I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition.
It came like a bolt from the blue. In February 2010, it was announced that Yes, Prime Minister was returning as a stage play.
It was the last thing that any admirer of the show was expecting. It was not just that it was twenty-two years after the last episode was seen on the small screen. It was also that it was fifteen years since Paul Eddington, and almost nine years since Nigel Hawthorne, had passed away.
The belated revival of a sitcom, as such, did at least have quite a few precedents. Some of them, indeed, had been successful. Galton and Simpson brought back Steptoe and Son after a five-year interlude. Clement and La Frenais revived The Likely Lads as the even better Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? after a seven-year hiatus. Eric Sykes reprised Sykes And A … as Sykes following the same seven-year absence. John Sullivan also returned to Only Fools and Horses once after a three-year gap, and then again after a five-year gap.
Several other attempts had been considerably less effective. The Rag Trade, for example, which had ended on the BBC in 1963, fell flat when it was brought back by ITV after fourteen years in 1977. Bootsie and Snudge, which also had its original finale in 1963, met with a similar fate when ITV exhumed it eleven years later in 1974. Till Death Us Do Part was brought to a close by the BBC in 1975, then returned briefly on ITV as Till Death six years later in 1981, and then was transmogrified (to mixed reviews) back on the BBC as In Sickness and in Health in 1985. Up Pompeii!, having finished in 1970, was brought back twice, in 1975 and 1991, looking a shadow of its former self. Similarly, in a TV culture that was getting increasingly retrogressive, The Liver Birds, which had last been seen in 1978, flopped badly when it returned in 1996, and To the Manor Born, which ended in 1991, proved a disappointment when it was brought back as a one-off special in 2007.
The notion of a sitcom coming back not in its original medium of television, but rather in the different form of the theatre, was, however, a much more recent phenomenon. It had happened in 2005, when Ray Galton, thirty-one years after Steptoe and Son had disappeared from the screen, collaborated with John Antrobus on a spin-off stage play, Murder at Oil Drum Lane. It happened again the following year, when Marks and Gran decided to do much the same with The New Statesman.
The Steptoe revival, with its two original stars having long since died, featured a new pair of performers, with Jake Nightingale standing in for Harry H. Corbett and Harry Dickman replacing Wilfrid Brambell. The New Statesman, in contrast, had been able to call on the services of its old leading man, Rik Mayall, to lend the venture some lustre. Neither production, however, really caught the popular imagination, arousing a certain amount of initial curiosity without going on to attract much critical praise.
The cultural climate did not, therefore, seem particularly clement as far as a Yes, Minister stage play was concerned. What mattered, though, was that both Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn were very keen to write it.
The plan had been hatched about six months earlier, during the summer of 2009, when both of them had been reminded of the fact that it would soon be the thirtieth anniversary of the arrival of Yes Minister on the screen. This imminent event did not in itself prompt the two writers to snap back immediately into action, but, as both of them – Jay in England and Lynn in America – reflected on what could and should be done to mark the occasion, they started to consider the idea of returning to the show ‘before it was too late’.1
Two producers – Mark Goucher and Matthew Byam Shaw – had made contact to express their interest in staging a play. Neither writer, however, was ready yet to commit to such a project, and, while they agreed to negotiate a provisional deal, they refused to take any money in advance in case they failed to come up with something that seemed actually good enough to work.
Lynn then decided to fly over to the UK to visit Jay at his home, an earthy, easy-going organic farm in Langport. It was merely an opportunity for the two men to discuss their options informally while enjoying the chance to be back in each other’s company.
There was no pressure, just plenty of pleasure. ‘Tony is exceptionally generous,’ Lynn later remarked, ‘and has a lot of great wine, more than he can drink unless he outlives Methuselah. He opened a case of Château Margaux 1990 and we had a bottle or two every night with dinner.’2 It was in this relaxed and convivial atmosphere that the two writers started to wonder: had Whitehall really changed as much as some people claimed since the sitcom had ended? What would Hacker and Sir Humphrey be arguing about now? What kind of plot would work in, say, a two-hour play instead of a thirty-minute sitcom? Would the old charm return with the new challenge?
‘We were cautious about the [idea of a] play,’ Lynn would say. ‘We repeatedly reassured each other that we were unlikely to make any progress in the first ten days [which was the length of their stay], and if we managed to hammer out a story, then that would be good progress and it wouldn’t matter at all if we found we had lost the knack or had nothing more to say. We started at nine the next morning. By lunchtime we had a rough storyline. Tony, who loves to categorise things, remarked happily that it had “gone from being a problem to being a task”. He was right. By the time we left Somerset nine days later, we had a good story and most of Act One was written.’3
They were now fully energised by the thought that they were collaborating once again, but there was one problem still to be resolved. The new play would only work if a large enough number of people accepted actors other than the much-loved and much-missed Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne as Hacker and Sir Humphrey (as well as, of course, Derek Fowlds, who was now aged seventy-two and well past retirement age for a Principal Private Secretary, as Woolley).
