The Henderson Report

On the 23rd December 1982, BBC2 broadcast the final episode of Series 3 of Yes Minister. Titled “The Middle Class Rip-off”, it’s an amusing satire on arts funding, and the nature of “high” culture and “low” culture.¹

SIR HUMPHREY: The point is, suppose other football clubs got into difficulties. And what about greyhound racing? Should dog tracks be subsidised as well as football clubs, for instance?
BERNARD: Well, why not, if that’s what the people want?
SIR HUMPHREY: Bernard, subsidy is for art. For culture. It is not to be given to what the people want. It is for what the people don’t want but ought to have! If they want something, they’ll pay for it themselves. No, we subsidise education, enlightenment, spiritual uplift. Not the vulgar pastimes of ordinary people.

You can probably guess which side Hacker is on.

HACKER: Why should the rest of the country subsidise the pleasures of the middle class few? Theatre, opera, ballet? Subsidising art in this country is nothing more than a middle class rip-off.
SIR HUMPHREY: Oh, minister! How can you say such a thing? Subsidy is about education. Preserving the pinnacles of our civilisation! Or hadn’t you noticed?
HACKER: Don’t patronise me Humphrey, I believe in education too. I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, may I remind you.
SIR HUMPHREY: Well, I’m glad to learn that even the LSE is not totally opposed to education.

Very droll, Humphrey. Still, the rights and wrongs of funding for the arts isn’t our big interest today. Instead, I want to look at the Radio Times capsule for the episode. Which features something rather unusual.

Take a look at those names. Eddington, Hawthorne, Fowlds: check. And John Nettleton, John Barron, Patrick O’Connell, and Derek Benfield: check. But what about Joanna Henderson, playing the Curator? She’s not in the episode at all. Nor is she in the end credits. What gives?

To answer that, I have to take you on a little expedition. And to tell the tale properly, we have to go right back to 1979.

*   *   *

So, with the promise that all this does actually lead somewhere, let’s take a look at the recording dates for the very first series of Yes Minister.

Location filming for “Open Government” took place 21st January – 24th January 1979.
Filming for the rest of the series took place 9th – 16th December 1979.

The very first episode of Yes Minister was a genuine pilot, made nearly a full year before the rest of the series. The show wasn’t immediately commissioned, due to worries from the BBC about the political situation at the time, followed by a certain general election. In fact, there are a number of rather interesting things about that pilot, which I wrote about at great length here.

The series finally went back into the studio in January 1980, and each episode was essentially shot a couple of months before it aired, with all programmes finished before the pilot was broadcast. The episodes weren’t broadcast in exactly the same order they were recorded in; Episodes 3 and 4, and Episodes 6 and 7 were swapped round for TX. This was far from unusual when it came to sitcoms, but the actual reasons for episodes being swapped around are often lost to the mists of time.³ Perhaps we can take a few educated guesses, though.

I find the swapping round of “The Economy Drive” and “Big Brother” especially interesting. If those episodes had been transmitted in the same order they were recorded, it would have meant Hacker’s two big wins of the series against the Civil Service – “The Official Visit” and “Big Brother” – would have been broadcast in consecutive weeks, very early on in the series. This surely doesn’t quite sell Hacker’s central plight in the right way. It’s also worth noting that “Big Brother” also contains Frank Weisel commenting that Humphrey has Hacker “perfectly housetrained”, which seems a little early for Episode 3. Episode 4 makes rather more sense.

One other thing struck me during this rewatch. Surely the episode “The Writing on the Wall” is begging to be shown last in the series: threatening to close the Department for Administrative Affairs is pure season finale material, in the current vernacular. But even if they had wanted to change this after all the episodes had been recorded, they couldn’t have done it: that episode contains Weisel, so he’d pop up again straight after leaving in “Jobs for the Boys”.

Onto Series 2.

Location filming took place in December 1980.

Two main changes here. Firstly, “The Greasy Pole” was shot first, but bumped right down to fourth in the run. No idea why this episode was apparently disfavoured; it works perfectly fine on-screen, and sets up Hacker’s attempted climb to the top nicely.⁴ Regardless, this does have the happy effect of putting “The Compassionate Society” first in the run; one of the most memorable episodes the series ever did. “But there are no patients!”

