A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  Even Sir Robin Butler himself, when he saw the reproduction, was taken aback by the accuracy, to the extent that, when Nigel Hawthorne later had occasion to visit him in the real Cabinet Room (to record a brief interview for the BBC radio show Down Your Way22), he felt distinctly disoriented, wondering who was visiting whom. ‘I had an identity crisis,’ he would recall. ‘I wasn’t really quite sure whether he was the real thing or I was!’23

  The same urge to verisimilitude informed the costume designs by Richard Winter, with plenty of research done on everything from the appropriate weight of cloth to the style of design for the suits that the actors were to wear. In an environment in which everyone, politicians and bureaucrats alike, would be formally suited and booted, it would have to be the small details – such as Sir Humphrey’s darker and more classically tailored two-button woollen suits adorned with college- or club-crested ties (sporting tasteful half-Windsor knots), or Hacker’s slightly lighter, slightly flashier, more ‘lived-in’ sets of clothes (including a few ‘trying too hard’ double-breasted numbers, with a semiotically confused selection of schoolboy knotted ties), and Woolley’s plainer, less noteworthy choices – that highlighted the differences in the characters.

  Sir Humphrey, it was reasoned, was an extremely self-assured man with traditional tastes whose job kept him based mainly in one particular place and well out of the public eye, and so his wardrobe would be tasteful, predictable and reserved (while reflecting, very subtly, the recent increase in his salary), whereas Hacker, who was much more insecure and eager to please and impress, would be constantly rushing between the theatre of the House of Commons, the forensic stare and glare of the television studios and the businesslike milieu of Number Ten, and so he would require a wider and more eclectic range of clothes, reflecting the need of a Prime Minister to be part authority figure, part working politician, part celebrity and part (in a very awkward and unwilling way) national fashion icon. Woolley, meanwhile, would simply need to remain smart but bland, ensuring that he could step into and out of the background as each scene required.

  Such care, on all levels, was encouraged by Sydney Lotterby, who, in the autumn of 1985, was finally free to return to the show as producer/director. Two of his other most time-consuming commitments, the very popular sitcoms Ever Decreasing Circles and Open All Hours, had now finished (the former in 1984 and the latter in 1985), while a new project, another sitcom called Brush Strokes, would not be ready for broadcast until the autumn of 1986, so he was able to immerse himself in the planning of Yes, Prime Minister.

  His first task was to cast the two new characters, who would, every now and then, be seen to be assisting Prime Minister Hacker. The first was his new Press Secretary, Malcolm Warren, and the second was his new political adviser, Dorothy Wainwright.

  Jay and Lynn felt the time was right to introduce a Press Secretary partly because such a figure had been lurking around the position of Prime Minister for years (with the hard-boiled, sharp-tongued, fiercely loyal ex-tabloid hack Joe Haines, who served Harold Wilson in that capacity from 1969 to 1976, setting the standard for subsequent practitioners), and partly because the incumbent, Bernard Ingham, had made the role even more of a talking point.

  Although the term ‘spin doctor’ was still not quite in common parlance at the time, the intimidatingly aggressive Ingham, through his increasingly notorious ‘off the record’ press lobby briefings (which, reported only as emanating from ‘Whitehall sources’ or ‘sources close to the Prime Minister’, tended to undermine anyone in the Cabinet whom Margaret Thatcher happened to regard at the time as ‘not one of us’24) and his quick and forceful ‘corrections’ of potentially embarrassing facts, figures or phrases, was certainly one of the people who helped inspire the use of the term. A former Labour Party candidate, he was a career civil servant who (at least in the eyes of many outsiders) had now seemingly ‘gone native’ and committed himself to the Tory – or more accurately the Thatcher – cause. As the parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart put it: ‘Bernard was Margaret Thatcher when being Margaret Thatcher 24/7 was just too much for her.’25

  The Press Secretary in Yes, Prime Minister – so as to help keep a healthy distance between the Hacker and Thatcher Governments – would be as equable and inoffensive as Ingham was belligerent and brusque, thus, ironically, conforming much more to the traditional template of the job than any of the latest real-life practitioners had done. Warren would be more obviously an ordinary civil servant rather than a special political henchman, exuding a beige-like personality that suggested he was more likely to place a friendly arm around a troublesome journalist than hold a knife to their throat.