The two writers were probably the only people at that time who would have challenged the view that Eddington and Hawthorne had made the characters of Hacker and Sir Humphrey definitively and eternally their own, but, then again, only the two writers had a bona fide right to do so. As great and as genuine as their respect and admiration for Eddington and Hawthorne remained, Jay and Lynn still saw the characters as their creations, speaking their words, and thus they did not see why it should be impossible for them to find other talented performers to bring Hacker and Sir Humphrey back to life.
The ultimate concern for the writers, after all, was not the characters: it was the system. They might as well have invented two completely different characters – in fact, it would surely have been so much easier, commercial considerations aside, had they done so – but they were determined to press on with what they had.
Both men were adamant: when asked if they had ever contemplated replacing Hacker, Sir Humphrey and Woolley with a fresh trio of authority figures, Jay would say, ‘No, never’,4 while Lynn, just as firmly, said, ‘No. It would not have been Yes, Prime Minister without them.’5 Most of the awards might have gone to the actors, and most of the public and critical attention had gone in their direction, too, but as far as the writers were concerned, the characters, like the show as a whole, belonged to them; it was their writing, more than anything else, that had made Yes, Prime Minister what it was.
They knew, nevertheless, that the vast majority if not all of the fans might think otherwise, and it unnerved them for a while. Their mood changed, however, once they reflected on other cases. ‘I realised,’ said Lynn, ‘that so many beloved characters have been recast, like Doctor Who, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes – not to mention Hamlet! – and the audience simply accepts a new interpretation by a different actor and treats it on its merits. We hoped that would be the case with our characters.’6
Such optimism was no doubt further boosted by the knowledge that the BBC had only just ‘updated’ The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (which ended in 1979) as Reggie Perrin in April 2009, with Martin Clunes taking the place of the deceased Leonard Rossiter. Even if that particular much-hyped revival had been met with reactions ranging from the hostile to the ambivalent, the absence of a backlash against Clunes himself at least suggested that the new cast of Yes, Prime Minister would be given a reasonably fair chance.
Jay and Lynn (with Bernard Donoughue, once again, acting as expert adviser7) were now free to concentrate fully on the script itself. The main question to be addressed in this context was: what needed to be altered, updated or replaced in terms of the political and administrative world that they had last explored twenty-nine years earlier?
The simple answer was: not as much as one might think. ‘Nothing really changes in government,’ Lynn would insist. ‘Progress is a sham and topicality is an illusion. People go into politics thinking they can change the way it works, but it’s like wrestling a blancmange. You can do what you want to it, but it comes right back at you … just as bad as before.’8
The more complex answer was: all kinds of minor details. Information, speculation and gossip, for example, now went into circulation much more quickly, thanks to gadgets such as smartphones and tablets as well as twenty-four-hour news channels, and the role of spin doctors, sound bites and special advisers was more prominent and more public than before. The so-called ‘geography of power’ had also shifted somewhat, with fewer decisions being made at full Cabinet level and more now being devolved to smaller and more specialised Cabinet committees. Moreover, while political discourse had superficially become less formal, it had, more significantly, become less accessible, with every ‘proactive’, ‘incentivised’ and ‘pathfinding’ politician now schooled in the same smug, jargon-ridden and lazy geek-speak.
Most of the additions and revisions, however, struck Jay and Lynn as relatively trivial compared to the core set of things that had stayed much the same. While they made sure that Sir Humphrey, for example, would face more competition as he tried to influence his Prime Minister, and Hacker would show a much-improved, almost Blair-like mastery of PR as he looked to protect his own position, the writers were content to keep the basic situation, and relationship, that the two characters shared more or less as it was.
What they were still concerned to find, though, was a suitable crisis to use as a device to drive their storyline. In all of the classic Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister episodes, there had always been a ‘hideous dilemma’ at its heart that seemed plausible enough to send Hacker into a panic and Sir Humphrey into a plot. Now, they felt, the problem was that something had changed enough to make their search much harder.
What, they believed, had changed was society itself. Seemingly imbued by a mood of ennui, the British public appeared harder to shock, and, more pertinently, their politicians appeared harder to shame.