The other change was swapping around the last two episodes, so “A Question of Loyalty” aired last. Unlike Series 1, this means that the end of Series 2 ends on a major story: Hacker’s appearance before a select committee, defending (or otherwise) his department. As ever, I have no proof this is what was in the production team’s mind, but it’s surely a possibility.

It’s also worth noting that the final episode recorded, “The Quality of Life”, was in studio on the same night that the first episode of the series, “The Compassionate Society” was broadcast. I hope that audience had one of those new-fangled video recorder things handy.

Each show was recorded between five to seven weeks before transmission, which wasn’t much different than Series 1. But here is where we get to the real meat of this discussion. Because things were about to change, and drastically.

Location filming took place in October 1982.

Series 3 of Yes Minister is rather different. Firstly, the recording order of the series is identical to the transmission order, with no swapping around of any episodes. This was literally forced onto the production. Because every single episode of Series 3 was recorded just four days before air!

Which means that for this series, the production experienced an entirely different interaction with the audience at home. Unlike previous years, each episode of the series would have been broadcast right in the middle of rehearsals for the next episode. They would have known how well the series was going down with critics and audiences alike as they were making it. Which to me, sounds frankly terrifying. Thank God what they were making was damn good.⁵

The other thing which is frankly terrifying: the fact that the series was only one cast member illness away from being postponed, and having to go into repeats.

The sense that this was a programme being made week-by-week can be seen in the paperwork for the third episode, “The Skeleton in the Cupboard”, which contains the following note:

NB: Episode 2 “The Challenge” TX’d on 18.11.82
The edited programme TX spool was H16011

Updates to the paperwork were having to be made the following week. In previous years, all this would have been done and dusted well before air.

Which leads us to the question at the start of this article. What about Joanna Henderson, who was supposed to play the Curator in the final episode, “The Middle Class Rip-off”?

The paperwork states the following:

JOANNA HENDERSON (direct)⁶ was filmed for this episode and therefore charged to this number – but was edited out of the programme.

This is fairly standard practice: there are all kinds of similar notes across the paperwork for Yes Minister. But those people aren’t usually listed in the Radio Times. Here, she was. And so the last-minute nature of the show truly becomes clear. The Radio Times which includes “The Middle Class Rip-off” has a front cover date of the Saturday 18th December 1982. The episode was recorded on Sunday 19th December, and was broadcast on Thursday 23rd December.

In other words: how could the Radio Times possibly know that Joanna Henderson wasn’t in the episode? When the magazine was already sat on the viewer’s mantlepiece, the programme’s studio scenes hadn’t even been recorded yet! How could they possibly know how the final edit would turn out?

Not even the great Radio Times could predict the future to that extent.

*   *   *

Which leaves us with just one final question. What exactly did the role of the Curator involve in the episode? It’s at this point I wish I had a copy of all the shooting scripts for the series. Sadly, I do not.

We do, however, have the next best thing. One of the very best things about Yes Minister is the absolutely superb novelisations of the series. A combination of Hacker’s diaries, papers from Sir Humphrey, interviews with Bernard Woolley, and all manner of memos and letters and the like, the books are easily as much a triumph of adaptation as the Red Dwarf novelisations, despite being very different beasts.

The book adaptation of the third series of Yes Minister was released in 1983, the year after broadcast. And when reading it, it becomes clear that the writers were working from their original scripts for the show, rather than the broadcast episodes. Because occasionally, as well as brand new material written just for the books, bits of cut material poke through and make themselves known.

Let’s put this into the context of the episode. In the final episode, “The Middle Class Rip-off” has Jim and the gang make their way to the Corn Exchange art gallery:

Even on broadcast, the cut to Humphrey seems slightly odd here; it feels like there was more to the scene. There clearly was; Joanna Henderson is stated to have been “filmed” in the paperwork, so her scene must have been shot on location and done as part of that film sequence, rather than recorded in the studio.⁷

The diaries rewrite this slightly; the episode seems to indicate that everything happened on the same day, while the book indicates Hacker came back the next day to talk to the Curator.⁸ Nonetheless, the filmed scene surely ran very similar to the following; none of this is in the episode as broadcast:

September 25th
Today Brian, Harry and I returned to the art gallery. Fortunately it’s open on Sundays too. Annie was pretty fed up this morning. I told her I was going to the art gallery but she didn’t believe me. It’s not really surprising – I didn’t even go into any art galleries when we went to Italy a couple of years ago. My feet get so tired.

