe that the audience were just as intelligent as we were but there might be some things I didn't know and so we'd make it you know absolutely imperative that they should know it and we'd find ways of giving them the necessary information that they hadn't got but having given them that we assumed they'd laugh at what we laughed at and it seemed to work I'll take the Foreign Office first you get the CMG in the KCMG than the gcmg the commander of the order of Sir Michael Ince and George Knight Commander of Sir Michael Ince and George Knight Grand Cross of sir Michael and security of course in the service CMG stands for call me God the KCMG for kindly call me God what does gcmg he's tapped for God calls me God

Channel: Humphrey Appleby

Views: 740,063

Rating: 4.7980771 out of 5

Keywords: Best, sitcom, Yes, minister

Id: hBYWE-8-SjI

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2010