The Men From The Ministry

The Making of The Men From The Ministry A Reminiscence by Edward Taylor Broadcast on BBC7 on 27th December, 2009

 

Announcer: ... and if you want to know more about the making of The Men From The Ministry, have a listen to this:

Edward Taylor: I'm Edward Taylor and I worked for the BBC for forty years. Men From The Ministry is one of my babies, indeed it is one of the most treasured of my shows. "Ministry" always did pretty well in Great Britain. I've never fooled myself that it reached the heights of the Goon Show or Take It From Here, but we always were well-liked and people laughed and [we] got nice post. Abroad, it was often very big indeed, bigger than the Goon Shows and so on. I got a lot of letters, particularly from India, France, well all over. And I sold the scripts first of all to Sweden, they translated it and made their own series, likewise Denmark; they ran in South Africa for ten years. I think that it had just about finished in Britain when Finland, somebody came over from Finnish radio and got hold of one of the scripts and said we'ed like to do this, and they negotiated with me as the writer and they bought a dozen scripts and translated them into Finnish and broadcast them. And it has really been very very big indeed in Finland to the extent that having recorded all our 150 British scripts they then repeated them, and they repeat them still. Men From The Ministry is going out 52 weeks a year in Finland at this moment so if you've missed a recent programme, if you can get hold of Radio Helsinki, and if you speak Finnish, you can make up for what you missed.

Announcer: ... I don't, as it happens, but that was Edward Taylor, the writer and producer of The Men From The Ministry.

 
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