Sir Antony Jay

Born:’Aprl 20, 1930;

Died: August 21, 2016.

Anthony Jay, who has died after a long illness, aged 86, was best-known as the co-creator of Yes Minister and the follow-up Yes, Prime Minister, which skilfully pitched a rather naïve and well-meaning Government minister against the Machiavellian wiles of his senior civil servant.

It ran for five series in the 1980s, with Paul Eddington as the minister Jim Hacker and Nigel Hawthorne as the Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby. It coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s time in office and she allowed the producers to film Eddington entering 10 Downing Street.

The show famously made Thatcher laugh. In recognition of such a singular achievement Jay was given a knighthood in 1988. But Thatcher was certainly not the show’s only fan and, although politics and the working of the civil service might have been a turn-off for some, the show was voted No 6 in a BBC poll in 2004 on the best British sitcoms of all time.

Before Yes, Minister, Jay had had a distinguished career as a television producer, editor, writer and executive at the BBC. He worked on the Tonight current affairs programme from its inception in 1957 and helped launch the legendary satirical show That Was The Week That Was, with David Frost, in 1962.

Yes Minister poked fun at politicians and civil servants, but Jay was no subversive. He wrote the commentary for the landmark behind-the-scenes documentary Royal Family in 1969, and much later he wrote the one-off documentary Elizabeth R, in 1992, the Queen’s Annus Horribilis, when her family was tearing itself apart and the Queen was desperate for sympathetic coverage. Jay was made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, an award that recognises personal service to the monarch.

Having left the BBC, he set up a company called Video Arts in the early 1970s, with John Cleese, who he first met at Cambridge Footlights and who worked as a writer on That Was the Week That Was. It made management training films with witty scripts and big-name comic actors.

They were so funny that they were shown as entertainment on BBC and sold internationally. The partners reportedly pocketed around £10 million each when the company was sold in the late 1980s.

Antony Rupert Jay was born in London, in 1930. Both parents were actors. He studied Classics and Philology at Cambridge University, did national service in the Royal Corps of Signals and joined the BBC in 1955, initially as a researcher. He served as both producer and latterly editor on Tonight, the daily current affairs programme with Cliff Michelmore.

Tonight was lively and offbeat and did much to recalibrate the BBC’s rather stuffy image following the appearance of ITV. It was while working on Tonight that Jay developed an appreciation for the absurdities and comic elements of British politics and the British political system.

In a way That Was the Week That Was, TW3, was a logical next step, poking fun at those in the news. In his mid-thirties, Jay took the plunge to go freelance as a writer and producer, reuniting with TW3 presenter David Frost on The Frost Report and with Cleese at Video Arts, which occupied much of his time during the 1970s.

Cleese introduced Jay to Jonathan Lynn, an actor and writer, who had worked as a scriptwriter for On the Buses (1972-73) and My Name is Harry Worth (1974) and together they came up with Yes Minister.

They never specify Hacker’s party and in the early series his department is the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs. He is no revolutionary, though he does propose a series of reforms, which are frequently thwarted by Sir Humphrey, whose main aim is to preserve the status quo and the power of the civil service.

The series relied heavily on the realisation of the two principal characters and the dynamic between them, with a new spin on the idea of the servant being in charge without the master every realising. And of course she success of the show owed much to the intricate, nuanced dialogue that Jay and Lynn created for them.

Hacker might be very pleased with himself for coming up with some idea. Then, with an entirely straight face, Sir Humphrey will praise him for his “courage” in pursuing his principles, even if it costs his party votes. At which point Hacker will generally back down and a little smile might creep across Sir Humphrey’s lips.

It was relatively gentle and affectionate, perhaps even nostalgic for the “One Nation” days of Heath and Wilson, when the Liberals ran a campaign playing on the fact that there was nothing between them.

Strange perhaps that it went out in such a turbulent political era when the status quo had been abandoned, when Thatcher introduced the poll tax and was ripping the heart out of industrial Britain, with police battling miners at daybreak, and Britain was committed to a war over a few inhospitable islands off the coast of Argentina.

There were three series and 21 episodes of Yes Minister, plus one Christmas special, and two series and 16 episodes of Yes, Prime Minster. A theatre version of Yes, Prime Minister opened in the London West End in 2010 and a new television series was created for the UKTV Gold cable channel, with David Haig and Henry Goodman reprising their stage roles as Hacker and Sir Humphrey.

Hacker now headed a coalition government and had to deal with issues such as possible Scottish independence. But there were only ever six episodes of the new series. And with the British political scene now so vicious and at the same time absurd, it is difficult to see how any writer could make a fiction funnier than the real thing.

Jay is survived by his wife and their four children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH