What The Papers Say

HACKER: Don’t tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
HUMPHREY: Prime Minister, what about people who read The Sun?
BERNARD: Sun readers don’t care who runs the country as long as she’s got big tits.

– Yes, Prime Minister, “A Conflict of Interest” (TX: 23/12/87)

The above is one of the most famous sequences in the whole of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. And like so much of the best comedy, it’s many things at once. A forthright piece of satire on the media, a character moment for Bernard… oh, and a rude joke into the bargain.

It was also, in some circles, a well-worn piece of material by the time it was broadcast on the 23rd December 1987. And the original version of that material was certainly not written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn.

Not that any of this comes under the Official Secrets Act. It’s often been talked about on Twitter, people have asked about it on forums, and it’s also briefly discussed in Graham McCann’s excellent book, A Very Courageous Decision: The Inside Story of Yes Minister. But nobody seems to have collated all the different strands of this little story together in one place.

So here is the tale of where this routine comes from… or, at least, as close as we can get. I can’t promise you that I have found the true origin of this material. But I believe I have managed to get further back than anybody ever has before. And if you already think you know definitively where this material comes from, then prepare to be surprised.

*   *   *

There are any number of routes we can take in tracing this material back, although they will all lead to the same point eventually. So rather than linking to endless newspaper columns, let’s take the scenic route instead: through television.

With that in mind, our first stop is nearly five years prior to Yes, Prime Minister, and to a rather unusual source. On the 14th January 1983, two weeks before it officially launched, TV-am put out an unusual but fascinating message aimed at potential advertisers. Thanks to Transdiffusion, we can watch (most of) the 25 minute presentation on YouTube.

And at 4:40 in, David Frost recites a familiar piece of material.¹

FROST: And I suppose that’s inevitable. After all, The Times, they say, is read by the people who run the country. The Guardian by the people who’d like to run the country. The Financial Times by the people who own the country. The Daily Telegraph by the people who remember the country as it used to be run. The Express by people who think the country is still being run that way. The Mail by the wives of the people who run the country. The Morning Star by the people who want another country to run the country. While Sun readers don’t really care who runs the country, as long as they’ve got… outstanding characteristics. I mean, preferably two outstanding characteristics.

Let’s be honest: David Frost doesn’t exactly demonstrate the same class as Paul Eddington or Derek Fowlds here. In fact, it distinctly reminds me of the reason why I stopped watching my Frost on Sunday DVD. He particularly muffs the final gag; while expecting him to say “tits” is probably over-ambitious, his follow-up line of “preferably two outstanding characteristics” hammers an already compromised joke into oblivion. We got it, David. Really. I promise.

But there are still interesting things about this rendition of the joke. For a start, Frost’s “they say” indicates that this material is already well-known, even back in 1983. We also come to one of the recurring features of this routine; the newspapers listed and the definitions of each reader never stay quite the same. I shall generally leave it as an exercise for the reader² to compare the different versions, unless there is some specific insight to be gained in doing so. I will point out another way Frostie ruins the joke, though: the definition for the Express, with the awkward phrasing of “still being run that way”, breaks the rhythm of the joke, which means the gag about the Mail falls flat.

But enough slagging off David Frost. I’ll never do it as well as Python anyway. Instead, let’s leap back another year and half to the 1st July 1981, and the launch of a brand new sketch show on BBC 1: Three of a Kind. Brilliantly, all three series of Three of a Kind is available on DVD, unlike a lot of its contemporaries. And a rather familiar piece of material makes itself known at the end of that first show – albeit in a stripped-down form:³

LENNY: The Times is read by people who run the country.
TRACEY: The Guardian is read by people who’d like to run the country.
DAVID: The Sun is read by people who don’t care who runs the country – just as long as they’ve got big knockers!

It’s very easy to make fun of Three of a Kind, and I’m not entirely sure David Copperfield’s rendition of the final gag is much cop, but I do admire how the show manages to cut to the chase and get to the gag quickly. I’ll take it over Frost’s bumblings any day.

It’s at this point that the slightly thorny issue of authorship comes up. Examining the paperwork for the first episode of Three of a Kind, we can find this:⁴

Firstly: isn’t it exciting that the paperwork states that the above sequence was recorded on two subsequent weeks, and not all at once?⁵ But more importantly, we finally have a writer attached to this joke: Mike Radford. A guy who wrote for, among other programmes, The Little and Large Show, Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Two Ronnies, and Blankety Blank.

Sadly – and let’s tread carefully here – I don’t believe he wrote the original version of the joke. I think he’s probably responsible for the condensing of it in Three of a Kind, sure. But the fact we can trace the joke back even earlier makes his authorship of the original unlikely.

Because we’re now going to skip back four and a half more years, to the 18th October 1976. This was the date the fifth series of Dave Allen at Large debuted. And sure enough, we have a – by now – very familiar piece of material; of course, delivered in Allen’s own inimitable style.⁶

ALLEN: One of the things about Britain, actually: you can always tell the way a person votes by the paper they read. For example, The Times is read by people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who own and run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think that they should run the country. The Morning Star, or as it used to be known as, the Daily Worker is read by people who think that the country should be run by another country. The Daily Express is read by people who think that the country should be run as it was. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think that it still is. And The Sun is read by people who don’t care who rules the country as long as they’ve got big boobs.

You really, really want Allen to just come out and say “tits” there, don’t you? For that matter, it’s also vaguely annoying that he changes “run the country” to “rules the country” in the last line, but as it’s Dave Allen, I’ll let him off.

Unique to this version, is Allen clarifying that the Morning Star used to be known as the Daily Worker. Seeing as the name change happened in 1966 – over ten years before Allen does this routine on At Large – it seems an odd clarification to throw into your comedy show. It does somewhat disrupt the rhythm of the joke. As we’ll see shortly, Graham McCann claims that Allen was doing this material in his live shows at the time as well, which seems extremely likely; it’s hardly a routine which feels unique to television. Does the Daily Worker reference indicate he had been doing this material for a number of years, when the clarification would have been more useful? Or is it just an off-the-cuff reference? With the information we have available – i.e. virtually none – it’s impossible to say.

What’s also impossible to say is who wrote this material; unfortunately, I don’t have access to the paperwork for 1970s BBC shows. We can look at the end credits; is it one of these people?

• Script by Dave Allen, Austin Steele, and Peter Vincent⁷
• Additional material by Raymond Allen, John Bartlett, Garry Chambers, Alice Crotch, Dorothy Kilmurray-Hall, Bernard Lazenbury, Malcolm Mather, Philip Munnoch & Graham Deykin, Norman Rowntree, Tony Stevens, Maureen Stevens-Kemp, Hugh Stuckey⁸

That long list is very nice for people trying to make a living writing comedy in 1976, and extremely not nice for anybody trying to work out who wrote what 45 years later. Without further information, I’m giving that up as a bad job.

So, is this the earliest we can trace this material back? In a comedy show: yes, at least as far as I can make out. But let’s take another look at Graham McCann’s The Inside Story of Yes Minister, and read exactly what his footnote on this material says:

“This summary was by no means new. There is some debate as to who first wrote it. A version was certainly used by Dave Allen during the mid-1970s both onstage and in an edition of Dave Allen at Large, but authorship has also been attributed (without any specific date or place) to the former TUC President Cyril Plant, who is reported to have come up with the basic list and descriptions in 1976. See Denis MacShane, Using the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1979), p.13.”

OK, let’s do exactly that. Which is why I found myself ordering a long out-of-print book from an independent small press and reading about trade union leaders, instead of just doing something sensible like watching Yes Minister on BritBox and laughing at it.

Our next key question is: can we actually nail this material down to Cyril Plant?

*   *   *

I could, if it was useful, go into a long biography of Cyril Plant here. But there’s really no need. All you need to know is that he was born in 1910, died in 1986, and was a trade unionist for much of his life.

Here he is, in 1969. Hello Cyril.

