A Very Courageous Decision

by Graham McCann

  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 o
f ‘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:

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  No one knew that those computer models in the City were being given faulty information. Everyone assumed the mortgages were worth their face value.

  HACKER:

  But they were worth nothing! Why didn’t anyone know? Why didn’t you know?

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  [Sighs, humiliated] Everyone thought that everyone else understood what was going on and nobody wanted to admit they couldn’t make sense of it.

  HACKER:

  Why couldn’t they?

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  Because it didn’t make sense! Everybody thought that all the others knew, and there were some who knew, but the ones who didn’t know didn’t believe that the ones who did know knew.

  HACKER:

  Say that again?

  SIR HUMPHREY:

  Nobody wanted to rock the boat because everyone was making so much money!

  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