Advertisement

How Drop the Dead Donkey broke the news – and its cast

Neil Pearson and Stephen Tompkinson in Drop The Dead Donkey - Paramount
Neil Pearson and Stephen Tompkinson in Drop The Dead Donkey - Paramount

When Drop the Dead Donkey became a comedy hit for Channel 4, some hacks claimed the title as a well-worn journalistic phrase. It was in fact made up by creators and writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, inspired by a gloriously cynical snippet overheard in the BBC newsroom.

Shadowing the newsroom as research for their new script, they observed the editorial team putting together the evening bulletin – an increasingly furious process of shifting news items around, and bumping them up and down the running order.

“There was a lot of news coming in,” says Andy Hamilton. “There was an assistant editor – a very calm, relaxed chap – and at five minutes to six he said, ‘Someone’s been shot in Belfast.’ The editor snapped rather testily, ‘What, is he dead? I need more information than that…’ They kept jiggling the running order around. It got faster and faster. ‘Right, we’re moving Reagan up to the first item, we’ll drop Geoffrey Howe down to third!’ Finally, they had this sprint up the corridor. The deputy said, ‘What about the chap who’s been shot?’ The editor said, ‘If he’s dead, he’s in.’”

Before conceiving of an imagined story about a dead donkey – whose demise, we can assume, wasn’t good enough to make the headlines – one prospective title for the series was Dead Belgians Don’t Count.

“We wanted something that sounded cynical,” says Hamilton. “But the channel was unhappy about that title. One of the reasons was that they thought it might affect sales to Belgium – and it did get sold to Belgium in the end, so they were right.”

First broadcast on August 9 1990, Drop the Dead Donkey not only sold to Belgium – it also won a Bafta, two Emmys, multiple British Comedy Awards, and ran for six series. Now the entire show is available on BritBox.

Set in the offices of Globelink News – taken over in the first episode by a Rupert Murdoch-style mogul – the crux of its satire still feels very much on the hot button: journalistic integrity (or lack of it) vs. money-spinning sensationalism.

Packed with gags about current affairs, Drop the Dead Donkey isn’t just a snapshot of its era, but of the specific week that episodes were broadcast. Down-to-the-wire writing and production allowed topical jokes to be inserted the day before the show aired. Repeats (including BritBox) have even included a news debrief on what was happening at the time of the original transmission.

But at heart – and there is heart beneath the cynicism and spin: relationships, affairs, breakdowns, a wedding – it’s really a workplace comedy.

“That was the idea,” says Andy Hamilton, “a character-based sitcom with this extra spice. Being able to talk about the news, and satirise the news values and commercialisation. We wanted to create rounded characters, but types that people would recognise from their own working lives.”

The cast of Drop the Dead Donkey - Paramount
The cast of Drop the Dead Donkey - Paramount

Those dynamics were evident even in the BBC newsroom. “It was quite an entertaining day,” says Hamilton. “It confirmed that it was an office like any other. Even on a short visit you could register that there were the various different types that you’d find in a lot of offices – the over-promoted, the under-promoted, the slackers, the worriers.”

Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin began writing together in the 1970s, first for the Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society (“A less glamorous version of Footlights,” said Jenkin on Comedy Connections) and BBC radio. They moved to BBC television to write for Not the Nine O’Clock News. Between them, other credits include Who Dares Wins, Spitting Image, The Two Ronnies. They also wrote the family sitcom Outnumbered together.

Looking back at the genesis of Drop the Dead Donkey, Hamilton recalls there had been few workplace-set sitcoms since The Rag Trade in the 1960s. “From time to time we have a little blitz of ideas, playing the ‘what if?’ game,” says Hamilton. “We were aware that there hadn’t been a studio sitcom set in the workplace for a while. We thought that was odd because we spend so much of our lives at work. At some moment we had the idea that if the workplace was a newsroom, the product we'd be dealing with was the news – we could make it a topical show, and use the techniques we had used on sketch shows, like Not the Nine O’Clock News and Who Dares Wins, where we made it and it went out the following day. That hadn’t been done in a sitcom.”