‘Shame!’ was still shouted in Parliament whenever someone wished to register their displeasure, but fewer MPs actually seemed to feel it when they were caught doing something that surely deserved it. ‘Since we started to write Yes Minister,’ Jay and Lynn reflected ruefully, ‘shame went out of style’:
Politicians, like other celebrities, reflect our society. Remember John Profumo? He had sex with a prostitute, lied to the House, and spent the next 40 years in penance. Twenty years later Cecil Parkinson, a married man, had an affair with his secretary; she went to the newspapers with the story – no shame there, apparently – and nine years later Parkinson accepted a peerage and became chairman of the ‘family values’ party. Embarrassment, yes. Shame? Not so much. We are not moralists about sexual conduct but all satirical writing involves a moral standard, frequently self-imposed, which is not being met. Our concerns are hypocrisy and dishonesty, because those are usually the funniest. But in looking for subject matter for the play, we looked for things that still shock people. We couldn’t find very many.9
Probably the most obvious real-life example, at first glance, was the MPs’ expenses scandal (which was still playing out as Jay and Lynn were working on the script), but, on closer inspection, the writers found it to be neither particularly new nor especially rich in dramatic potential. ‘After all,’ they said, ‘that system was deliberately designed by the Callaghan Government as a way to get around the pay freeze. MPs were supposed to inflate their expenses. They were expected to do it discreetly, however, and weren’t expected to commit actual fraud such as claiming for paid-off mortgages, or duck houses, or moat-clearing. But they virtually all did it and no one felt guilty. Shame had been replaced by embarrassment – horror at what you have done replaced by horror at people finding out what you have done.’10
It then occurred to the writers that there was one kind of scandal that still had the capacity to shake and shock. This was the scandal that involved foreigners.
While reports of the average domestic scandal rarely seemed to provoke more than a collective shrug of the shoulders, the news of another country’s scandal still managed to fascinate a fair proportion of the nation. The multiple alleged financial, political and sexual antics of Italy’s then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in particular, were regularly commanding plenty of space on Britain’s front pages, featuring as they did such topics as his decision to appoint a former topless model, Mara Carfagna, as Equal Opportunities Minister in his Government, and the announcement by his wife, Veronica Lario, that she was leaving him because he ‘consorted with minors’ at what were termed, much to the British tabloids’ delight, ‘bunga bunga parties’.11
It was this kind of ‘exotic’ ingredient, Jay and Lynn decided, that would spice up the storyline quite nicely. One way or another, they would have something sufficiently ‘hideous’ to horrify Hacker.
The script, when it was finished, was set in Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence, between one Friday afternoon and a Sunday morning in autumn. The atmosphere inside is tense: Europe is in financial meltdown; Britain’s Government clings precariously to power after a close election; the Cabinet is divided; and the Prime Minister is in urgent need of help from dubious new allies.
The financial crisis, Sir Humphrey admits, has been caused in part by the kind of computer models on which even the Civil Service now tends to rely:
The consequence is that, as Britain currently has the Presidency of the European Council, Hacker (eager to spread the blame and share the strain) has convened a Euro-conference in the hope of finding a solution to the recession. All too predictably, however, the assembled representatives of the member states have so far failed to agree to anything except to disagree with each other.
Salvation suddenly seems to loom on the horizon when the oil-rich central Asian state of Kumranistan comes on board and offers a $10 trillion loan to build a pipeline that will zigzag through the whole of Europe. The deal, however, is thrown into disarray when the country’s Foreign Secretary arrives and demands that unless the Government supplies him with an underage girl with whom he can spend the night, the contract will remain unsigned.
This ‘hideous dilemma’ takes the second half of the satire into the realm of farce – a form of drama at which Jonathan Lynn (who was also set to direct the play) was an acknowledged master, and which also suited the spirit of the fiction, and indeed the real-life contemporary political situation, rather well. Just as farce is all about a world that is fast spinning out of control, so Hacker finds himself plunged into just such a world, encircled by bewildering economic abstractions, ethereal political conventions and wildly unpredictable animal spirits, thus forcing him to contend with a living reality that is vastly more complicated, more confusing, more contradictory and much, much messier than its description on paper.
There would be a few things in the play that acknowledged the changes that had taken place since the sitcom was last shown. Hacker, for example, is now quite addicted to his BlackBerry, while Sir Humphrey has learned how to dismantle and scramble it; the Government now boasts a ‘Twitter Tsar’ (whose appointment was announced in a tweet); officials and politicians all argue among themselves about the reality of global warming; and administrators and governors alike are increasingly reliant on computers. In place of the sitcom’s Dorothy Wainwright, who was forthright but still quite formal, there is a more aggressive, assertive and even more misguided special adviser called Claire Hutton (included, according to Jonathan Lynn, not only to reflect the fashion but also ‘because we wanted a younger person in it’12), a party-dressed policy wonk who is so at home by the Prime Minister’s side that she addresses him as ‘Jim’ as she tells him what to do.
Much of the story and the material, however, would underline just how many themes and issues had indeed remained basically the same over the past thirty years or more, from the formulaic clichés that are used to swathe and suffocate the media’s searching questions, to the sleaze that has either to be smeared or smothered. There are still Oxbridge classicists in the Civil Service, and ambitious amateurs in the Government, and too many people in Westminster and Whitehall who are far too preoccupied with what gets written about them in the Daily Mail.
