A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  Jay’s first major job was to help bring to the screen a new kind of current affairs programme that reflected the change in the national mood away from deference and paternalism towards a more informal, critical and questioning attitude. Championed by two of the BBC’s most innovative and iconoclastic young programme-makers, Donald Baverstock (a future Controller of BBC1) and Alasdair Milne (a future Director-General), this new programme, which was to be called Tonight and would be broadcast live five nights a week, was designed to sweep away British television’s traditional approach to covering the news and current affairs – an approach which relied on a starchy, stiff-lipped style that Baverstock and Milne found far too dull, submissive and condescending – and replace it with something that was lively, varied, relaxed, seriously journalistic, occasionally very playful but also essentially moral.21 The idea, as one of their bosses Grace Wyndham Goldie would later put it, was to create a programme that was firmly and clearly on the side of the viewer rather than the rulers, and would speak up for them rather than down to them. ‘Power,’ she wrote, ‘even the power endorsed by election in a democratic society, did not confer wisdom, and those who wielded it could be questioned’.22

  Jay could not have been more suited to supporting such a venture, and, initially as film director, later as editor, he would help make the programme one of the great success stories of British television’s post-war era, launching the careers of a tidal wave of memorably distinctive reporters (including Cliff Michelmore, Alan Whicker, Fyfe Robertson, Magnus Magnusson, Julian Pettifer, Michael Cockerell, Cynthia Judah, Macdonald Hastings, Brian Redhead and Kenneth Allsop). First broadcast on 18 February 1957, the Tonight programme grew rapidly in popularity – to the point where it attracted a nightly audience of around seven million viewers – and won unprecedented critical prestige. Perhaps inevitably, given that it began just over a year after Harold Macmillan arrived at Number Ten and ended in 1965 about twenty months after he departed, the new Prime Minister became one of the most enduring targets of its opprobrium – but he was far from being alone.

  ‘[We] were not just anti-Macmillan,’ Jay would recall, ‘we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority’.23 This was a somewhat misleading exaggeration – the programme sought to apportion praise as well as blame, and could be constructive as well as destructive – but it certainly did refuse to accept, prima facie, any explanation by the Establishment designed to justify its actions. What it showed politicians, in particular, was that, from this point on, television existed to make them accountable rather than merely visible, and, as a consequence, the programme set a new and higher standard for the way current affairs was covered.

  While Antony Jay was making his name as an editor and producer, Jonathan Lynn was beginning to establish himself on the stage and screen as an entertainer. Shortly after graduation, he had been recruited by his old Footlights colleagues John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie, who had renamed their old Clump of Plinths revue Cambridge Circus and restaged it in London’s West End. One of their fellow cast members, Chris Stuart-Clark, had since dropped out to pursue other interests, and so, in May 1964, Lynn was enlisted just in time to join them on a short tour of New Zealand before transferring in September to New York; first for a short run at the Plymouth Theater on Broadway, and then, for the remainder of the year, at a cosier café theatre in Greenwich Village.

  Encouraged by the experience, which had not only exposed him to large theatre audiences but also given him his television debut on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show, Lynn returned to Britain and began working steadily over the next few years as an actor in repertory, spending time in companies based in Leicester, Edinburgh and at the Bristol Old Vic, as well as the odd production in London, appearing in everything from The Taming of the Shrew to Fiddler on the Roof and receiving a nomination for a Plays and Players award as ‘Most Promising New Actor’ for his performance in Paul Ableman’s 1965 two-act comedy Green Julia.

  He also joined his old Cambridge contemporaries Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tony Buffery, along with Oxford graduates Terry Jones and Michael Palin, to make a short-lived but memorable sketch show called Twice a Fortnight. Produced and directed by Tony Palmer (‘in front of a tanked-up audience’24), it was screened on BBC1 during 1967, ran for ten editions and featured not only the kind of fresh, irreverent and unconventional humour that would help create the culture in which the likes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus would soon thrive, but also, with its regular musical guests (which included Cream, The Who and The Small Faces), paved the way for a new style of youth-oriented variety show that mixed comedy with popular music.

