Former Prime Minister’s favourite comedy is about to return. | UK | News

Cancel culture is the curse of comedy. These days it sometimes seems as if a comedian only has to sneeze in the wrong direction to be cast out into the outer darkness of supermarket openings, daytime TV shows and shopping channels. 

But speaking exclusively to the Express, the popular, veteran comic Griff Rhys Jones is delighted to announce that cancellation has never been a problem for him.

The 72-year-old comedian and actor, who has starred in such classics shows as Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas, Smith and Jones, says he’s never been troubled by the bane of cancel culture. “Funnily enough, I haven’t,” he muses.

“People always say to me when I’m on tour, ‘It must be terrible for you going out on the road. How does the idea of being cancelled and the woke culture and all that affect you? How much do you have to look out for what you say?’

“And I have to reply, ‘Well, it doesn’t affect me at all’. I walk out on stage and usually make jokes about the age of the audience because my auditorium is full of people who are in their 70s. Nothing I say causes them any perplexity of any kind whatsoever!”

The father-of-two, who has been happily married to wife Jo Jones for 46 years, continues by expressing gratitude that he is now past the age where cancellation is a clear and present danger.

Never more than a minute away from the next winning laugh, he continues: “I’m rather relieved that my children are 38 and 40 now, and don’t sit around the kitchen table upbraiding their poor father. That does happen to friends of mine with younger children.

“But this is one of the things we passed through as a family and we just came out the other end. At the age of 25, my children returned to the breakfast table and said, ‘We need some money, we need somewhere to live’. Those were the only real problems the older generation had to face!”

Sadly, the same cannot be said of the latest character Griff is playing, who is very much in the sights of woke warriors. The actor is taking the role of Jim Hacker, the hapless former premier, in a new West End play, I’m Sorry, Prime Minister.

It is based on the BBC’s hugely successful satirical sitcoms, Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which ran for eight years and picked up numerous Baftas during the 1980s. It was the favourite television programme of politicians of all stripes, despite the jokes often being made at their expense.

Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was even a fan. She enthused that Yes, Prime Minister’s, “clearly-observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy”. Such was Mrs Thatcher’s love for the sitcom, she even performed a sketch in public with the show’s two stars, Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, which she was said to have written herself.

As in the sitcom, the premise of the play is that the slow-witted ex-Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Griff) is constantly being outfoxed by his far wilier former civil servant, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Clive Francis). The humour is set to be sharp as ever as it’s written and directed by Jonathan Lynn, who co-wrote the TV series with the late Sir Antony Jay.

We join Jim, who is older, but definitely not wiser, in the rarefied universe of Oxbridge where he is still completely bemused by the real world. Looking forward to a peaceful retirement from government as the Master of Hacker College, Oxford, Jim instead ends up threatened with the ultimate modern disaster: cancellation.

The panicky former premier calls on the help of Sir Humphrey. As always, the ex-Whitehall mandarin takes great delight in bamboozling Jim with his love of bureaucracy, hatred of change, obscure Latin phrases, and wilful obstruction.

The one-time civil servant is renowned for tricksy phrases such as “Statistics can be used to prove anything, even the truth.”

Can Jim outwit the revolting students, the Fellows, and reality itself? Or is it at last time for him to be told: “I’m Sorry, Prime Minister…”?

“He’s in trouble because of things he said,” explains Griff of how Jim has got himself into such a characteristic pickle. “His cancellation is the consequence of a silly joke that he made when he was invited to give a keynote speech at a conference. God knows what the speech was about – we don’t ever get to hear it.

“He happened to say something in a lift backstage. This was passed on, and as a result of that, he was no-platformed.”

Things go from bad to worse for Jim. “At one point, he’s taken to task for the British colonisation of India,” says Griff. He says, ‘That was nothing to do with me. That was 150 years ago!’

“But history is now something that is morally alive. There’s no objectivity in studying history anymore, and I think poor Jim’s suffering from that. The whole story here is the old guard finding themselves having to defend themselves against a new guard.”