At the heart of the play, as at the heart of the sitcom, there was the archetypal comic relationship between the fallible master and the crafty servant, Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey. The battle-scarred Hacker, certainly, has grown a little more opinionated and worldly-wise, and much readier to stand up to his Cabinet Secretary and sometimes even lecture him (‘Computer models, Humphrey, are no different from fashion models: seductive, unreliable, easily corrupted, and they lead sensible people to make fools of themselves’), while Sir Humphrey – in the manner of Jeeves responding to Bertie Wooster’s sudden fondness for strumming the banjolele – has reacted to this unwelcome change by becoming a little more critical and cynical about his boss (WOOLLEY: ‘Power abhors a vacuum.’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘And we are currently led by one’).
In general, though, the dynamic is much as before. Sir Humphrey is still the artful virtuoso of verbosity:
Well, Prime Minister … one hesitates to say this but there are times when circumstances conspire to create an inauspicious concatenation of events that necessitate a metamorphosis, as it were, of the situation such that what happened in the first instance to be of primary import fraught with hazard and menace can be relegated to a secondary or indeed tertiary position while a new and hitherto unforeseen or unappreciated element can and indeed should be introduced to support and supersede those prior concerns not by confronting them but by subordinating them to the overarching imperatives and increased urgency of the previously unrealised predicament which may in fact now, ceteris paribus, only be susceptible to radical and remedial action such that you might feel forced to consider the currently intractable position in which you find yourself.
Hacker, likewise, is still only just bright enough to know that he is not quite bright enough (repeatedly declaring ‘I must do something’ and then looking hopefully at those who might be able to think of something sensible for him to do), only able to commit to any course of action when he can envision the personally favourable headlines it is likely to engender (‘TRIUMPH FOR PRIME MINISTER!’) and willing and able to dirty his hands whenever it seems to suit him:
SIR HUMPHREY: |
Prime Minister, you have always taken a very high moral tone. You’re on the record against teenage sex. If you were now to endorse prostitution as an instrument of policy, there’s a chance you could be accused of inconsistency. |
HACKER: |
There are exceptions to every rule. |
Bernard Woolley, meanwhile, is still the limp link between them: a mimetic mandarin, a sponge that seeks in vain to soak up only the good things that slosh towards him. A pedant without a purpose, he continues to wander unwittingly through conversations like Bambi gambolling across a minefield: WOOLLEY: ‘It beats me why anyone would want to be Prime Minister.’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘It’s the only top job that requires no previous experience, no training, no qualifications and limited intelligence’; WOOLLEY: ‘I believe in democracy, Sir Humphrey.’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘It does you credit. And if all the voters were as informed and intelligent as – say – me, or even you, it could possibly work. But that’s hardly realistic’; WOOLLEY: ‘You know, I’m sure Humphrey wouldn’t leak.’ HACKER: ‘Are you?’ WOOLLEY: ‘No.’
When it came to (re)casting these roles, Jay and Lynn were anxious to avoid those actors who would be inclined merely to imitate their illustrious predecessors. They wanted performers who would bring something fresh to their characters.
They chose David Haig to play Hacker. Well known in his own right as one of Britain’s busiest character actors, having caught the eye in numerous productions over the past thirty years, including the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), the sitcom The Thin Blue Line (1995–6) and a wide range of stage plays, the balding and moustachioed actor was particularly adept at playing ordinary men unnerved by extraordinary problems.
Henry Goodman was picked to play Sir Humphrey. A tall man whose piercing eyes, sharp cheekbones and hawk-like nose made him vaguely reminiscent of Danny Kaye, he was best known for portraying strong and devious figures, including the eponymous king in Richard III at the RSC and the cynical lawyers Billy Flynn in Chicago and Roy Cohn in Angels in America.
The actor assigned to the part of Bernard Woolley was Jonathan Slinger. Very versatile, with a face that could suggest anything from dreamy placidity to edgy eccentricity, he was a performer who had been steadily making a name for himself in the theatre at the RSC and the National Theatre, as well as appearing occasionally in one-off television dramas.
Jonathan Lynn enjoyed the experience of directing this new version of the old comic triangle, relishing the subtle changes in each interpretation as the actors built up the layers of their respective roles. Without trying too hard to be different from the original characterisations, they found ways to accentuate those elements that suited their own particular strengths. ‘They are not doing impressions,’ said Lynn approvingly. ‘They are playing it differently, and very well.’13
The production (which also featured Emily Joyce as Claire Hutton, the only female character now that Annie Hacker had been consigned to the sidelines) opened at the Chichester Festival in the summer of 2010, running from 13 May to 5 June. Following on from the real-life General Election of 6 May, which had resulted in a Coalition Government, the script had been fine-tuned by the writers to include a few extra topical jokes, as Hacker’s anxiety over his own wafer-thin majority was made to seem remarkably current and pertinent.