The BBC originally commissioned a script, but they missed the point. The script had to be read that same day for the topical jokes to land. “We said, ‘We’ll try and give you the sense of what the experience of watching the show will be like,’” says Hamilton. “They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we understand that.’ We handed it in and months went by. Finally, we got word that they quite liked the script but didn’t think the topical stuff worked. But they’d made the mistake of not paying us yet – I don’t think we even had a proper contract – so we immediately sent it round to Channel 4.”

Victoria Wicks and David Swift in Drop The Dead Donkey - Paramount
Victoria Wicks and David Swift in Drop The Dead Donkey - Paramount

With the show commissioned, Hamilton credits some of its success to the now-rare privilege of an unaired pilot, essentially a dress rehearsal which allowed the director, the late Liddy Oldroyd (who directed all 65 episodes) to experiment with the format, and a lengthy casting process. “We had a lot of time to get the casting right,” Hamilton says. “We knew the cast were good. None of them were household names at the time, which gave it an extra spark.”

Globelink’s finest (or worst) include chief executive Gus (Robert Duncan), who not-so-surreptitiously steers the team towards sensationalism and corporate interests; George (Jeff Rawle), the ineffective put-upon editor – downtrodden by every facet of his professional and personal life; Alex (Hadyn Gwynne), the voice-of-reason deputy editor – later replaced by Helen (Ingrid Lacey), a gay single mother whose inclusion is decades ahead of other sitcoms; subeditor Dave (Neil Pearson), a compulsive gambler and womaniser; Joy (Susannah Doyle), the brutally unfriendly PA; and news anchor team Henry and Sally (David Swift and Victoria Wicks) – an unhappy onscreen marriage of a pompous boozehound and a stuck-up tabloid starlet.

The best remembered character, thanks to his nabbing the most outrageous laughs and the award-winning performance from Stephen Tompkinson, is Damien Day, a near-sociopathic field reporter who will stoop to any and all depths to get, exaggerate, or fabricate a good story.

He bought football fans booze and Nazi gear for a feature on neo-fascist hooliganism; encouraged a firing squad to execute the same person more than once; started riots; coerced a mild mannered animal rights group into a puppy farm raid; whacked children to make them cry on video; and stuck his camera (quite literally) into some experimental heart surgery.

In the very first episode, the editor George confiscates Damien’s teddy bear – a prop that he plants at disaster sites for some extra emotional wallop in his reports (“Buried inside the remnants of this hospital devastated by the earthquake, a sad symbol of tragedy… a child’s teddy”).

“As we were doing that scene I remember thinking that the show had a very clear identity already,” says Andy Hamilton. “You never like to tempt fate, but I don’t think it was just me. There was a general spring in people’s step. There was a feeling that it was gelling.”

While Sir Roysten Merchant, the oft-mention but rarely seen Globelink owner, is a clear play on Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell – “He was an amalgam,” says Hamilton – the other characters weren’t drawn from real-life newscasters. That was Channel 4’s official line. “I remember a Channel 4 lawyer saying to us, ‘If anyone asks you, none of the newsreaders are based on anybody,’” says Hamilton. “We said, ‘That’s Ok, they’re not.’ The lawyer said, ‘Yeah that’s right, say it just like that.’ ‘But they’re not!’ ‘Yeah, like that, that’s really good…’”

Scripts were written with gaps, so that up-to-the-minute topical gags could be inserted during the rehearsal stage. Those gags might get replaced with even more up-to-the-minute references. They filmed episodes in front of a studio audience the day before transmission, a process that’s more akin to Have I Got News for You (on which Andy Hamilton is a regular guest) than classic studio sitcoms.

“We got up extremely early the next morning, edited all day long, and handed it in for transmission that night,” says Hamilton. “Sometimes the adrenaline got going. When it got to six in the evening and you still had a bit to do… but you’d get a bit calmer in a weird way.”

