A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  Paul Eddington found himself in demand not only in Britain but also in a number of countries around the world. In spite of his continuing health problems he was anxious to remain as active as possible, and got on with touring, appearing in commercials, recording voiceovers and continuing to pick and choose his projects for the theatre, television and radio. He also gave his support freely to a fairly wide range of artistic, social and political causes, chairing Equity’s International Committee for Artists’ Freedom, serving on the Council of the Howard League for Penal Reform and acting as an adviser to the International Shakespeare Globe Centre.

  Television, for a while, held the least appeal, because so few of the scripts that were submitted to him came close to matching the quality of the ones crafted by Jay and Lynn, but, after taking a break from the medium, he did accept the odd offer, such as one of the leading roles in Peter Hall’s four-part production of Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn on Channel 4 in 1992. He remained more resistant to the prospect of returning to small-screen comedy, though, and rejected a number of lucrative offers to do so, including a starring part in a BBC comedy drama written by Debbie Horsfield entitled The Riff Raff Element.

  In the years that followed his farewell to the role of Jim Hacker, it was the theatre that commanded most of his time and energy. In 1988 he starred in a double bill of Terence Rattigan plays, The Browning Version and Harlequinade; the following year he began appearing as the ageing, self-deceiving fop Sir Harcourt Courtly in what would turn out to be a long-running revival of Boucicault’s London Assurance; in 1990 he starred as the bumbling Monsieur Jourdain in a new production of Molière’s classic Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and the next year he not only portrayed the uxorious Sir Paul Plyant in a revival of Congreve’s The Double Dealer (which, much to his pride and pleasure, was directed by one of his four children, his daughter Gemma) but also appeared as the easily duped Orgon in Peter Hall’s restaging of Molière’s Tartuffe.

  In 1993, he gave an exceptionally clever and subtle performance (for which he received the Critics’ Circle Best Actor Award) as the seedy and starving poet Spooner in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. He seemed, to many, to be at the peak of his powers. Peter Hall, indeed, went so far as to call his acting ‘Mozartian’.10

  It was also in 1993, shortly after completing his run in No Man’s Land, that The Sun newspaper, with its well-known commitment to serving the public interest, decided that the time had come to reveal that Eddington was suffering from skin cancer. He was informed of the ‘story’ by telephone the night before, and then, once it was published, he and his wife were besieged by a horde of hacks.

  ‘I was horrified by the feeling of persecution,’ he would say, ‘and became absurdly nervous; we even put up a screen in the hall to prevent reporters peering through the letterbox. If I had to go out for some purpose I would spend minutes peeping out of the window in an effort to see whether the coast was clear before dashing to my car.’11

  The only thing that the media intrusion did, apart from attract public sympathy for his plight, was to harm his health further through all the stress and to undermine his chances, during his final couple of years, of getting any more work. The BBC would hire him to play Justice Shallow in a new production of Henry VI,12 but other than this the offers dried up. It seems that some prospective employers, now wary about hiring an actor whose publicised poor health and partially scarred and blotchy face (even though it had already been disguised with special make-up for some while) might prove a distraction to a production, passed him over for a number of possible projects, much to his hurt and frustration.

  Desperate to keep himself busy by doing what he did best, he was, nonetheless, determined to act again. He managed to do so in 1994, thanks in part to his old friend and Good Life co-star Richard Briers, who agreed to act alongside him in a new production of David Storey’s play Home. A simple but poignant tale about two elderly men who sit together in the sun and chat about their lives while their minds begin to fail, it was a suitably intimate and humane fiction with which a fine actor might bid his farewell.

  ‘Dickie knew how ill Paul was – as did the producer and director,’ Eddington’s wife, Tricia, later said of Briers’ involvement. ‘But everyone was very keen to do it. Dickie could just fit it in before he took on yet another project. He very much wanted to do it and Ann, Dickie’s wife, backed him up. At times the schedule was very difficult, because Paul had to have his treatment and still carry on with rehearsals. The treatment exhausted him, so Dickie – being Dickie – took away all the stress of the publicity and interviews. “Look, old love,” he said, “I’ll do it. If they’ve got one of us they don’t need you.” That meant Paul could conserve all his energies for the stage.’13

  The production was well received. One critic praised Eddington as ‘bleakly brilliant’,14 another called him ‘a master of nuance’,15 while a third applauded him for his portrayal of a man whose eyes, ‘even when brimming with tears, suggest he dwells in some private world of his own’.16 It had been a huge strain, but he had maintained his impeccable standards right through to the end.