  By the end of the decade, however, Lynn was looking to develop a second, complementary career as a writer, and he got his chance after joining the cast of a new ITV sitcom (adapted by, among others, Lynn’s fellow Footlights alumni John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden from the bestselling stories by Richard Gordon, and produced by another old college friend Humphrey Barclay), called Doctor in the House (1969). Although he was dropped as an actor when the show returned for a second series, entitled Doctor at Large (1971), the friendship that he had formed with one of the show’s main stars, George Layton, led to them collaborating (with Layton using his occasional pseudonym of ‘Oliver Fry’) on a script for one of the episodes.25

  It helped that Lynn came from a family of doctors, so he could draw on a fund of real-life medical stories, but there was also a freshness and paciness about the comedy that he crafted with Layton. The episode slipped slyly from a mundane-sounding first act about nurses ‘with big bazookas’ into a surprising second act that mocked male hypocrisy and consequently stood out. Barclay, indeed, was so impressed with their writing that he went on to use them regularly in future series, including Doctor in Charge (1972–3), Doctor at Sea (1974) and Doctor on the Go (1975), and they also started supplying scripts for a number of other sitcoms, including several episodes in 1972 of ITV’s creakily coarse but consistently popular On the Buses.

  Even though he was confined by the context of such formulaic fare, Lynn still showed an intriguing ability to slip in some detail, exchange or sequence that gave an otherwise anodyne scenario a little more character and clout. In a predictably farcical episode of Doctor in Charge entitled ‘Which Doctor’, for example, viewers were treated to a brief but unusually sardonic glimpse (for ITV at least) of the old boys’ network, as one insufferably smug senior Harley Street surgeon, after cheerfully bidding farewell to a now useless dying patient (‘I’ll miss his money’), brags to his NHS equivalent about his busy practice (‘business is booming’) and recent knighthood, and hints that a lesser gong might be obtainable via one of his glamorous cocktail parties (‘We’ll get an OBE for you yet, Geoffrey!’). It was this good sense of when and how to give such conventional shows a bit of bite that made producers increasingly appreciative of Lynn’s ability to shape a script.26

  It did not take too long, however, for him to feel as though, in spite of such signature touches, he was fast becoming the servant of the sitcom ‘sausage machine’,27 stuffing in a tiny bit of meat with plenty of filler and artificial flavourings, to keep each familiar format going. He wanted to try to write episodes that were more ‘grown up’, featuring less conventional and more satirical themes and situations, but, time and again, the producers of existing sitcoms kept passing on such proposals. Eventually, for want of another option, he and Layton decided to create a show of their own.

  Entitled My Brother’s Keeper, it was envisaged by Lynn as a fairly daring affair that explored the idea, which he had been pondering ever since his undergraduate days, that there was a surprisingly slender psychological line separating law enforcers from law breakers (a criminology study of identical twins separated at birth had found that, of thirteen persistent offenders, nine of their long-lost brothers had
also grown up to be persistent offenders, while the other four had become policemen28). He planned to play a petty criminal, called Pete Booth, whose twin brother Brian, played by Layton, was a dutiful policeman. Slowly but surely, however, the premise was prodded and poked by ITV producers until it was deemed safer and more suitable for one of its prime-time comedy slots, with the criminal being replaced by a comically militant student.

  Reaching the screen in 1975, it ran for two series and performed well in the ratings, but, given the knowledge of what it might have been, it proved a profoundly frustrating experience for Lynn, who felt that a career was being crushed. Looking back to trace the trajectory of his writing partnership with Layton, he would later describe it as evolving up to this point in the following manner: ‘Initially, enthusiasm. Later, gloom. Not about him, though. My own depression’.29 His mood was made worse as he surveyed so many of his old Footlights friends doing work that, in his eyes, seemed much more distinctive and rewarding, such as John Cleese’s achievements on TV, first with Monty Python and now Fawlty Towers, and Richard Eyre’s efforts in the theatre, where, in his capacity as artistic director of the Nottingham Playhouse, he was commissioning and directing a succession of interesting new plays, including Trevor Griffiths’ critically lauded Comedians.