The play was then moved to the Gielgud Theatre, in London’s West End, where it would run from 17 September 2010 until 15 January 2011. The response, critically and commercially, was generally very positive, with audiences and reviewers alike appearing to accept (or at least tolerate) the inevitable changes in personnel while embracing the return of the familiar elegance and intelligence that was evident in the script.
Quentin Letts, writing in the Daily Mail, rated the play’s ‘observations on the chicanery of Whitehall as cute as ever’,14 while Michael Billington, in the Guardian, expressed his admiration for the way it ventured into ‘buoyant farce’ and still managed to locate ‘its madness in a world we all recognise’,15 and the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer enthused that it was ‘both hilarious and a telling satire on the unscrupulousness of government’.16 Some found faults in the acting (one critic, for example, judged Henry Goodman’s portrayal of Sir Humphrey ‘too heavy-handed in his coy cunning’,17) while a few felt that too much of the television show’s old intimacy had been lost (‘subtle it ain’t’18), but the overwhelming majority regarded the production as a great success.
It would later be taken on a very well attended UK tour, with a new cast (featuring Simon Williams as Sir Humphrey and Richard McCabe as Hacker), before returning for a second run in London’s West End, and was also staged, among other places, in Australia and America. The odd new topical line was added for these productions, including a couple of jokes about telephone hacking and one about the debt-ridden Greeks, and (given the publicity surrounding the ‘Operation Yewtree’ investigations19) the reference to sex with an underage girl was eventually altered to mention of multiple adult partners. The reviews were once again predominantly positive, with even the Hollywood Reporter (while betraying its unfamiliarity with the original show via its clumsy references to ‘common-touch politico Jim Hacker’ and his ‘fixer-nemesis Sir Humphrey’) praising the play for avoiding the ‘standard-issue political spoofing to focus more valuably on the foibles of actual policy and governance’.20
The experience left Jay and Lynn not only feeling vindicated for their decision to revive their great creation, but also eager to explore the possibility of using the play as the basis for another television series. Spreading out elements of the storyline across a sequence of six interrelated half-hour episodes, with the aim of illustrating how a Prime Minister cannot afford to deal with each crisis in a vacuum but rather has to contend with them in the midst of five or six other crises, they started planning how the scripts might take shape.
They were disappointed, however, to find that the BBC, when given the chance (‘out of courtesy’) to commission the new series, was cautious, requesting to see a pilot script before making a firm commitment. The writers were greatly offended by this response, arguing (somewhat disingenuously seeing as the old cast was no longer available) that ‘there were thirty-eight pilots available on DVD’. The BBC responded by explaining that it was now ‘standard policy’ to request a pilot. ‘So we said our policy was to not write a pilot for them,’ Jonathan Lynn would snap. ‘I thought it was absolutely extraordinary.’21
Curiously enough, there was no similarly furious denunciation of the commercial ITV1, or Channel 4, or Channel Five, none of whom jumped in to snatch the sitcom from under the nose of the Corporation, even though as rival terrestrial broadcasters (presumably with the same access to the thirty-eight ‘pilot’ episodes on DVD) they could have offered the sitcom roughly the same size of audience the writers surely desired. Jonathan Lynn would say, when asked if there had indeed been any other offers from the main commercial channels, ‘I have no idea’,22 while Antony Jay would say, ‘No, as I remember it, it was the original [production] company who did it.’23 (ITV1, it should be noted, did go ahead, just a year later, and commissioned a new series of another former BBC sitcom, the vastly inferior Birds of a Feather.)
The revived Yes, Prime Minister would end up instead, faute de mieux, on the niche nostalgia cable and satellite channel GOLD (formerly known as UK Gold and now partly owned by the US company Scripps Networks Interactive and partly by BBC Worldwide), where, alas, it was destined to reach a far smaller proportion of the viewing audience.
Jay and Lynn, nonetheless, were simply pleased to have secured the degree of control that they wanted over the series (co-producing it with their old BBC Head of Comedy, Gareth Gwenlan, who was now operating as a freelancer), and proceeded to write each script with the same kind of care and meticulous research that they had lavished on all of the old episodes. David Haig and Henry Goodman agreed to continue in their stage roles, while Chris Larkin (who as a teenager had studied the original shows while working for his A level in Politics and Government) was recruited to take over as Bernard Woolley from Jonathan Slinger (who was preparing to appear as Hamlet for the RSC), and Zoe Telford was brought in to replace Emily Joyce as Claire Hutton.
