Guilty as charged in board meetings
The Sunday Times talks to Sir Antony Jay on the 2012 edition of Meetings, bloody meetings from Video Arts
John Cleese has been promoted to the bench, there is a new man in his blue striped pyjamas and there are BlackBerrys on the meeting table.
Beyond that, however, the fictional managers in the 2012 edition of Meetings, Bloody Meetings from Video Arts are just as incompetent as in the original 1976 version of the training film. That is because people still make the same errors that in the old film landed a dreaming Cleese in court for crimes against chairmanship, said Sir Antony Jay, who co-wrote the script with the comic actor.
The chances are that the first cavemen who sat around discussing the best way to kill the tasty mammoths they had seen nearby made some of these errors, too, although they would not have had to deal with videoconferencing.
“People have been making the same mistakes for thousands of years,” said Jay, co- creator of the 1980s BBC comedy series Yes Minister. “And the basic principles of how to run a meeting have not changed in centuries.”
