A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  India was first to do so in 2001, followed by Turkey in 2004 and the Netherlands, Israel and Ukraine in 2009. Sweden, Portugal and Canada also bought the rights with the intention of developing their own versions.

  These bids to grow the sitcom in foreign soil would witness some intriguing ‘modifications’. The Indian manifestation, for example, which was called Ji, Mantriji, was produced in Delhi in collaboration with BBC Worldwide, and remained largely faithful to the original scripts, but they were still adapted in certain ways for Indian politics (and audiences), with references to Russia changed to Pakistan, football altered to cricket, badgers replaced by monkeys and the EEC changed to SAARC – the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Jim Hacker, meanwhile, was renamed Suryaprakash Singh (played by the well-known Indian actor Farooque Sheikh) and Sir Humphrey was now called Rajnath Mathur (played by Jayant Kripalani).

  The Dutch version took more liberties with the characters. Jim Hacker was renamed Karel Bijl, Sir Humphrey Appleby was transformed into a woman, while Bernard Woolley was made a Moroccan called Mohammed.

  Back in Britain, the sense that the sitcom had embedded itself in the popular consciousness was getting stronger rather than weaker. In 1989, for instance, it came as no surprise when it was reported that a stray black and white cat, who had wandered into Number Ten and been made ‘Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office’, had been christened ‘Humphrey’ in honour of the character in the show. The very triviality of the example only served to underline how natural such references now seemed. The show had acquired its own adjectival power: to say that something was ‘a Yes Minister situation’, or that a figure, phrase or stunt was ‘straight out of Yes, Prime Minister’, was sufficient to make perfect sense to the average viewer or voter.

  The start of a new century did nothing to diminish its reputation. If anything, the contrary was the case. In 2000, the British Film Institute’s prestigious poll to determine the nation’s one hundred best-ever television programmes placed Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister ninth.44 In 2004, a rather less rigorous BBC survey to find ‘Britain’s Best Sitcom’ had the show on the list at sixth.45 In both 2006 and 2010, MPs, unsurprisingly, voted the show the greatest political comedy of all time.46 In any discussion of a new political satire, the benchmark was invariably the same: ‘How good, or accurate, or believable is it compared with Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister?’

  One writer and broadcaster who was even more influenced than most by the sitcom was Armando Iannucci. By this time an accomplished satirist in his own right as the co-creator of the brilliant news and current affairs spoofs On the Hour (BBC Radio 4, 1991–2) and The Day Today (BBC2, 1994), he acted as the on-screen advocate of the show when the BBC held its 2004 ‘Best Sitcom’ poll.

  He argued at the time:

  Yes Minister made the driest subject possible – the minutiae of politics – into sparkling comedy. No sitcom has been so thoroughly researched – it used real Whitehall insider moles to spill the beans – and meant that (unlike Richard Curtis, for example) the writers were considered a threat to national security! Yes Minister was more than a sitcom, it was a crash course in Contemporary Political Studies – it opened the lid on the way the Government really operated. It remains the most quintessentially British of the British sitcoms – understatement, embarrassment, Masonic secrecy and respect for the rules all in evidence. It had the only sitcom title sequence – drawn by Gerald Scarfe – that was a genuine work of art. And, perhaps above all else, it is the lasting legacy of two of our greatest actors: Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne.47

  Iannucci would freely admit that it was actually due (at least in part) to the preparation he did for his advocacy of this sitcom – which involved watching every single episode all over again – that inspired him to create his own contemporary satire on British politics, The Thick of It. Launched in 2005 (initially on BBC Four and later transferring to BBC2), it differed from its predecessor by focusing on politics rather than government, and responded to the even more cynical climate of the time by adopting a colder, harsher tone as it explored the aimless tail-chasings of solipsistic politicians (the kind of callow creatures who go straight from school to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, and then become political researchers before getting elected as MPs) and their equally blinkered advisers, no longer able or interested in pursuing any grand projet, and so immersing themselves instead in a culture of micromanagement that too few of them have the intelligence to master let alone transcend.

  In place of a Jim Hacker, who had at least experienced something of the world before becoming an MP and continued to hang on, albeit limply, to something that resembled a hinterland, The Thick of It pictured spin-manipulated marionettes, not moral enough to know when they risked being immoral, evading words and meanings like the simulated agents bending away from the bullets in The Matrix. It was not life as Jim knew it, but the lineage, indisputably, was his.

  Iannucci then went on to do what American broadcasters had ultimately failed to do with All in Favor and brought some of the spirit of Yes Minister to Washington with his US sitcom Veep. First broadcast in 2012, it featured the very talented comedy actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, the Vice-President of the US. Strongly reminiscent of Jim Hacker’s first phase as a Minister, hindered more than helped by a coterie of officials and advisers, Meyer is vulnerable and weakly well meaning but also fiercely ambitious and quite willing to dirty her hands if she thinks it will keep her close, or preferably even closer, to power.

  Neither The Thick of It nor Veep would display any of the literary elegance and cultural complexity that were such key ingredients in Yes Minister, but the absence was more to do with social and cultural rather than artistic trends. The more elaborately educated administrative wing of government was not really the focus of either sitcom (and in that sense both of them actually harked back before Yes Minister to an earlier and simpler satirical tradition), and the crudity of thought and language on show over on the political side was only reflecting the change in the reality of the situation. In 1915, for example, the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan read Aeschylus as he lay wounded in the trenches; whereas in 1998, the recently elected Prime Minister Tony Blair read the modish sociologist Anthony Giddens as he sat back and relaxed in Number Ten. It has been a case of downwards and inwards for quite a while.