Jonathan Lynn, who would co-direct with Gareth Gwenlan, took primary responsibility for preparing the cast for the recordings. ‘I was a hundred per cent involved with everything,’ he later confirmed. ‘Tony, who is somewhat older than me and has health issues, came to the read-through and first rehearsal every week, and the dress rehearsal and performance. There was some give and take with regard to lines: essentially the actors would sometimes point out that something they were saying could be clarified in a particular way, and I would sometimes agree to change it. It was a fairly collaborative atmosphere, I think.’24
The schedule was basically the same as it had been back in the 1980s. Each episode (now timed at around twenty minutes, due to its being broken up and extended by ten minutes of adverts) would be rehearsed during the week, and then it was recorded in front of a live studio audience – now as before, ironically, at BBC Television Centre – on the Sunday evening.
One thing that had certainly changed since the last time Yes, Prime Minister was on the screen was the amount of pre-publicity that any show could expect, and, for a show with the pedigree of this one, the coverage was exceptional for a programme on a minority channel. There were countless interviews and articles in the newspapers and magazines, on radio and television and in various places on the web, all attracting attention to the imminent revival of a classic comedy show. There was also a tie-in documentary, Yes, Prime Minister: Re-elected, featuring the two writers and the new cast. Few existing fans of the old sets of series, nor many who had only seen the stage play, would have failed to notice what was due to happen. Yes, Prime Minister was coming back.
The first episode, entitled, ‘Crisis at the Summit’, was broadcast at 9 p.m. on Tuesday 15 January 2013. Featuring a credit sequence that used a new set of caricatures by Gerald Scarfe and an upbeat rerecording of Ronnie Hazlehurst’s original theme tune, it was basically an updated version of the first act of the play, introducing the initial elements of the existing plot and also reintroducing the new cast characters.
Again set in Chequers, again over the course of an autumn weekend, Hacker has sought refuge there after enduring a media grilling in London over how badly things have been going:
Tired after trying in vain to guide his fellow European leaders in the direction of an acceptable consensus (‘It’s like herding cats!’), he privately fears the worst about the summit meeting (‘Dealing with Europe isn’t about success, it’s about concealing failure’), and, in spite of one last gasp of bravado, is clearly in desperate need of some help:
HACKER: |
It is time for me to get hands on and give some leadership. |
SIR HUMPHREY: |
Oh, good. |
HACKER: |
So, tell me what I should do. |
SIR HUMPHREY: |
Now that’s just the kind of leadership we need! |
HACKER: |
Thank you, Humphrey! |
The rest of the opening instalment concentrates on establishing the plotline concerning the rescue offer from Kumranistan, drawing on many of the best early lines and exchanges from the play. It ends with the Eurosceptic Hacker, having been enlightened by his special adviser, demanding that Sir Humphrey admit that the Kumranistani loan will only reach the UK via the European Central Bank, and will thus be dependent on the Government abandoning sterling and joining the euro. ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ the Cabinet Secretary reluctantly confirms.
The first episode of the ‘new and exclusive’ series was watched by an estimated 283,000 people (which amounted to approximately 1.17 per cent of the available audience). It easily beat the channel’s twelve-month ‘slot average’ of 114,000 viewers (about 0.47 per cent of the available audience),25 but it was a poor reward for a sitcom that had always worked so hard to engage with the biggest and broadest audience possible.
The acting was uneven. The great success was David Haig (now sans moustache) as Hacker. A tightly coiled ball of nervy frustration, suggesting a dollop of Harold Wilson, a big drip of John Major and a wee dram of Gordon Brown, he was instantly believable as a Prime Minister weighed down by the woes of the nation while worried about the intrigues and schemes that are afoot within his party. Never able entirely to ignore the nagging feeling that he is not up to a job whose crucial description is still missing, there was a delicate sense of pathos about him that added to the air of authenticity.
Less successful was Henry Goodman as Sir Humphrey, mugging almost as much as he had done in the stage play. In stark contrast to Nigel Hawthorne’s portrayal, whose calm visage allowed only the subtlest hint at the synaptic acrobatics that were going on behind the bland mandarin’s mask, Goodman’s characterisation was all show and tell, with squat-thrusting eyebrows, darting eyes and a ready grin that suggested he was more Tigger than Jeeves, more Uriah Heep than Iago, and certainly not the discreetly dangerous, panther-like plotter of the original series.
Chris Larkin’s Woolley also lacked the unforced charm and well-schooled dutifulness of Derek Fowlds’ interpretation, although his sleepy-haired naivety, if writ a little too large, did at least suit the comedy of his character as it was now written. Zoe Telford, on the other hand, struck a sure tone from the beginning as the driven and doubt-free Claire Hutton.
