Antony Jay

Sir Antony Rupert Jay (born 20 April 1930) is a British broadcaster and script writer best known for co-writing the 1980s political comedy Yes Minister. Less well known is Jay's role as a right-wing activist.

Career

Jay joined the BBC in 1955. He edited its current affairs programme Tonight from 1962 to '63 and was head of talks features between 1963 and '64. In 1964 he left the BBC to work as a freelance writer and producer.

Jay was a member Annan Comittee on Future of Broadcasting (1974-77) which led the the creation of Channel 4 - an innovation which served the interests of independent producers like Jay.

In 1972 Jay co-founded the corporate training video production company Video Arts with the comedian John Cleese. Jay chaired the company from 1972 to 1989. Jay was also a partner in a sister company called Video Arts Television which was set up in 1978 and produced a number of films promoting neoliberal ideology. Most notable of these was the ten part documentary Free to Choose promoting the views of Milton Friedman, but it also produced a three part film called Heyek - His Life and Thoughts, broadcast in 1985.

Bob Chitester, the driving force behind the project has explained that the purpose of the project was:

[T]o translate the excellent scholarship of think tanks and independent scholars into engaging material containing easily remembered stories, phrases and images. These will become life-long reminders; think of them as awareness triggers, of the tug of war between freedom and government and the constant need to rein in the latter to preserve the former. This will be particularly productive with young people whose “natural passion for change and freedom” can become a lifelong habit of seeing the many ways government stands in the way of their aspirations.

After failing to find a production company in the United States sufficiently committed to the neoliberal philosophy, Friedman and Chitesterturned to Video Arts Television to produce the film. In his autobiography Friedman recalls the first meetings with Video Arts Television to discuss their future production of the 1980 neoliberal polemical documentary Free to Choose:

Bob [Chitester] had been planning a trip to London to talk to the BBC about its interest in acquiring the program when it was completed and to talk with possible producers... By far the most important interview was with Antony Jay, recommended by Ralph Harris [Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs] as “a Friedman fan” (initially from reading my [1973] Playboy interview). Jay was a partner in Video Arts, a television production company formed by ex-BBC employees who had wanted to escape bureaucracy… [Later] Bob and I took off on September 20 for London, where we had extensive discussions with Antony Jay and two of his partners who were to be the most closely involved in the production of Free to Choose, Michael Peacock, managing director and Robert Reid, chairman. In addition, Peacock arranged for us to interview Michael Latham as a potential producer. Unlike the producers we had interviewed in the United States, both the Video Arts trio and Michael Latham were sympathetic to our philosophy and enthusiastic about producing a documentary to present it.

Free to Choose eventually became a ten part television documentary. The BBC bought the rights to six of the programmes, five of which were broadcast with studio discussions with Milton Friedman hosted by the neoliberal economist and journalist Peter Jay.