Embed from Getty Images

Crucially, he became President of the TUC in 1975, and the subsequent year is when he enters our story. How? Let’s take a proper look at the relevant page of Denis MacShane’s Using the Media:

“Circulation and readership figures can, however, be a misleading guide to the real influence of different newspapers. In 1976, at the end of the TUC Congress, the President of the TUC, Cyril Plant, neatly summed up the different readerships of the national newspapers:

• The Times: read by the people who run the country
• Daily Mirror: read by the people who think they run the country
• Guardian: read by the people who think they ought to run the country
• Morning Star: read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country
• Daily Mail: read by the wives of the people who run the country
• Financial Times read by the people who own the country
• Daily Express: read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run
• Daily Telegraph: read by the people who still think it is
• and then, of course, the readers of the Sun – they don’t care who runs the country as long as she has big tits!”

— Using the Media, Denis MacShane, p. 13

And as far as I’m aware, this is as far as any research on this topic has got. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could see an actual copy of his speech?

Well, I’ve seen it. Sadly I can’t upload a video of it, for boring reasons. But I can certainly transcribe it. Denis MacShane is correct when he says Cyril says this “at the end of the TUC Congress” – while Plant’s main speech at the TUC that year was on the 6th, the material above was actually given on the closing day of the conference: the 10th September 1976. And while the adaptation in Using the Media gets the key parts of Plant’s speech more-or-less word for word, I think we’ll benefit from the additional context at the beginning and end.

So, this section of his speech goes as follows, verbatim:⁹

PLANT: I know Len Murray is going to say something nice about the press. Or, he’s going to speak about the press. (laughter from audience) I’m not going to abuse the hospitality of this platform, but what I am going to say is what some people think about various newspapers.

The Times: read by the people who run the country. The Daily Mirror: read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian: read by the people who think they ought to run the country. The Morning Star: read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country. (laughter and applause) I can’t leave out the Daily Mail: it’s read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think it is. (more laughter and applause) And the readers of The Sun… (more laughter in anticipation) they don’t care who runs the country. (yet more laughter and applause) They don’t care who runs the country providing she’s got big tits! (the house comes falling down)

…I’m sorry, I’d crossed that out, I said: providing she’s well-developed.

— Cyril Plant, TUC Annual Congress, 10th September 1976

He then goes to call the General Secretary to do the next speech… before someone nudges and corrects him on the next speaker. “I’m sorry, President, but I must interrupt you – because I’m afraid you’ve forgotten your wife!” Oh, CYRIL, YOU SILLY MAN.

Again, there’s a number of interesting things here. Note that the “tits” line – always one which causes some trouble – is still causing trouble even in this incarnation. Was he planning to use the censored line, but decided not to because the speech was going down so well? It’s also notable that unlike nearly every other incarnation of the joke, Plant gets a double-whammy on that final line – nobody else manages to get a laugh purely on the “don’t care who runs the country” bit.

What’s also notable is that, while the lines are in a slightly different order, the newspapers and descriptions are virtually identical to Dave Allen’s routine: indicating that they both have a common, close ancestor. This feels extremely significant, although – as we’ll see later – this isn’t quite as useful to us as it might first appear.

Here’s the other key thing I take from his speech, though: Cyril’s distancing of himself from the material. If he truly came up with “the basic list and descriptions in 1976” – or if his speechwriter did – would he really use the phrase “what some people think about various newspapers”? Wouldn’t he want to claim credit for himself? Instead, it’s doing the exact opposite: it seems to indicate that this material was far from original even in 1976.

Of course, I can’t prove the above. This is the point where we start having to make suppositions. All we know is that this incarnation of this material is one of the earliest we have actual evidence for: over a month before Dave Allen does it on At Large. And while Dave Allen might well have been doing it in his live shows before this point, we don’t actually have any proof of that, or any dates attached to it.

There is one thing we do have proof of, however. And it’s something that, as far as I’m aware, nobody has ever discovered before while researching this topic. Bizarrely, we have to travel halfway across the world in order to get there. In the 29th July 1976 edition of Californian newspaper The Sebastapol Times¹⁰, we can find the following letter on Page 4.

Published over one month before Cyril Plant’s speech. The very earliest incarnation of this material that I have been able to find. And it raises a rather large number of questions.

Firstly: it is thoroughly bizarre that this material first shows up in a Californian publication rather than a British one.¹¹ So much so, in fact, that I find it difficult to believe. However, I’ve searched newspaper archives extensively, and this is the earliest I’ve come up with so far. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it turned out that Private Eye had run it at some point before this, but that’s a tricky thing to research.