  Ready for a change but unsure of what to do, on 29 April 1976 Lynn glanced, quite by chance, at an advertisement in the latest edition of the weekly industry publication The Stage. It was for someone to fill the vacant position of artistic director of the Cambridge Theatre Company. Tired of being a ‘joke machine’, and impatient to stretch himself, Lynn decided the time was right for him to apply.30

  The career of Antony Jay, meanwhile, was developing in a different direction. He left the BBC (where he had risen to the lofty position of Head of Television Talk Features) in 1964, although he remained so highly thought of at the Corporation that he was given a succession of long-term contracts that retained his services as a consultant. Working for a number of companies as a freelance writer, adviser and producer, he helped develop several arts programmes, contributed satirical material for The Frost Report (BBC1, 1966–7), wrote the commentary for the dramatic ‘let in daylight upon magic’ documentary Royal Family (BBC1, 1969), and assisted in a wide variety of other projects. He also popularised his views on politics, bureaucracy and individual liberty via a number of bestselling books, which included the elegantly analytical Management and Machiavelli (1967), the quasi-anthropological Corporation Man (1972) and a drily amusing self-help pamphlet entitled The Householder’s Guide to Community Defence against Bureaucratic Aggression (also 1972).

  His great gift, as it emerged from all of these diverse enterprises, was to be able to deconstruct complex institutions and processes as if they were tangible mechanisms, grasping the intricacies of their internal structure and then not only explaining, simply and clearly, how they functioned, but also suggesting how, if at all, they might be made more effective. On his own classically educated terms, he was more of a hedgehog than a fox, more of a man who knew one big thing rather than one who knew many little things; in the sense that wherever he looked, be it business or government or any other organised form of activity, he felt that it could be reduced to the way that the formal rules of engagement were interpreted and enacted.

  Rather like Walter Bagehot had done before him, Jay had a rare flair for connecting the paper description to the living reality. It was this gift for animated enlightenment that provided the pattern that united all of his projects.

  He found yet another venture through which he could channel his ideas and expertise when, in 1972, he teamed up with John Cleese and two old BBC colleagues, Peter Robinson and Michael Peacock, to form Video Arts, a production company designed to make concise but exceptionally engaging training films for a wide range of business organisations. Dealing with everything from committee meetings to consumer complaints, the films would use humour to demonstrate how the dynamics of any typical situation could best be managed to everyone’s advantage. Using an impressive unofficial repertory group of well-known performers, including Terence Alexander, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Connie Booth, Nigel Hawthorne, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and John Cleese himself, the company soon established itself as the leader in its field, garnering numerous awards, plenty of critical plaudits and countless contented customers.31

  There was still a restless curiosity about Antony Jay, and it was therefore no surprise when, in 1974, he accepted an offer to become a member of Lord Annan’s Committee on the Future of Broadcasting. Launched by the Labour Government’s Roy Jenkins, it was charged with the challenging task of assessing the extent to which Britain’s broadcasting industry, organisationally, technologically and financially, could and should be modernised and democratised. The process, which lasted for three years, turned Jay temporarily from outsider to insider, and afforded him the priceless opportunity to gorge himself on privileged gossip and insights, and to assess at close quarters the routine connections between Whitehall and Westminster.

  It was during this period that the paths of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn finally came to cross. When Video Arts started making its first few training films, Lynn was one of the people John Cleese persuaded to get involved (for an initial sum of ‘thirty quid plus a deferred fee’32) both as a writer and performer. This work, which included such titles as the award-winning Who Sold You This, Then? (1972),33 It’s All Right, It’s Only a Customer (1973) and Selling on the Telephone (1975), also brought him into contact with Cleese’s fellow director, Antony Jay.