What was most reassuringly impressive about the episode was the script, which was full of Jay and Lynn’s trademark rigour and wit. It was topical (WOOLLEY: ‘A Hung Parliament’s a bad thing?’ SIR HUMPHREY: ‘Yes, Bernard. Hanging’s too good for them!’), amusingly nerdish (‘No Prime Minister or US President has been elected without a full head of hair since Eisenhower and Churchill in the 1950s’) and admirably candid (SIR HUMPHREY: ‘We will have to pay a premium on the loan, but not for many years to come, when there will be a different government.’ HACKER: ‘Well, that’s all right, then!’), and provided viewers with the main reason for staying with the sitcom and watching the rest of the run.
The reaction to the start of the series, however, was mixed. Among the reviews that arrived the following day, the Independent’s Tom Sutcliffe felt that the pace of the comedy ‘was a beat or two off’;26 the Daily Telegraph’s Mark Monahan was much more enthusiastic, praising the ‘terrific’ cast and claiming that the ‘writing is as sharp as ever’;27 while Sam Wollaston, writing in the Guardian, delivered the most damning of all the responses, branding the decision to bring back the show ‘a mistake’ before adding: ‘Best forgotten, lest it sully fond memories’.28
Over on Twitter, where snap judgements popped up throughout the duration of the programme like fleas hopping on a dog, the comments were too diverse to confirm anything other than the incoherence of the medium of their expression: ‘It all feels horribly forced’; ‘Absolutely superb, very funny and brilliantly written’; ‘Bad casting. No flair’; ‘Pretty epic’; ‘Slightly disappointing that the first episode of new Yes, Prime Minister is a rehash of the stage version. And that it’s not very funny’; ‘At last some great comic writing back on TV’; ‘An outright embarrassment of sub-mediocrity especially after the golden gem that was the original’; ‘Pleasantly surprised so far by this remake’; and ‘Utterly devoid of charm. Memory sullied’.29
Several prominent politicians, who were well known to have been fervent fans of the original series, would aver that they were, alas, so busy attending to affairs of state that they had ‘not yet had the opportunity to see’ either this or subsequent episodes.30 This was, in a sense, an encouraging sign, bearing in mind the recent fashion for Prime Ministers and Ministers to down tools in order to publicise their opinions on everything pop cultural from the plight of fictional characters in Coronation Street31 to the carefully choreographed crises of contestants on The X Factor,32 but, given their previously professed strong allegiance to this particular show (and the eager participation of some of them in the pre-publicity for its successor), their seeming failure even to record it for future scrutiny suggested a certain reluctance to welcome the revival.
The sole survivor of the original trio of stars, Derek Fowlds, was another who was left feeling far from satisfied by the new version. ‘They were very, very fine actors,’ he would say of the cast, ‘but, for me, it seemed that they were trying too hard to be funny, and I’m afraid I didn’t believe a word of it. It just reminded me of how natural and truthful Paul and Nigel were as those people.’33
The rest of the episodes continued to develop the basic storyline covered in the play, while also entwining such other topics as MPs’ expenses claims, secrecy, leaks, patronage, Scottish independence, postcolonial diplomacy, the huge debt crisis, the influence of oil-rich countries, the purpose and influence of the BBC (an old hobby horse of Antony Jay’s) – and the debate concerning global warming (a more recent hobby horse of Jay’s34). There was also, in the background, a return to the original series’ reflection on the differences between personal and public morality.
One of the highlights was a summary by Sir Humphrey of Whitehall realpolitik:
SIR HUMPHREY: |
Bernard, there are two worlds. There is the world of high principles, noble ideals and eternal verities. That is the world of philosophers, theologians, academics. And then there is the world of unsavoury realities and squalid practicalities. The world of politics and government. My world, Bernard, and yours. The real world. |
WOOLLEY: |
But Sir Humphrey, this is a matter of black and white. |
SIR HUMPHREY: |
No, no, there’s nothing black and white in our world, Bernard. Ours is a world of dirty grey. I appreciate you wish to take the moral course. Well, sometimes it is unclear which course that is. Politicians, they can talk about what is right and what is wrong. We talk about what works, and what doesn’t. So we put morality in the pending tray.35 |
The series was brought to a close on 19 February 2013 with an episode (‘A Tsar is Born’) which sought to tie all of the strands of the story together. Close to collapsing under the strain of such multiple worries as an unproductive European summit, an international financial crisis, a disloyal Cabinet, a critical media, damaging new computer predictions about global warming and the ‘Kumranistani pervert’ reneging on his country’s deal with the UK, Hacker is close to giving up and resigning. Sir Humphrey saves the day by coming up with yet another ingenious plan.