Secondly: we aren’t any closer to coming up with an author. Mike Erickson almost certainly didn’t actually write it; it has the air of a latter-day forwarded email even in that letter. So we’re left with guesswork. Maybe Cyril Plant did write this material, earlier in 1976, and it got passed around before he put it on record in his speech. Or maybe it really does originate from Dave Allen’s live shows. The above letter certainly doesn’t prove that neither of them wrote it.

It does, however, prove that Cyril Plant’s TUC speech wasn’t the very first time this material was seen in public. That always seemed likely before, but it’s nice to have actual proof of it. And it certainly means that Plant’s supposed authorship is on a far less secure footing than many assumed.

Indeed, my suggestion is that the true author may never be known. It has the distinct air of something clever being written and passed around Fleet Street or the unions, with the original author either stripped off, or never attached in the first place. Remember the QI forum thread that I linked to at the start of this article? The person who started that thread said the following:

“I’m sure I remember my grandfather bringing it home from work some time in the 1970s on a badly photocopied sheet (the predecessor of today’s workplace email jokes, presumably), but I’ve no idea where it came from. Certainly when I first heard it on YPM I instantly recognized it.”

I would suggest that photocopied sheet could well have been around before 1976. Possibly even years before. And while I’m very interested to see if we can trace this back before July 1976, I’m fully prepared to accept we’ll never know who the original author actually was. These things have a nasty habit of being lost in the mists of time.

*   *   *

Finally, let’s jump right back to the far end of this story.

It’s well-known that Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister have what is widely-considered to be some of the best book adaptations any sitcom has ever had, rivalled only by Red Dwarf. Framed as Hacker’s diaries – with departmental memos and interviews with other characters filling the gaps – this means that, yes, the newspapers routine gets yet another adaptation by Antony Jay & Jonathan Lynn. The second volume, covering the second series of Yes, Prime Minister was published in 1987¹², but the generally consulted edition these days is the omnibus from 1989, combining both volumes.

Let’s give it a read.

“Humphrey knows nothing about newspapers. He’s a Civil Servant. I’m a politician, I know all about them. I have to. They can make or break me. I know exactly who reads them. The Times is read by the people who run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by the people who think they ought to run the country. The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Independent is read by people who don’t know who run the country but are sure they’re doing it wrong. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to run. The Daily Telegraph is read by the still think it is their country. And the Sun‘s readers don’t care who runs the country providing she has big tits.

[This critique of London’s newspapers was found in Number Ten Downing Street shortly after Hacker’s eventual departure. Xerox’d copies were found all over the building: the Cabinet Room, the Private Office and, of course, the Press Office.]

— The Complete Yes, Prime Minister, Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay, p. 355

The most obvious change in this version is the addition of a line about The Independent, a paper launched in 1986. The line is amusing enough in itself, but I’d argue that it ruins the rhythm of the routine a tad. Indeed, the rhythm of the piece as a whole isn’t a patch on the TV version.

Then there’s that intriguing use of the word “providing” in the punchline; a word that is used in precisely no other version we’ve talked about, except… Cyril Plant’s speech. Every other incarnation uses a variant of “as long as she’s got”. Was this word used in the original television script that Jay and Lynn wrote, and it changed during rehearsal? Or did they go back to their battered copy of Understanding the Media while adapting this section, and deliberately hewed it closer? Note also, the definition for The Express and the phrasing “used to be run”; present in Plant’s version of the speech, but nowhere to be seen in the televised Yes, Prime Minister episode.

And then, there’s that bracketed “editor’s note”, which I find absolutely fascinating. At first glance, it seems to be almost an irrelevancy. But look closer, and it seems to be a tacit, in-universe admission: this material has been around the houses. What better way to admit that this all originated from a scrap of photocopied paper, than by explicitly labelling it as such?

But one thing above all strikes me about this version of the routine in the book. And that is how… ordinary it is. So much of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister works wonderfully in the books. But this particular section doesn’t work quite as well, and that’s not just because you’re lacking Eddington’s brilliant performance¹³, or because the rhythm is a bit off.

