For Britons interested in politics, 25 February 1980 was a great night in. BBC One had a Panorama on the faltering White House bid of former film star Ronald Reagan, followed by a Nine O’Clock News bulletin with the latest on a gathering Tory party rebellion against Margaret Thatcher. And, opposite the news, BBC Two showed the first ever episode of the sitcom Yes Minister, about a weak cabinet minister, Jim Hacker, who is the puppet of his chief civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Previews were lukewarm, mainly because the BBC had curiously not shown the programme to the press, possibly due to the Corporation’s historic and continuing terror of anything touching on the government. Most previewers felt that Paul Eddington as the politician and Nigel Hawthorne playing the permanent secretary were the main reasons to tune in. The first overnight review, in the Guardian, found the show “not the sharpest” but felt it “deserved nursing”. A few episodes in, the Observer noted that the comedy was causing “quite a stir” but gave a “false impression of the civil service”.
All the politicians in that TV evening defied expectations. Reagan served two full presidential terms, Thatcher stayed in power for another decade. And now, 43 years later, the Hacker-Appleby story has climaxed – on stage, at the Barn theatre in Cirencester.
The play I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember is subtitled “The Final Chapter”. The first of the scripts to be written by Jonathan Lynn alone – after the death in 2016 of co-creator Antony Jay, to whose memory the show is dedicated – this is the fifth phase in the franchise. Previously, there were 23 episodes of Yes Minister (1980-84) and 16 of Yes, Prime Minister (1986-88). For a 2010 stage play that spun off into a TV series on Gold, the late Eddington and Hawthorne were replaced by David Haig and Henry Goodman respectively.
For the stage finale, Christopher Bianchi, with poignant nods to Eddington’s mannerisms, is Hacker, with Clive Francis as an Appleby much less smoothly urbane than Hawthorne, although that may be due to retirement and time. Based on their inferred ages in 1980, the two main characters would now be in sight of a telegram from King Charles, but Lynn has wound them back to their mid-80s. Lord Hacker is Master of an Oxford College bestowed in his name. During an attempt to take away his “lifetime” post and tied accommodation – after “inappropriate” comments secretly recorded at a college dinner – he summons Sir Humphrey, who also has intriguing troubles, to resist the expulsion. Their traditionalist opinions are gently moderated by Sophie, a young woman of colour, who as a Hacker graduate unemployed and struggling with the cost of living becomes their carer.
It’s curious to be watching a world premiere where the audience – mainly of an age to have seen the 1980 debut – is so familiar with characterisation and catchphrases. Fans know what Sir Humphrey’s last line to Hacker must be, but there is satisfaction when it lands. We also expect at least one Appleby tongue-twisting and self-contradicting monologue, although a tension hangs, of which Lynn’s direction makes good use, about how many of these an older actor/character might reasonably deliver. Openly invoking King Lear (each man has a “thankless child”), the play is frank about mental and bodily degradations.
In each iteration across five decades, the franchise has been an argument about where political power really resides. Lynn and Jay initially suggested that democracy delivers transitory dupes who are ruled by a permanent civil service. In actual politics at the time, Margaret Thatcher was anything but the puppet of her Humphrey-equivalent Sir Robert Armstrong, frequently defying him. (Coincidentally one such dispute – the knighting of Jimmy Savile – is the subject of episode three of the BBC One drama, The Reckoning.) In this version, Sir Humphrey concludes that “all power is an illusion”, which is suitably Lear-like, but ignores the fact that those whom the play calls “this current lot” (delivering five Hacker-like mediocrities in a row) have hugely and ruinously affected many lives.
The most durable TV political fictions, though, tend to be alternative realities: The West Wing dramatised a super-liberal super-bright Democrat president during the actual administrations of an opposite Republican, George W Bush. The Thick of It was unusual in brutally satirising New Labour during its supremacy.
The original TV Yes Minister and its spin-off made a point of never identifying Hacker’s party, reassuringly for the bias-terrified BBC. However, all five versions of the story have run under Conservative-led governments and, in this epilogue, Lynn seems finally to out the clueless Hacker as a Conservative, having apparently been responsible for Brexit, austerity, university fees, and Russian infiltration. This enjoyable and touching play is most for Hacker-Appleby completists but honours a magnificent comic project.
• I’m Sorry Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember is at the Barn, Cirencester, until 4 November
