phrase was "it stands to reason", usually before making some patently unreasonable comment. Alf was portrayed as an admirer of Enoch Powell, a right-wing Conservative politician known particularly for his strong opposition to the immigration of immigrants from non-white countries. Alf was also a supporter of West Ham United (a football club based in the East End) and known to make derogatory remarks about "the Jews up at Spurs" (referring to Tottenham Hotspur, a north London club with a sizeable Jewish following). This was a playful touch by Speight, as Warren Mitchell was both Jewish and a Tottenham Hotspur supporter. In interviews, Speight explained he had originally based Alf on his father, an East End docker who was staunchly reactionary and held "unenlightened" attitudes toward black people. Speight made clear that he regretted that his father held such attitudes, which Speight regarded as reprehensible. Speight saw the show as a way of ridiculing such views and dealing with his complex feelings about his father. However, it was later claimed in the book about the series, A Family at War by Mark Ward, that the only similarities between Alf and Speight's father was that his father was a hard-working, working-class East End docker and manual labourer who voted Conservative, revered traditional British values, and was very polite to everyone he met, no matter their background. It is claimed that Speight picked up the idea for Alf's bigoted personality from railway station porters he met when he had worked in temporary jobs for British Rail in the London area. The political views of both Alf and Mike were reflective of Speight's own perception of people both on the left and the right, with the ignorance and bigotry of those on the right represented by Alf and the idealism of many sections of the left represented by Mike. Original decline Johnny Speight gained a reputation for late delivery of scripts, sometimes unfinished and still in the form of rough notes (which would be finished and finalised as a script by the script editor and cast during rehearsals), either close to, on, or occasionally past the deadline. This was claimed by Speight to ensure maximum topicality for the series, although this was disputed by the programme's first producer, Dennis Main Wilson, who stated that Speight was frequently found late at night in a regular selection of West End bars, and that on more than