No, the beauty of the televised version is simple. It’s because you can pluck out that existing final punchline, endlessly used over the years, and give it to Bernard. What was just a bit of satire, becomes that same bit of satire… and something greater. That line reflects as much of Bernard as a character than any original line given to him ever did. The genius of Jay & Lynn is clearly evident, and that genius wasn’t in swiping a piece of material. It was swiping a piece of material… and using it in an extraordinarily precise way. And that is entirely missing from the book adaptation.

And this is why, I think, I love sitcom. The best sitcom I find more satisfying than the best stand-up performance, or the best speech, or the best letter, or the best anecdote. Because you can take exactly the same material, and imbue it with literal character that is impossible to do any other way. That final line is funny because it’s a joke about Sun readers. It’s funny because it uses the word tits.

But uniquely… it’s funny because it’s Bernard.

With many thanks to Richard Ward for the initial inspiration and research for this article. Also thanks to Milly Storrington, Ronnie MacLennan Baird for the link to the TV-am clip, Ade Jacobs for Three of a Kind research, and Gary Rodger for help with Dave Allen and old VHS tapes.

*   *   *

UPDATE (16/4/21): Well, it’s very rare that I publish an article, only for it to go out of date pretty much immediately. But this is exactly the kind of subject which rewards a few more eyeballs. We can now push the date of this material significantly earlier than July ’76. Even more interestingly, and contrary to my expectations, we might even be able to figure out who wrote the damn thing.

So let’s first turn to a column by Miles Kington in The Times, published on the 20th January 1984. This one passed me by in my research, because I was simply searching for the earliest published example of the material. Luckily, that fine fellow John Williams is a little more sensible than me, and recognised gold when he saw it. Thanks also to Daniel Webb in the comments, who thought along exactly the same lines.

Kington’s article is a little long and unwieldily to read online, so while you can peruse the full scan here, I’ve transcribed the relevant excerpt:

“It was Kevin Grant who, based on an idea by Brian Redhead, dreamed up those descriptions of British newspapers based on their readers.
The Times is read by the people who run the country.
The Guardian is read by the people who would like to run the country.
The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who like the way the country used to be run.
The Daily Express is read by the people who think it’s still run that way.
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country.
And so on, down to the Morning Star, which is read by the people who would like the country to be run by another country. All very good stuff. So good, that it was quoted all over the place and even, I believe, turned up on the Dave Allen Show. But Kevin Grant’s name was never quoted. The only reason I know all this is that Kevin Grant sent a piece to Punch, where I was working, explaining and proving his invention. I am sorry to say we did not use it. I wish we had.

[…]

End of article too, nearly, except to say that I rang up Brian Redhead yesterday to check the Kevin Grant facts. (The nearest I have ever come to investigative journalism.) “Here’s something extra for you”, he said. “When Kevin wrote his original list, there was no Daily Star. When it came out, he rang me up and said: ‘The Scriptures were wrong. Brian – there is something new under The Sun‘.”

Both these names have got somewhat lost in the ether since 1984. So, Brian Redhead would be this Brian Redhead; an author, journalist and broadcaster who co-presented Today between 1975-93. He sadly died in 1994. As for Kevin Grant, he is also a former journalist, who in 2018 released his second book of poetry.

Still, it sure would be nice to have a second source for this dynamite information. So, how about a letter that Kevin Grant wrote to the Daily Mail back in January 2015? This is available online via PressReader:

Fun with The Sun
The late Brian Redhead and I wrote those 1973 jokes about newspaper readers which Yes, Prime Minister featured (Mail).

Our original satire on The Sun was more biting than the version by some later hand which was popularised and which Sarah Vine quotes. We wrote: ‘Mr Murdoch has found a gap in the market. It’s the oldest gap in the world.’

Later, when the Daily Star began, Brian rang me and asked: ‘What shall we say about the readers of this one?’

I told him: ‘They defy scripture. They have found something new under The Sun.’

KEVIN GRANT, Swindon, Wilts.

Normally, I would be automatically suspicious of any claim of authorship over this material; you have to be suspicious when researching this kind of thing. Still, a number of things make me broadly trust these accounts. For a start, Miles Kington clearly did his homework, especially with his call to Brian Redhead himself. The fact that Kevin Grant’s letter confirms the broad strokes a full 31 years later also seems convincing.