  Lotterby chose Barry Stanton for the role. A regular small-screen presence since the early 1960s, Stanton had appeared in most of the popular police and crime shows of the past couple of decades, dividing his time fairly evenly between playing down-to-earth coppers and run-of-the-mill thieves, but Lotterby had also liked his more recent performances in the John Esmonde/Bob Larbey sitcom Now and Then (which ran for two series between 1983 and 1984), in which he had played ‘Uncle Gordon’, the avuncular owner of a surgical appliances shop.

  The on-screen blandness of the character would not give Stanton any real chance to shine, but Lotterby trusted him to flesh it out and make the figure seem believable. Resembling a pleasantly attentive GP, the bearded, rounded Stanton’s Malcolm Warren would serve Hacker dutifully and with quiet efficiency, while leaving all of the dark arts to Sir Humphrey.

  Hacker’s new political adviser, on the other hand, was set to be a much stronger and more significant sort of character. The real-life Prime Minister was now using several informal advisers to strengthen her independence from, and power over, her Ministers, with the likes of Tim Bell (an advertising and PR executive who not only masterminded successive Conservative election campaigns but also coached the leader on how best to alter and control her image) and Alan Walters (an economist who helped her challenge the authority of more than one Chancellor of the Exchequer) rattling Cabinet cages.

  By giving Hacker his own special adviser, in the form of Dorothy Wainwright, the writers were therefore not only reflecting a genuine trend but also ensuring that the intellectual battle between the Prime Minister and his Cabinet Secretary would not be too imbalanced in favour of the latter. Rather than make it seem as though Hacker had suddenly acquired a better brain and greater guile, they gave him some much-needed expert backup.

  Building on the impact that Eleanor Bron’s bright female character, Sarah Harrison, had made at the start of the third series of Yes Minister, Dorothy Wainwright would provide Yes, Prime Minister with a welcome new female regular, unsettling the men on both sides of the Whitehall–Westminster divide with her willingness to pit her wits against them. Cleverly adding the pressure of gender to the dynamic of the show without inviting direct comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, she was probably, aside from the obvious elevations, the shrewdest revision of the new series.

  Sydney Lotterby deliberated for a while on the possible options for the role, but eventually decided on Deborah Norton to play the part. Strongly and aptly reminiscent of a young Marcia Falkender (and especially of Bernard Donoughue’s version of a young Marcia Falkender), with piercing eyes and a powerful voice, she had worked steadily on the stage and in television for more than fifteen years, and was well suited to animating a part that involved snapping out lines with upper-middle-class self-assurance while maintaining a suitably haughty expression.

  With these two castings in place, the rest of the preparations continued at a rapid pace. More illustrations were commissioned from Gerald Scarfe for the opening title sequence, with special story-themed sketches added to introduce each new episode; the preferred studios were booked (once again, usually TC4 or sometimes TC8); and the stars were briefed as to the schedule for rehearsing, location shooting and recordings.

  Always someone who relished working closely with the best actors, Sydney Lotterby was especially d
elighted to resume his association with Eddington, Hawthorne and Fowlds when rehearsals began in the last few weeks of the year, and the actors, in turn, were happy to be reunited with him. ‘It felt so right to have him back,’ Derek Fowlds would say of Lotterby. ‘He’d started it all off, after the pilot, with the series proper. Peter Whitmore had come in and taken over the reins for a while, and he was a delightful man, too, but I think you always like to go back to the beginning if you can. We always had a soft spot for Syd. He was part of the family.’26 With everyone greatly impressed both with how the scripts had been written and how the staging was progressing, the rehearsal sessions were very positive and high-spirited occasions, with Lotterby ensuring that every minute was put to good use.

