Russell Jones's Week Moment: 'Yes Minister' Remade as Reality TV, 'Kem Hacker' is the New Tory Leader
The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on Kemi Badenoch assuming the Jim Hacker role of 'an over-promoted, delusional, publicity-seeking bungler at eternal war with the civil service'
Remakes are the curse of our cautious, superficial age. Everything new is really just a slightly depressing, warmed-over rehash of something old.
The big musical news of the year is a reboot of Oasis, themselves a Slade tribute act who only stopped making albums when they ran out of Beatles songs to steal. The Office is currently being squeezed out into unwilling Australian living rooms in its third shiteration. The big upcoming movie is Gladiator II, which trailers present as a beat-by-beat remake of an original that was itself little more than a scriptless, zhuzhed-up reworking of Spartacus set in a plastic Colosseum.
In fact, 8 of the 10 highest-grossing films in the last year were remakes, reboots or sequels, but you have to take your hat off to anybody with the balls to touch one of Britain’s greatest cultural highlights: Yes Minister.
The spin on things this time is that it’s been remade as reality TV, with the plum role of Jim Hacker – an over-promoted, delusional, publicity-seeking bungler at eternal war with the civil service – being recast as a woman. She is embodied by newcomer Kemi Badenoch, exuding bombastic, vaudevillian swagger in the lead role of “Kem Hacker”.
Actors often imagine an entire backstory for their character or learn the necessary skills to fully embody them on stage and screen. Playing the cello. Skinning squirrels. Holding your breath for seven minutes. For Badenoch to fully embody Kem Hacker, she decided to commit the actual criminal offence of computer hacking. And, judging entirely from her warm and engaging performance, she seems to have imagined her character’s backstory was working as a dentist on the Death Star.
So let’s recap the story so far.
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