It’s a highly topical theme. Griff thinks some people are far too swift to troll others for perceived politically-incorrect remarks. These pile-ons take on a life of their own and can very rapidly become extremely vindictive.

The actor believes that we should all be more forgiving of each other’s blunders. After all, it is human to err. “I am aware that these rows can suddenly and furiously take off,” he observes. “But I think people are too quick to jump on other people’s lapses.

“As Jim says towards the end of this play: ‘It doesn’t matter who we are. We can all make mistakes, and those mistakes can become far, far bigger than they need to be’.”

Such misunderstandings often stem from the generation gulf believes Griff. “The problem with the world at the moment is that the worst moral sin you can have is to fail to accept somebody’s selfishness, to accept their identity or the way they feel,” he says. “That’s the new world that I think us oldies find difficult to take in.

“My generation all came from the world of hard knocks – that’s what school was all about. But the thing about young people today is they have a very strong sense of right and wrong. They are all about moral probity.” That creates a trap for Jim that he inevitably falls into.

Another very germane subject that I’m Sorry, Prime Minister tackles is ageism. “Jim is about the same age as Joe Biden, but from his point of view, there’s no particular reason for him to be sidelined.

“The point of the play is that Jim is past his prime. He’s finished, but he’s still trying to hang on as master of the college. He doesn’t want to be told that he’s not worthwhile anymore because he’s reached a certain age. We have a thing in this country that at a particular point, you’re past it.”

Unfortunately, Jim has not got that memo. “He really has to get it into his head that he’s done-for because there comes a time, especially in the cut and thrust of British politics, when you’re no longer worthy of note,” says Griff.

The original series remains very relevant, conjuring up a timeless political realm in which cunning civil servants run rings round less intellectually nimble ministers. “Jonathan and Antony were writing about the inertia that surrounds politics and the difficulty of getting things done.”

Some things never change. Look at the recent government U-turn over ID cards.

“You know that somewhere in Whitehall there was a moment when senior civil servants said, ‘I’m sorry, Sir Keir, but you would have to be very courageous indeed to bring this in because we simply don’t have the processes, the money or the physical resources to police it’,” muses Griff. “And so, the Prime Minister had to go back and reverse the policy.”

The series also nailed the British fixation with bureaucracy. I mean, have you ever tried to fill in a tax form? Griff reflects that we have tried unsuccessfully to move away from our obsession with red tape. “There was lots of talk about getting away from Brussels and all that EU bureaucracy.

“But we ought to be honest and say, have we actually done that? Isn’t it time we recognized that we are an incredibly bureaucratic nation? We are addicted to bureaucracy.”

He believes that’s what is also great about Yes Minister. “It’s not like the West Wing, which is about getting things done and people going through emotional crises. Yes Minister is about stasis. It’s about keeping things exactly the same. At one point in the play, Jim says to Humphey, ‘You dedicated your career to the idea of nothing changing, didn’t you?’

“It’s the perfect recipe for a comedy because the characters start in one place and finish in exactly the same place.”

The one element that has made Jim’s life infinitely more difficult since the heyday of Yes Minister is social media. Griff is hopeful that its power might be waning, though. 

“We must not overrate the importance of social media,” he begins. “That will fade because gradually people are recognising that on platforms like X, there is so much froth. Froth froths up, and there’s a huge fuss around it. 

“That’s good for the people who live on social media. They like there to be a froth, and they like it to upset people. But we need to be careful about taking it too seriously to the extent of allowing it to ruin people’s lives or stop things happening.

“If I were to make a prediction, it’s that we’re learning that the internet can be a false god.” 

But, he adds with that inimitable chuckle, “I hope I’m not wading into trouble here. I’m not here to make the front pages with, ‘Griff Rhys Jones says this’. I’m just an old man who wants an easy ride!”

As Jim might ask: will Griff manage to steer clear of cancellation and remain one of our best-loved comedians? Yes, Minister.