  As he looked forward to recording the episodes, there was really only one thing that caused him concern. Paul Eddington seemed to be in increasingly poor health.

  Eddington had been burdened by health problems of varying degrees of severity for most of his life. He had suffered during his early teens from tuberculosis, which necessitated his spending six months away from school and left him anxious about contracting any further infections. Although he eventually recovered fully and went on to establish himself as an actor, he started experiencing problems again in his early thirties, when he was diagnosed as suffering from ankylosing spondylitis, a progressively painful and debilitating type of chronic arthritis that affects parts of the spine including bones, muscles and ligaments. The treatment that he was obliged to undergo for this affliction caused occasional bouts of radiation sickness. Then he started suffering from ulcerative colitis, as well as a skin condition that would soon be discovered to be a rare form of cancer (Mycosis fungoides, a type of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma).

  He bore all of these many problems privately and quietly with remarkable fortitude, good humour and grace, but, inevitably, they placed a great physical (and mental) strain on him as, driven on by the ordinary actor’s paranoia about the bookings one day drying up, he continued to work hard not only on one production after another but also, sometimes, on more than one project at a time. During the preparations for Yes, Prime Minister, for instance, he continued appearing onstage in a production of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers at the Aldwych, as well as working on numerous voiceovers, radio projects and commercials, and there were occasions when he arrived at the North Acton rehearsal rooms feeling very drained and uncomfortable.

  He decided, as a consequence, to put in a request to the BBC for a chauffeured car to transport him to and from rehearsals, but, much to his and his friends’ irritation, the request was rejected. It seems that the relevant people at the BBC, who do not appear to have been aware of the extent of Eddington’s health problems, reasoned that agreeing to such an arrangement would create a precedent that, potentially, would lead to the Corporation being bombarded by star demands for similar privileges.

  It angered Eddington, and did not go down well with his colleagues (Jonathan Lynn would complain that it was ‘cheap’ and ‘ungenerous’, and, responding to the point about creating a precedent, he reminded people of the classic Yes Minister line: ‘You mean, you can’t do the right thing now because it might mean you have to do the right thing next time?’27), but the actor accepted it and carried on stoically with the work.

  Indeed, it energised him to come back as Hacker. From starting out as the actor most sceptical of the show’s potential, he was now as proud as anyone about what it had achieved, not only at home but also abroad (it had recently been sold to its forty-fifth country, China, where, aptly enough, it was set to be dubbed into Mandarin28), and was fully committed to its reinvention. Surrounded by his fellow actors and well looked after by Lotterby (as well as the writers, who made sure that he was seated in as many scenes as possible), he loved playing Hacker again, and could not wait to portray him as Prime Minister.

  The time would soon come. Following a quick break for Christmas, the team reassembled at Television Centre at the start of 1986 to start recording the series.

  10

  Series One

  In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination.

  The first series of Yes, Prime Minister received a very warm welcome. Nothing on television, during the three years since Yes Minister had last been seen, had come close to matching the show’s remarkable combination of intelligence, realism, knowledge and wit. Its return, in revised form, represented a reassuring move at a time when accusations were in circulation that British television was in the process of being ‘dumbed down’.1

  There were numerous admiring profiles and respectful interviews in the newspapers and several television promotional features, and a picture of all three stars (photographed outside a mock-up of Number Ten) adorned the cover of the Radio Times. It was, by the relatively restrained standards of the time, an unusually broad and enthusiastic response to the revival of a sitcom that dared to go against the trend for safe, inoffensive and formulaic fare.

  The opening episode – which was broadcast at 9 p.m. on BBC2 on Thursday 9 January 1986 – made it clear from the start that this series, now that Jim Hacker had become Prime Minister, was going to be the most ambitious one yet in terms of the nature and treatment of its themes. Within the first two minutes it had Hacker hovering over the button that could trigger a nuclear war.