  Paul Eddington died, at the age of sixty-eight, in 1995. Just a month before he passed away, he made a deeply moving and characteristically defiant appearance on the BBC1 programme Face to Face, in which he made light of his increasingly disfiguring illness. ‘People are kind enough to say “how brave” and all the rest of it,’ he said. ‘I’m not brave at all. I do wish, very sincerely, that I hadn’t got this problem. But as I have it, there’s no alternative but to say, “Yes, I’ve got it”’. His autobiography appeared a couple of weeks after that appearance. His title for it was So Far, So Good.

  A journalist had once asked him what he would like his epitaph to be. He suggested: ‘He did very little harm.’ He added that earning the right to such a claim was not easy: ‘Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me.’17

  Probably the sweetest, simplest and most apt of all the many tributes to him came from John Howard Davies, who, all those years ago, had hired him to play Jim Hacker. ‘I loved him,’ he said. ‘I thought he was a smashing man, and I wish there were more of his kind about.’18

  Nigel Hawthorne sounded a similarly heartfelt note. ‘He was the bravest man I ever met,’ he said of his former co-star. ‘He never seemed to complain about his poor health, and he had been ill for many years, but always bore it with dignity and humour.’19

  Hawthorne himself had been just as active as Eddington in the years since Yes, Prime Minister. Like his old friend, he had found few new television projects that appealed, and preferred to spend much of his time back on the stage.

  He did so, however, on his terms, and his terms only. Still scarred by all of the snubs he had endured prior to his success in Yes Minister, he regarded the new clamour for his services with more than a small measure of cynicism. ‘I was offered the sort of parts by the Royal Shakespeare Company which five years ago I’d have cried with joy to get,’ he would reflect. ‘But this time I told them, “You have left it too late”.’20

  He was predictably impressive as a spymaster in the Tom Stoppard play Hapgood (1988); profoundly moving as C.S. Lewis in William Nicholson’s Shadowlands (1989); mesmerisingly complex as the porphyria-plagued sovereign in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III (1991); and, directing himself, he also appeared as the vain and rickety Lord Ogleby in The Clandestine Marriage (1996). His last, and not particularly satisfying, stage role was the lead in King Lear with the RSC at the Barbican, Stratford-upon-Avon, and in Tokyo in 1999 and 2000.

  He also enjoyed increasingly high-profile successes with movies. There were times, such as when he appeared with Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock in the sci-fi thriller Demolition Man (1993), when the money was far more of an attraction than the art, but he was always searching for roles that would help stretch him in this medium. Taking part, for example, in two new attem
pts to do justice to Shakespeare on the big screen, he played Clarence in Ian McKellen’s modernised Richard III (1995), and Malvolio in Trevor Nunn’s version of Twelfth Night (1996). Steven Spielberg cast him as the pro-slavery President Martin Van Buren in Amistad (1997), and he was David Mamet’s first and only choice to play the obsessive Arthur Winslow in his adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy (1999).

  His biggest international success, however, came in 1994, when he reprised his stage role in the movie The Madness of King George. It won him a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award nomination, a great wave of critical praise and brought this very private man far more publicity and media attention than he had ever wanted.