Hamilton recalls delivering one episode just 45 minutes before broadcast, and once handing the tape to a Channel 4 bod who clearly hadn’t got the memo (“We should have had this two weeks ago!”). But he says there were “much hairier moments” on Ballot Monkeys, which aired during the 2015 general election. Set on Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, and UKIP campaign buses, material was written and filmed on the day of transmission.

During its six-year run, Drop the Dead Donkey tackled hefty topics such as the Gulf War, the Robert Maxwell pensions fraud (apt, as Sir Roysten was a partial nod to Maxwell), the Northern Ireland Troubles, the breakdown of royal marriages, the launch of New Labour, the, erm, cancellation of Elderado, and break up of Eastern Europe.

“The cast used to hate that,” says Hamilton. “We’d give them the topical jokes very late, often on show day, and they’d have to learn lines about Bosnia and Herzegovina, and unpronounceable Slavic names,” says Hamilton.

Amusingly, the first episode has the characters arguing about which of them gets lumbered with reporting on the EU because it was boring. “The EU was a dead story then,” laughs Hamilton.

Reactions to the show as much about the political moment as the show itself. One early joke about Margaret Thatcher prompted a complaint from within the government. The gag – that Mrs Thatcher only cared about dead foreign children if they were a missed photo op – was broadcast in October 1990, shortly before Mrs Thatcher was ousted as prime minister.

“It was quite a hard joke,” recalls Andy Hamilton. “When I got into work there was a fax from a Tory backbencher which said, ‘This will be one of thousands of faxes you get objecting to the joke you made about our prime minister last night.’ I thought, 'Maybe we’ve misjudged it? Maybe it was too much?’ I asked Channel 4 to send over what phone calls we’d had that night. There were three calls. One had been to commend that very same joke – the other two had been to ask where you could buy the dress that Sally wore. I hadn’t realised at the time, but it showed how much trouble Margaret Thatcher was in – people weren’t getting worked up on her behalf.”

Arriving at the emergence of Sky TV and rolling 24-hour news channels, Drop the Dead Donkey took aim at the news itself – as personified by unshakably-smarmy, corporate waffle-spouting executive Gus. As yes-man to Sir Roysten, he insists that he doesn’t interfere editorially (“You’re the editor George, I’m not here”) but revels in tabloidese and ratings-grabbing headlines.

Gus quibbles that their coverage of an oil spill has been lacklustre, because their oil was only “leaking” – other news firms had oil that was “pouring” or “spewing”. In future, he insists, Globelink’s oil should be “vomiting”. Gus also embodies crooked media interests. “Any news of that minister rumoured to have taken a £500,000 bribe?” he asks the team, then whispers into his mobile phone: “No, it’s OK, you’re still alright, mate.” The fun is seeing Gus’s yuppie façade occasionally slip.

The Drop the Dead Donkey cast in 1996 - PA
The Drop the Dead Donkey cast in 1996 - PA

Indeed, the characters – in contrast to how Gus’s media machine would treat subjects of its news items – are very human. “Initially, it was the topicality that grabbed a lot of the attention,” says Hamilton about the show. “That was the icing on the cake that got people interested. As time went by, it became much more about characters. We got to dig down into why Gus was like Gus, and why Dave was like Dave.”

Even the amoral Damien gets picked apart with a visit from his cold-as-ice mother. In another episode, Sally – introduced in the first episode as a snooty antagonist – suffers a miscarriage and blindsides viewers with a heart-wrenching confession.

It’s hard to imagine Drop the Dead Donkey being made in 2021, with the rapid rate at which news comes – or vomits, even – and the ripe comedy characters that occupy the real political world. Still, the show occupies a strange cultural and political space: both of its time and still very relevant.

“A lot of it is driven by what we should morally versus commercial imperative – what we probably have to do in terms of self preservation,” says Andy Hamilton. “That quandary is one that ordinary people get placed in – what my Jiminy Cricket is telling me I should and what my self-serving survival instinct tells me to do. That makes it quite universal.”

Drop The Dead Donkey is available on BritBox