  Jim Hacker did tend to lapse into cod Churchillian when he was feeling unusually statesmanlike, but even in those days such eloquence (outside of Sir Humphrey’s Whitehall) seemed comically out of date. It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when The Thick of It’s Malcom Tucker moaned that a certain Minister was ‘about as much use as a marzipan dildo’,48 or when Veep’s VP responded to a proposal by saying, ‘I’d rather set fire to my vulva. So that’s a no’.49

  The mirror might have been bequeathed by Yes Minister. What it was now reflecting belonged to another time.

  The memory of the original home-grown shows, however, would never look like fading away. For Britain’s politicians, for example, it remained, regardless of how many supposed successors it spawned, the one external critique that kept intruding into their world.

  Year after year, the citations continued to come. In 1992, for instance: ‘The Sir Humphrey Applebys of every country in Europe have got together, and they say, “You cannot do that, Minister”’ (Tony Benn);50 in 1998: ‘Does my hon. Friend agree that Sir Humphrey Appleby is alive and well?’ (Richard Spring);51 in 2000: ‘The transcript of the interrogation reads like a script from Yes, Minister’ (Vince Cable);52 also in 2000: ‘As it might have been said in Yes, Prime Minister’, that is a very courageous decision by my right hon. Friend’ (John Major);53 in 2002: ‘That is Sir Humphrey-speak for a complete mess’ (George Osborne);54 in 2004: ‘Sir Humphrey does not always get things right’ (Peter Hain);55 in 2008: ‘In Yes Minister, nothing frightened the politician Jim Hacker more than when his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey, listened to his latest idea and descr
ibed it as “brave”’ (Michael Portillo);56 and in 2010: ‘Where was Sir Humphrey when I needed him?’ (Tony Blair).57

  The show’s veteran consultant, Bernard Donoughue, after being ennobled as Lord Donoughue of Ashton and appointed a Junior Minister in the 1997 Labour Government, would actually discern a more profound (and rather ironic) influence on the new generation of Ministers:

  These were young people who had grown up watching the show. And some of them came in, as a consequence, excessively primed, and were out to demonstrate their masculinity by not listening to their civil servants. And I think they went too far. Because they were young, inexperienced Ministers, and they hadn’t a clue what to do. So my view was that, in many cases, it would have been better if the civil servants had done it rather than them. But you could really hear them say this: ‘I’m not going to let Sir Humphrey run me!’ Yes Minister really had influenced them that much. For a whole generation, it had been their textbook on how to conduct government. But this crop of young Cabinet Ministers frightened me a bit. You could just tell they were thinking, ‘We don’t want to be Jim Hacker!’ And the point was they exaggerated the number of Sir Humphreys around. Because Sir Humphrey was brilliant – sometimes to pernicious ends, but he was brilliant. And when I came into Government I found that the number of brilliant top civil servants was sadly few. I would rather have had more Sir Humphreys!58

  There would also be many occasions when seasoned students of the sitcom would point out how some of its storylines still seemed to be acted out in real life. In 2001, for example, when the Conservative Party published its manifesto for the forthcoming General Election, it was evident that a commitment by the then leader William Hague (a self-confessed great fan of the show) to give parents ‘their first choice of school for their children’, had strong echoes of Jim Hacker’s ‘National Education Service’.59

  In the same decade, during the increasingly awkward and tense ‘partnership’ between the Chancellor Gordon Brown and his Prime Minister Tony Blair, following the apparent collapse of their infamous ‘Granita pact’,60 some commentators were equally quick to quote from the 1986 episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which Sir Humphrey seemed to anticipate just such an imbroglio: ‘The Chancellor will never forgive the Prime Minister for beating him to Number Ten, and the Prime Minister will never trust the Chancellor. After all, one never trusts anyone that one has deceived.’61

  Thus the sitcom never seemed to date. Current events kept underlining its continuing relevance.

  In 2012, the British Prime Minister David Cameron, busy trying to cope with the distinctly ‘Hackeresque’ situation of running a Coalition Government, acknowledged his own admiration for the sitcom. ‘You’ll be amazed to know that [when] I was a student in the 1980s, a student of Economics and Politics, I once had to write an essay on “How true to life is Yes Minister”,’ he told his Malaysian counterpart Najib Razak. ‘I think I wrote in the essay that it wasn’t that true to life. I can tell you, as Prime Minister, it is true to life.’62

  So much time had passed since the original shows had been screened, but the interest, affection and appetite for them were still there. People still watched the repeats, read the books and watched the DVDs. The famous lines and speeches kept on being quoted and recited. The stories continued being related to the present day.

  That seemed to be the sum of the sitcom’s fate in the twenty-first century. It was more than two decades since Yes, Prime Minister had ended, and, although it was still so loved and so keenly missed, no one, any more, expected it to come back in any way, shape or form. Everyone, as a consequence, was in for an extraordinary shock.

  PART FOUR

  The danger for modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily. The holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage us to do so. They are so ready to spare us all sorts of troubles, except those of obeying and paying!

  Benjamin Constant

  It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  13

  The Revival

  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