He proposes using the idea of global warming – a concept that he has previously treated with cheerful contempt – to fashion a new policy that will transform the Prime Minister’s fortunes at a stroke. After boldly committing the Government to battle climate change, he can introduce a special global warming tax on fuel to generate much-needed revenue in the short term, while ‘phasing in’ any additional expenditure over the course of the next half-century; he can also be seen to demand that all other major countries agree to review their emissions policies, and then, when they fail to change their ways, he can call for a series of earnest international conferences to reconsider their decisions. ‘We can, Prime Minister, under your leadership, agree to save the world!’ The beauty of the whole initiative, Sir Humphrey points out, is that ‘it will be fifty years before anybody can possibly prove you’re wrong’. Hacker is thrilled (‘The voters will love me!’), and not even Woolley’s scepticism can spoil his sense of redemption:
WOOLLEY: |
There is one problem: nothing will have actually been achieved. |
SIR HUMPHREY: |
It will sound as though it has. So people will think it has. |
HACKER: |
That’s all that matters! |
In terms of critical attention, the series went out with a whimper, with few reviewers pausing to reflect on its run. The Times was an exception, judging the finale ‘as sharp and funny as all the rest’,36 but, as with the vast majority of the output on the minority channels, the show (after one short and sharp blast of pre-publicity) seemed to have been sent out under the radar of the national press. The viewing figures had remained tiny, ranging from the initial peak of 306,000 down to a mere 109,000 for the sixth and final episode, averaging just 202,000 per programme.37 It was still a coup for GOLD, which boosted its performance in that time slot quite significantly, but for a sitcom of such stature, and with such a history, it really did not seem right.
It was hard to gauge the general reaction to the revival, other than to conclude that it was underwhelming. With traditional critical sources largely silent, and the views expressed via the new social media far too mixed to be in any sense conclusive, all one could say with any confidence about the new Yes, Prime Minister was that it had been neither a complete failure nor an unqualified success.
There had been some good things. David Haig’s performance, from start to finish, was extremely well judged, conveying a sense of mounting panic and paranoia with a naturalness that kept the core of the show close to plausibility even when things were becoming rather cartoon-like out on the periphery. His Hacker was nothing like Paul Eddington’s Hacker, and was all the better for it.
It was also impossible not to admire, yet again, the cleverness of the scripts, which, while lacking some of the sureness and subtlety of their classic predecessors, still shone in comparison to the majority of what else was on offer in the sitcoms of the time. There were, in addition, a few nice little visual touches, such as Sir Humphrey’s grudging nod to calls for sartorial informality by pushing his pocket handkerchief down just out of view.
There had also been some bad things. The studio audience, for example, sounded too eager to laugh, cheer and clap, and it diminished the achievement of those lines that genuinely merited such an explosive response. One of the many remarkable things about the original series was that there would be times when the on-screen insights would be so clear, pertinent and provocative that one could actually ‘hear’ the studio audience fall silent and think about the issue. In the new version, there seemed to be a kind of compulsion to have every comic line, no matter how simple or slight, boosted by the sound of raucous guffaws, which was certainly in keeping with the fashion in broadcasting to bellow ‘give it up’ at audiences (as if laughter and applause was some kind of quasi-feudal obligation), but which nonetheless did a disservice to the memory of the old shows.
There was also a loss of tension in the traditional comic triangle between Hacker, Sir Humphrey and Woolley. Sir Humphrey, perhaps partly due to the presence of the fragrant special adviser who seemed forever draped over Hacker’s sofa, no longer appeared to have any real rapport with his Prime Minister. While Hacker staggered around his study like a wounded animal, looking at windows, floors and walls more often than he did human beings, the static Sir Humphrey’s oddly oleaginous smirks and sneers seemed to be emitted purely for the benefit of the cameras.
Another flaw was the fact that, as Hacker was now so much more aware of Sir Humphrey’s scheming, most of the comedy to be had from the Prime Minister’s deluded belief that he was still outwitting his Cabinet Secretary was lost. This was, after all, a political world that had itself been influenced by Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister: the new show was trying to satirise a class of people who had, at least in part, been shaped by the old shows.38
Bernard Woolley, meanwhile, no longer glanced back and forth at each of his masters as they competed to control his thoughts, but rather sought each of them out separately in order to express, rather gratuitously, how alarmed he was at what was happening. He was, as a consequence, not so much one-third of a trio but rather a solitary commentator on a duo.
None of this, however, did anything of great significance to affect the reputation of the original series. Some people had sought out the revivals, onstage and on screen, and some of them had been impressed, while some were disappointed. Many more had preferred to stay focused on the repeats, the DVDs and the memories, appreciating a great sitcom at its best.
The reactions, for and against, served to show how much the show still meant. More than thirty years on from its first appearance, it remained lodged in so many hearts and minds, no longer just a television programme, more part of the whole climate of popular political opinion. It was a remarkable achievement by the writers and the actors, and by the original broadcaster that had dared to give their show a home, and it would never be forgotten.
Before Yes Minister, sitcoms were valued mainly for the quantity of their laughs. After Yes Minister, sitcoms were also valued for the quality of their ideas. That, in terms of a contribution to television, to humour and to politics, was about as great and as good as it could get.