  In the build-up to his appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony, as part of the seemingly endless succession of promotional interviews that all nominees are obliged to endure, he gave a brief interview to the American gay magazine Advocate. ‘I didn’t know the magazine,’ he would say. ‘I don’t mix in those circles.’21 Naively, having been told that the publication had a very small circulation in the States, he thought that hardly anyone would ever read it (and even fewer would be interested), and so, once the mainstream media had indeed noticed the piece and ‘outed’ him in newspapers all over the world, he was horrified. ‘It was terrible,’ he would say of the moment when (just as they had done to Paul Eddington before him, only now even more aggressively) a swarm of journalists and camera crews descended upon the house that he shared with his partner Trevor Bentham, and started staring through the windows and shouting questions through the letterbox. ‘We had to hire four security guards to keep them away from the house.’22

  He would remain mystified and ‘frightened’ by the intensity of the interest, and traumatised by the intrusion into his and Bentham’s quiet private life. ‘We had always treated the press with great courtesy,’ he said, ‘always made a point of going together to public functions. They had cabinets full of pictures of the two of us arriving at BAFTA, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards, which we’ve done through the years. They knew perfectly well there wasn’t a story. There wasn’t a sudden revelation.’23 He resented the ‘outing’ so much because, he stressed, he had never really been ‘in’ – he had just been private.

  Bentham was by his side when he sat in the audience at the Academy Awards. He did not win – Tom Hanks did for Forrest Gump – but, relishing the opportunity to lose himself for a few hours in the sheer unreality of such an exotic event, he enjoyed the occasion greatly. Bentham then accompanied him to Cannes, where, once again, Hawthorne was nominated for an award. He lost out, once again – this time to Jonathan Pryce for Carrington – but he was cheered and applauded so enthusiastically that, as he later admitted, he ‘broke down a bit’.24

  Upon the couple’s return to England, however, they still feared that people ‘would be looking at us with disgust and that our lives had been irrevocably changed’.25 Hawthorne therefore rather dreaded having to appear so soon afterwards onstage at the Shaftesbury Theatre in order to present an Olivier Award, and was thus both surprised and deeply touched by the warmth of the welcome he received from the audience. It was the same wherever he and Bentham went in the weeks and months that followed: there was only sympathy, affection and respect. The ‘fuss’, as he put it, was over.26

  A much happier time was had on New Year’s Day in 1999, when it was announced that he was to be knighted for services to theatre, film and television. A KBE, added to a CBE, might not have caused much excitement inside Whitehall, where it takes a more exclusive-sounding set of initials to set the pulse racing (WOOLLEY: ‘Of course, in the Service, CMG stands for “Call Me God”. And KCMG for “Kindly Call Me God”.’ HACKER: ‘What does GCMG stand for?’ WOOLLEY: ‘“God Calls Me God’”27), and it still left him missing Sir Humphrey’s flashy GCB, but he was, nonetheless, extremely flattered and touched to accept the honour. Emerging from the ceremony at Buckingham Palace that was held later that year, he smiled as he told reporters, ‘The gentlemen in front and behind me were senior civil servants, so I was in good company.’28

  He died on Boxing Day in 2001, aged seventy-two, from a heart attack. He had been in very poor health for the previous eighteen months, having first been diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism before it was discovered that he also had pancreatic cancer. His autobiography, entitled Straight Face, would be published early the following year.

  Trevor Bentham, who was with him when he died, would later write of the man he loved: ‘To have known him was a joy. To have shared my life with him was exhilarating. I hope that there is an afterlife so he will have been aware of the shock caused by his death and the massive love that came – still comes – to act as comfort for the sadly missing years.’29

  There was now only one point left of the great comedy triangle: Derek Fowlds was left to mourn his two friends. Interviewed shortly after the news of Paul Eddington’s death had been announced, he said: ‘He was a great actor and he has shown such strength and courage over the last ten years. He was greatly loved.’30 Following the memorial service for Nigel Hawthorne, he commented: ‘We worked together for eight years and remained very close. He was very supportive. He always made me laugh. We never had a cross word. It was just a joy to be with him. I will miss him very much.’31

  Fowlds, like the others, had remained busy after Yes, Prime Minister. He made one-off appearances in ITV’s Inspector Morse in 1988,32 Boon in 1990,33 Van der Valk in 199134 and The Darling Buds of May in 199235; essayed the role of Oliver Davidson, a grey man from the Home Office, in ITV’s 1989 six-part Cold War drama Rules of Engagement; played a drably sinister MI6 officer called Crombie in the BBC’s 1990 six-part political thriller Die Kinder; and also appeared as the errant husband John Gutteridge in ITV’s 1992 eight-part domestic drama Firm Friends.