But the clinching factor for me, is that two people get the credit for the material in these accounts. This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing anybody who was trying to invent a claim to this material would do. It just seems very, very believable. Unless any evidence turns up to the contrary, I’d say we can trust all this to be generally true. Kevin Grant wrote the original list, based on Brian Redhead’s initial idea.¹⁴

I hope you’ve all spotted the really important thing in the above letter, though. Yes, Kevin Grant gives an actual date for the material: 1973. This is a full three years earlier than the 1976 date which I had previously found as the earliest public example of this material. Still, there is no substitute for seeing the material in print, with a date attached. Wouldn’t it be nice to see an actual example from 1973? And what about that original version of the final punchline?

Stay tuned, as they say.

UPDATE #2 (16/4/21): Well, I promised you evidence from 1973, so here it is. With many thanks again to John Williams, here is what the Financial Times had to say on the 19th December 1973, in their “Men and Matters” column.

This column is written by the pseudonymous “Observer”, and it’s notable that even at this early stage, Kevin Grant’s authorship has been stripped off, replaced with a generic “copywriter”. You will also note that this version does indeed have the “oldest gap in the world” punchline – yet again backing up Grant’s claim of authorship. The facts neatly fit together.

Grant claims an authorship date of 1973; this being December 1973, it may not actually be the earliest version of this routine in print. But it’s certainly the earliest that we’ve found so far, and by a significant margin.

Which leaves us, perhaps, with just one final question. Can we discover the name of the rascal who changed the original punchline, to the rather more vulgar (but to my mind, more amusing) “tits” version? And exactly when they did it? It seems an impossible task, but then 24 hours ago, I wouldn’t have said we’d know the names of who wrote the original version of this material either…

1. Well done to the YouTube commenter who states that “The description of the newspapers is more or less directly plagiarised from Yes Minister!”, without first checking the respective dates. ↩

2. Dirty Feed is read by people who think they run television. Broadcast is read by the people who actually do run television. ↩

3. This clip is taken from the DVD, for the record. How amazing is it that every single episode of Three of a Kind is available on DVD? If only some of its contemporaries were… ↩

4. Yes, the title of the sketch was not immediately obvious. I’m confident this is correct, though. ↩

5. Here’s another brand new Three of a Kind fact for you, gleaned from this piece of paperwork. Ronnie Hazlehurst conducted a theme tune session for the series on the 2nd April 1981… which is specifically labelled UNUSED. He then did another session a week later on the 10th, and this is the version which is used in the final show. And if you don’t find this thrilling, I don’t know why you read this website. ↩

6. I am afraid you legally have to describe Dave Allen using that cliché, apologies. ↩

7. Incidentally, Peter Vincent also wrote material for that first episode of Three of a Kind. I would suggest this is probably coincidence – Peter Vincent wrote for everything – but it feels worth mentioning. ↩

8. Interesting fact: for more than one of these names, there is no information about them at all across the entire internet. It’s fascinating how easily people with broadcast credits can just be lost to history. ↩

9. I’ve indicated which lines get a particularly good reaction, but he gets a bit of a laugh after almost every line. ↩

10. Now known as the Sonoma West Times & News. ↩

11. Incidentally, there are – of course – many adaptations of this routine which use American newspapers rather than British ones. As far as I can tell, none of them show up earlier than July 1976, and all seem to be based on the British version, so they don’t seem to be directly relevant to tracing the origin of this material. ↩

12. Abebooks claims the publication date of the original edition was 12th November 1987. If this is correct, this means it was actually published nearly a month before the second series was transmitted. ↩

13. Though – shhhh – is Eddington reading his lines from the desk? Why does he keep glancing down? ↩

14. There’s one thing I have to admit at this point: this part of the research had already been done elsewhere online. For a start, see this tweet from @eurotvdramafans back in December 2019, which screencaps the above letter from Kevin Grant. Some of the information also showed up in a couple of other places too. I feel this should have found this in my own original research, but I just didn’t spot it. Mea culpa. ↩

Read more about...

best of, yes minister