  In what followed, every major aspect of the country’s Cold War nuclear policy was sliced up and satirised, while the dangerous opportunism of those responsible for managing it was subjected to a suitably excoriating comic critique. In one scene, Hacker’s Chief Scientific Adviser dismisses the concept of Britain having its own nuclear deterrent because (as an attack would either be direct and immediate or, more likely, indirect and gradual) the time to press the button would either be too late or too soon, and thus proposes cancelling the purchase of any more nuclear weapons and using the £15 billion saved to build a large conventional army enhanced with high-tech weaponry.

  This gives Hacker what a worried-looking Woolley describes as a ‘courageous’ idea. If he did indeed decide to cancel the missiles, use the money to build a large conventional army and reintroduce conscription (which would also provide the idle youth of the nation with ‘a comprehensive education to make up for their comprehensive education’), he would solve Britain’s defence, unemployment and education problems in one dramatic stroke.

  Feeling the hand of history upon his shoulder, his voice takes on a Churchillian burr as he decides to name this new policy ‘Hacker’s Grand Design’. Sir Humphrey, of course, is not at all enthusiastic about such an idea and urges the Prime Minister to try ‘masterly inactivity’ instead, but Hacker is adamant.

  Sir Humphrey is aghast: ‘You can’t just reorganise the entire defence of the realm just like that!’ Hacker, however, points out that he is the Prime Minister: ‘I have the power’. Sir Humphrey asks, hopefully, if the plan is merely to stop buying Trident nuclear weapons and start buying Cruise missiles instead, but Hacker insists that he intends to stop buying any such type of the means of mass destruction.

  Sir Humphrey tries to make his Prime Minister see sense:

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  With Trident we could obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe.

  HACKER:

  I don’t want to obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe.

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  It’s a deterrent!

  HACKER:

  It’s a bluff. I probably wouldn’t use it.

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  Yes, but they don’t know that you probably wouldn’t.

  HACKER:

  They probably do.

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn’t. But they can’t certainly know!

  HACKER:

  They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn’t!

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  Yes, but even though they
probably certainly know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that, although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would!

  Hacker, however, vows to press on. He sounds out the Chief of the General Staff, General Howard, about his plan and, much to his surprise, finds that the Army man is very much in favour of such a move, but doubts that the Royal Navy and the RAF would support it. A solution, he says, would be to appoint someone to the soon-to-be vacant post of Chief of the Defence Staff who has an Army background – someone very much, in fact, like himself – to push the policy through.

  The General then bumps into Sir Humphrey, who shocks him with the news that Hacker is not only going to abandon nuclear weapons but is also planning on bringing back conscription. ‘We can’t bring in a mob of punks, and freaks, and junkies and riff-raff!’ the old soldier protests. ‘We must stop him!’

  Sir Humphrey assures him that they only need to slow Hacker down. ‘After a few months, most new Prime Ministers have more or less ground to a halt anyway.’

  The Cabinet Secretary achieves this aim by warning the Prime Minister that the Americans will be most displeased if Britain stops buying its Trident missiles and fails to replace them with another American-made nuclear weapon. Worse still, as far as Hacker’s own amour propre is concerned, this displeasure would manifest itself initially via the downgrading of his first official trip as Prime Minister to the White House. ‘Your meeting would not be with the President,’ Sir Humphrey informs him. ‘You would be entertained by the Vice-President.’

  Hacker is horrified. ‘The Vice-President?’ he gasps. ‘But even Botswana was met by the President – I saw it on the news!’ Sir Humphrey, quietly delighted to see that he can still make Hacker squirm, points out that Botswana had not just cancelled a £15 billion order for Trident. When Hacker admits that the meeting with the President ‘is vital for PR’, Sir Humphrey tells him that he will have to postpone his ‘Grand Design’ and the morally compromised Prime Minister, reluctantly, agrees.