Much has changed in the 23 years since the final episode of classic BBC comedy Yes, Prime Minister was broadcast.

The Sir Humphrey Applebys may still have their place in the civil service, but the job of the Prime Minister has become much more presidential, with special advisors taking the place of the cabinet secretary in the top man’s inner circle, and the media playing a much more central role.

These are changes which original Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minster writers Jonathan Lynn and Sir Antony Jay have acknowledged in this stage version of the comedy, which launches a new national tour at the Theatre Royal Brighton.

Speaking when the play took its first bow as part of the Chichester Festival Theatre’s 2010 season, co-writer and director Lynn told The Guide that little was different in real terms when it came to the issues politicians were discussing.

“The issues in 1956 were the same as those in 1986, and will be the issues in 2016,” he said.

“Nothing changes. We stopped writing Yes Minister when we felt we had set out all we had to say about being a cabinet minister. When we were offered the chance to write Yes, Prime Minister we felt we could get into home and foreign affairs and defence – things that we hadn’t tackled before.”

Although this play was written in September 2009, the topics it covers are still relevant and under discussion in Parliament today – from the environment to illegal immigration.

In fact, Jay and Lynn proved to be quite adept fortune tellers, predicting an unstable coalition government and the unrest in Greece following the EU bail-out.

When the story opens Prime Minister Jim Hacker is struggling to keep his head above water, dealing with a country in the middle of an economic meltdown, and his own precarious political situation.

He is hosting a major conference in Chequers with representatives of the oil-rich country Kumranistan, about a new pipeline which could supply the whole of Europe.

Unfortunately a late-night request from one of the diplomats throws a spanner in the works, and leaves the beleaguered Prime Minister with a very difficult moral dilemma.

While certain elements of the original show are still retained – Appleby’s baffling soliloquies, which will be delivered by Simon Williams on this tour, and private secretary Bernard’s pedantry being two obvious examples – much else has changed.

The politics are now harder and dirtier, with the language going post-watershed – perhaps reflecting the rumours of the rougher backrooms in Gordon Brown’s final months.

“Antony and Jonathan have created a Yes, Prime Minister for the 21st century,” says Eastbourne-based Wallander star Richard McCabe, who is taking on the role of the PM.

“A lot of audiences will go with an expectation of something comfortable and cosy from the 1980s, but they get taken in a new direction.”

Chequers now has 24-hour news feeds, with all the principal characters sporting Blackberrys. Say-nothing-soundbites are the order of the day, as journalists constantly plague the Prime Minister’s office.

And there is a new character wedged between the Prime Minister and public school-educated civil service dinosaurs Sir Humphrey and private secretary Bernard Woolley – special policy advisor Claire Sutton.

“There never was an equivalent in the old series,” says McCabe. “Now it is de rigeur to have a special advisor, and I think that has changed things enormously.”

With the addition of Claire the gentle old boys club has changed, with the principals seeming much more desperate, and willing to do the unthinkable to avoid losing face, as Sir Humphry gets pushed further into the background.

“It’s so hard for politicians,” says McCabe. “They can’t put a foot wrong. The expectations are quite unreasonable – they can’t win.

“Whatever way they go, journalists will find a way to pick a hole in what they are doing.

“It’s a great comic situation. Hacker is put under such pressure for his political life. He is faced with a moral dilemma, and he entertains the notion that he might actually go through with it, although his own personal moral compass won’t let him.”

Watching David Haig play Hacker on the verge of a nervous breakdown on the West End stage earlier this year, it was hard to see a line between Paul Eddington’s original portrayal of the wannabe Churchillian Prime Minister and this new 2011 version.

But McCabe says he could hear Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne’s Appleby speaking the lines when he read the original script.

“It was full of their phrasing,” he says. “They were the characters, and Jonathan and Antony wrote for them.

“I’m very keen to make it my own. When I was asked to do it, I was told they didn’t want a carbon copy of Haig, they wanted me to find my own way. I am approaching it by looking at the whole structure of the piece, and where Hacker is starting to lose it.

“One minute he’s shouting and screaming, the next minute he’s giving a television interview and he’s completely in control.”

There are other similarities with the original television scripts too.

“A feature of the programme, and something I always loved, was that the show never talked down to its audience,” says McCabe. “It always assumed a certain amount of prior knowledge, which is true in the script of this play.”

With everything seeming so current on the television series there was often speculation about whether the accuracy of what Lynn and Jay were writing about was down to inside sources.

“We currently speak to some sources who are up to date with what is going on,” admits Lynn. “I’m not going to give a more specific answer than that...”

Although Yes, Prime Minister has proved to be a hit in the West End, Lynn has no plans to continue the story with a new cast on television.

“I think it is highly unlikely that this will continue,” he says. “I can’t see us doing this again. I think times have changed.

What is exciting for us is that this is a new approach and a new venture.”

He admits to being a fan of what many media commentators have described as the Yes Minister for the present age – The Thick Of It.

“It’s a very funny show,” he says. “It does something quite different from what we did. Peter Capaldi is hilarious, and I think Armando Ianucci is a very interesting writer.”

Despite it now being 30 years since the first series of Yes Minister was broadcast, Lynn and Jay still have a healthy working relationship, even though they have admitted in interviews that they come from different sides of the political divide.

“Our relationship is extraordinarily agreeable,” says Lynn. “We’ve not had a cross word in the 30 or so years we have been working together.

“We tend to see the same problems.”

As with the Yes, Prime Minister series, Hacker has not been given a specific political party to lead, cutting any political affiliations or existing manifesto pledges.

“There is nothing party political about Jim,” says Lynn. “He is a centrist politician – he could have been Roy Hattersley or Jim Prior, or perhaps he could be David Milliband or Ken Clarke today.

“We aren’t writing about politicians, we are writing about government.

“Nothing gets resolved in Parliament.

It is just theatre. Everything that gets resolved is done in Whitehall.

“Parliament is just the play that gets put on at the end, after several months of rehearsal.”

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