  His most significant and long-lasting success, however, came when he played Oscar Blaketon, a curmudgeonly police sergeant turned pub owner, in the ITV period police drama series Heartbeat for its entire run from 1992 to 2010. ‘When I finished Yes, Prime Minister,’ he would later reflect with great amusement, ‘I was just fifty. But I was still playing Bernard as thirty-six. And when I started Heartbeat, my son, Jeremy, said to me, “Dad, you’ve gone from juvenile to geriatric overnight!”’36 A self-consciously cosy and nostalgic show, it would still contrive to offer him a new challenge as an actor (‘It was such a different role from Bernard, and a very different character from me, and Blaketon was Northern and I’m from the South, so it was a bit of a stretch in the beginning’37), and it also ensured that his amiable face would remain a fixture on British television.

  There were still occasions during this period when his old sitcom would intrude into view. In 1997, for example, he gleefully reprised the role of Bernard Woolley to read Antony Jay’s How to Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen’s Guide to Beating Officialdom for BBC Radio 4. He was also very willing to recall the many happy days that he’d spent working with Eddington and Hawthorne whenever there was a new attempt to commemorate and celebrate the show. ‘It’s always so nice to remember being with them,’ he would say.38

  That was the thing about Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. The show had ended, but it had never gone away.

  There was, for example, the merchandise. In 1989, Jonathan Lynn’s series of ‘Jim Hacker diaries’ was repackaged in two large volumes as The Complete Yes Minister and The Complete Yes, Prime Minister. Proving to be phenomenally popular with readers and reviewers alike, they would be lodged in the top-ten bestseller lists for more than a hundred weeks, and were translated into numerous other languages. (In 2013, as Li Keqiang became the new Premier of China, it would be revealed that, during the early 1990s, his wife, Cheng Hong, had translated the Yes Minister books (as ) into Mandarin. It was said that he was studying the volumes to prepare himself for dealing with his country’s own obstructive civil servants.39)

  Along with the books came the home videos (which started intermittently in the mid-1980s but were relaunch
ed early on at the start of the next decade), and then later the DVDs (starting in 2001), and both radio series were released on CD (in 2002). There was even an early computer game (developed by Oxford Digital Enterprises and published by Mosaic for the ZX Spectrum platform) in 1987.40

  There were also more repeats of the actual show from the mid-1990s onwards, thanks to the emergence of cable and satellite channels in the UK. The TV nostalgia channel UK Gold ensured that both Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister would remain in circulation not only for those who had seen them the first time round, but also for a succession of new generations of viewers.41

  All of this helped to maintain the interest of the fans, but there was also something else, something quite profound, going on during this period. The programme had become part of the culture of the country, a common frame of reference for anyone who wanted to address and make sense of the theory and practice of government and politics.

  In broadcasting terms, it provided a template, and an expectation, that could and would be used to inspire a new wave of accessible political satire. Ranging from the frenzied knockabout comedy of Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s The New Statesman (1987–94), which featured Rik Mayall as the ruthless right-wing Tory MP Alan B’Stard, to Michael Dobbs and Andrew Davies’ gloriously mischievous thriller House of Cards (1990–5), which featured Ian Richardson as the sinuously devious Chief Whip Francis Urquhart, the impact of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister would continue to be felt throughout the rest of the century and into the next.

  This was by no means limited to domestic popular culture. The original series were still being shown in more than eighty countries, encouraging more and more writers, performers and producers that it was both possible and desirable to make political ideas, arguments and insights engaging and entertaining for a broad audience.

  Several countries were encouraged enough to attempt to make their own versions of the sitcom to suit their own systems. An American version, entitled All in Favor, was put into production in 1987 only to collapse when the studio lost its nerve about how commercially competitive it might be. ‘It’s so long ago that I can hardly remember it,’ Jonathan Lynn would later say, ‘but I wrote a pilot script. I consulted Tony, of course.’42 It was not a happy experience: ‘They wanted to make it a family show. They wanted to make it like, you know, Cosby in the White House.’43 A number of other countries, however, were much more positive and brought their own adaptations to the screen.