Stuart Allen directed studio sitcoms the way a stage manager runs a theatre: camera wide, audience in the studio, nothing between the actors and the laugh. On Yes Minister that plainness is exactly what the writing needed, and it took more discipline than it looks.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the first episode of Yes Minister (1980) and try to notice the direction. You will not manage it, and that is the point. Hawthorne's mandarin begins one of his long sentences, the camera settles in a wide two-shot and stays there, and Eddington's minister goes through hope, confusion and defeat while we watch him do it. Stuart Allen directed and produced that opening episode, 'Open Government', and the most important decision in it was the decision not to cut.
He had been making that decision for fifteen years. Allen started directing and producing British sitcoms in the mid-1960s, on All Gas and Gaiters among others, then went to LWT for On the Buses (1969), where he directed and produced dozens of episodes and, when the script wanted one, had a real bus driven onto the studio floor. The Fosters (1976) followed, all 27 episodes his, then most of Mind Your Language (1977), then Yes Minister, then Bottle Boys, and by the middle of the 1980s the run was done. Nearly all of it was multi-camera studio work in front of a live audience, and on most of it he was producer as well as director, which is why his name appears on so many episodes twice. He worked with the writer Vince Powell.
The method has one virtue and one cost, and they are the same thing. Left wide and left alone, a good actor with a good line gets the whole laugh, and the studio audience on the soundtrack tells you at once whether the trust was earned. We laughed at that two-shot, and then realised the picture had not changed for what felt like a full minute, and that a cleverer director would have cut to a reaction and killed the joke stone dead. The cost is that there is nowhere to hide. We said of Yes Minister that every episode has the same shape and that after four in a row it shows; a director who will not cut cannot disguise that. Early episodes of On the Buses were criticised in some newspapers for tired jokes and weak scripts, and Allen's cameras could not have saved them, because saving scripts was never what the method was for.
He is not a director you seek out, because he never asked to be seen. The work is the actors, the lines and the studio audience, in that order. Allen once wrote to the On the Buses fan club that he never imagined "that people would still be watching and enjoying these programmes 40 years on". They are, and largely because he left them alone. A director you cannot see is either doing too little or exactly enough, and with Allen it was the second.
Biography
Stuart Allen was a British television producer and director. Born in London on 3 May 1931, he worked extensively in British sitcoms from the 1960s onwards.
He produced and directed episodes of series including Mind Your Language (1977–1986), On the Buses (1969–1973), The Fosters (1976–1977) and A Sharp Intake of Breath (1980–1981). Allen produced and directed (uncredited) the first episode of Yes Minister (1980). He died in London on 19 January 2019.
