Diary – 28 April 2012

No great April Fool’s Day spoof this year. The best ever was in Panorama on 1 April 1957. I was mildly connected with it — I was on the Panorama production team that devised it, though I did not think of it or produce it. It was a film of the spaghetti harvest in Italy. The team cooked pounds and pounds of spaghetti and draped it over the branches of trees in an Italian orchard, then filmed peasant girls with ladders collecting it in armfuls. Among the many people taken in by it (there was very little real spaghetti around in the 1950s, it was all in tins) was the director-general of the BBC, Sir Ian Jacob. He explained that his confidence had been shaken by peanuts: all his life he had believed they grew on trees, and when he found out they had to be dug up he was open to the possibility that he was wrong about other lifetime assumptions. Since he did not know about spaghetti production, he accepted the Panorama story without question. I thought it did him credit to admit it.

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The idea of a stage variation of Yes, Prime Minister first came up in the 1980s when the TV programme was running. It fell through because Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne could only commit for three months, and a play needed six months to get its money back, and it was unthinkable to cast it with anyone else as Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby. But Paul died in 1995 and Nigel in 2001 and, as the years passed, the idea of casting different actors started to become a possibility. After all, we had written the first five episodes before we thought about casting.