  Lynn’s first impression of Jay, looking at him through the eyes of someone well used to casting characters, was that of ‘a typical BBC producer or an Oxbridge don’: ‘He was tall with thinning, wispy, long greying hair, a tweed sports jacket, worn-down suede shoes and a characteristic, slightly knock-kneed stance. He talked very fast in a voice that became slightly squeaky when enthusiastic’.34 Jay, in turn, already recognised Lynn from his television and stage performances, and, face to face, warmed to his quick wit and unforced expertise. ‘I was rather impressed,’ he later remarked, ‘by his professional knowledge of actors and audiences’.35 In some ways, they made an unconventional pair. Although they shared a common cultural background of public school (Jay at St Paul’s in London and Lynn at Kingswood in Bath) and Cambridge, they were, in many respects, very different.

  There was, for example, a thirteen-year age gap between them (Jay was born in London in 1930, and Lynn in Bath in 1943), and while Jay had experienced growing up in an era that had witnessed Britain going to war, Lynn had grown up in a period that had seen the country struggle to cope with the austerities of peace. Jay had been through the enforced regimentation of post-war National Service, while Lynn reached the same age just after the compulsory call-up had been cancelled. The effect, arguably, was to give Jay’s youthful liberalism something of a nostalgic character, yearning for a ‘glorious revolution’ that would restore the freedom of the pre-war years, while lending Lynn’s early rebelliousness more of an inchoate, anticipatory feel.

  They also projected, unaffectedly, quite distinct kinds of social personae: Jay was actually an unusually complex soul who was the product of a lineage that was part quintessentially English (on his mother Catherine’s side) and part Jewish immigrant (on his actor father Ernest’s side36), but, superficially, he exuded the kind of effortless assuredness that epitomised a creature of the Establishment. Conversely, Lynn, whose awkward teenage years had been marked by him being the only Jewish boy at a Methodist school (‘If you want to create an outsider,’ he would later observe, ‘that’s a good way to go about it’37), had settled into the image of an obvious and somewhat prickly anti-Establishment figure.

  The snapshot impression was thus of contrasts: tall and short, reserved and outspoken, conservative and radical, insider and outsider. Jay, on top of all of this, was primarily an analyst and an observer, a man who had made his mark behind the scenes, while Lynn was an actor and an artist, be
st known for what he had contributed out on the stage and in front of the cameras.

  Once the two men had spent some time in each other’s company, however, they found that they complemented each other surprisingly well. Each had acquired a degree of specialist expertise and a range of experiences that impressed and interested the other. Each had the kind of character that had a pleasingly moderating effect on the other. Even their respective political outlooks, which, with Jay’s located recognisably to the right of centre and Lynn’s some way to the left, appeared at first sight to suggest a possible conflict, were in fact far closer than they looked, as Jay’s sceptical and strongly libertarian brand of conservatism had more in common with Whig traditions than Tory ones, while Lynn’s radical instincts were far more redolent of Paine than Tawney or Marx.

  They were thus, beneath the superficial contrasts, kindred spirits. Both of them were deeply suspicious of privilege and power. Both were passionately egalitarian and meritocratic. Both had an instinctive sympathy for the individual, the eccentric and the outsider against any form of oppressive hegemony. Both hated hypocrisy and humbug. They could tell, as they talked, that they were on the same side.

  The two of them got to know and like each other even better once John Cleese became distracted by his work on Fawlty Towers and, in his absence, Jay started collaborating with Lynn. By the time that Lynn had taken on the role of artistic director at the Cambridge Theatre Company, Video Arts was doing so well that it was looking to increase its annual output significantly, so when Jay invited him to contribute on a more regular basis, Lynn, whose theatre position was aesthetically rewarding but poorly paid, saw it as ‘an insurance policy’.38 ‘It was,’ Jay would say, ‘a very happy and successful partnership.’39