The gallery was empty when we got there. So we found the Curator, a pleasant chubby middle-aged lady, and had a little chat with her. She was awfully pleased to see us and of course I didn’t tell her the purpose of our call. I just made it look like I was keeping a fatherly eye on the constituency.

I asked her how popular the gallery is. She answered that it is very popular, and smiled at me.
‘You mean, a lot of people come here?’ She was careful to be honest. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say a lot. But it’s very popular with those who come.’
A slightly evasive response. I pressed her for details; like, the daily average of visitors through the year.
‘Well into double figures,’ she said, as if that were rather a lot.
‘How well?’
‘Um – eleven, on average,’ she admitted, but she added emphatically that they were all very appreciative.
We thanked her for her help and pottered off to look at the pictures. My feet started aching instantly.

As to why this scene was cut, the duration of “The Middle Class Rip-off” is already at the upper end of a half-hour sitcom: 29’54”. It seems highly likely that this was a timing issue as much as anything. The scene with the Curator is nice to have in terms of the structure of the piece, but not essential. Hacker gives enough detail about the art gallery in his conversation with Humphrey later on. And it’s the Hacker/Humphrey argument which is key to the episode, as ever.

And Joanna Henderson herself? She isn’t a particularly well-known actress; her most famous television role was as the secretary Miss Fennel in Terry & June. She first appeared in the Series 3 episode “It’s a Knockout!”, broadcast on the 27th November 1981⁹, which gives us a fair idea of how she looked around the time of her Yes Minister non-appearance:

Miss Fennel clearly taking lessons from a certain Sir Humphrey Appleby, there. Everything links together somehow.

With thanks to Paul Hayes.

1. For an alternative – and rather more negative – view of the episode, read Graham McCann’s A Very Courageous Decision: The Inside Story of Yes Minister, a book which comes highly recommended. ↩

2. This date is given as “Sunday: 29.1.80” in the paperwork. There is no such date: the 29th was a Tuesday. As the recording of Series 1 was weekly every Sunday, we can assume this is just a typo, and it was actually recorded on the 27th. ↩

3. Sometimes episodes are deliberately recorded out of order for production reasons, with the full intention of swapping them round for TX; other times, the decision to swap them is taken after all the programmes have been recorded. ↩

4. “The Greasy Pole” does feature the spectre of a nasty industrial accident, and you have to wonder whether there was anything in the news agenda which clashed. I can’t find anything, though. ↩

5. You also have to look slightly askance at the running order of the series as it stands. Certainly, “The Whisky Priest” would seems to me a far better final episode than “The Middle Class Rip-off”; not only is it one of the best episodes the show ever did, but the downward spiral of Hacker is perfect series-ending material. And if you don’t agree with that, and want a more upbeat end, then I would suggest “The Skeleton in the Cupboard”, with Humphrey’s downfall, would be a superb ending to the series too.

   OK, fine, no more Yes Minister episode orders fan fiction. ↩

6. I believe this means she was employed directly, rather than through an agency. ↩

7. The paperwork for Yes Minister is very careful to distinguish between actors in the studio, and those on location, and goes out of its way to list these correctly. Therefore I believe we can trust what the paperwork says here; “filmed” is not an offhand comment. ↩

8. A slightly puzzling change; the book seems to go out of its way to do this. Similar changes occur throughout the books, in order to spread out the action a little. Maybe they thought it was more realistic to expand the timeline of events slightly, without the constraints of telling everything economically that a half-hour sitcom demands. ↩

9. As Justin Lewis points out, this episode was directed by Peter Whitmore, who also directed Series 2 and 3 of Yes Minister. ↩

Read more about...

best of, yes minister