Andy Hamilton, writer

I’d been working on a TV series that kept getting postponed. When the channel eventually put it out, the reviewers said it looked dated. No wonder! So my co-writer Guy Jenkin and I wanted our next project to be topical. We decided to do a sitcom set in a workplace and the obvious choice was a TV newsroom: colourful, interesting, lots of things happening, and, if we were clever about the way we filmed it, we could make it really up-to-date.

We wrote 90% of each episode – plot, subplots, relationships between characters – in advance, but left holes in the script so we could drop in something topical at the last minute. Each hole would be given a letter – Topical A, Topical B – and we’d fill them in the night before, responding to things on the news. Then the actors would get them on the day of filming.

It was really exciting. Although it could have been about any office – the lothario, the PA who doesn’t give a toss, the woman who has been passed over for promotion – the fact that it was about news was important. There hadn’t been a sitcom where people sat around talking about world events before. It was comedy, but it had a ring of truth, with all the compromises journalists make to get a story. People have told me that some of the tricks reporter Damien Day gets up to actually happen, like carrying around a teddy bear to leave in the rubble of some disaster.

We wanted to call it Dead Belgians Don’t Count, but Channel 4 got cold feet. I think they were worried about selling it to Belgium. Then, for a while, it was called Dead Kuwaitis Don’t Count. Deciding against that was a lucky escape as, by complete chance, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait the first week it went out, in August 1990.

We came up with Drop the Dead Donkey after doing some research at BBC News. Someone had been shot in Northern Ireland – a terrible story, but there was no information. Eventually, this news editor said: “Well, if the guy’s dead, he’s in the bulletin.” That’s the way it works. But where the donkey came from, I still don’t know. I’ve heard journalists swear it’s authentic – that “donkey” refers to the cute animal story at the end of the running order. But the reality is it just sounded good.

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Robert Duncan, actor



Filling in the holes in the script on the day of shooting was so scary that some of us scribbled things on Post-its and left them on the set – it was a newsroom, so there was always a lot of paper around and you could get away with it. Once, I picked up a scrap during a shot, just ad-libbing, and David Swift, playing the news anchor Henry, looked completely panicked. It had all his lines on it.

I was Gus Hedges, the chief executive of GlobeLink News, this smooth but rather incompetent guy who’s full of appalling management speak. He was one of Margaret Thatcher’s children, desperate to get the approval of the proprietor, Sir Roysten Merchant. Andy and Guy gave him these brilliant, awful lines: “Are we cooking with napalm?”; “Let me run this across the road, see if it gets knocked down”; “stirring ideas in my strategy wok”. But of course he’s also deadly serious: it’s his job to make sure GlobeLink gets juicier stories to push up ratings.

The series started 25 years ago now, but people still reference it. It had such a cult following and ran for eight years. A few years ago, I was presenting a documentary for ITV and had come in to see the edit. Someone from the newsroom spotted me. They tried to persuade me to put on a suit, dress as Gus, and wander past the glass behind the newsreader during a live broadcast. The viewers wouldn’t notice, but it would be a great in-joke for all the journalists. I thought about it, but in the end my morals got the better of me. Some things should stay fictional.