The classic British sitcom Yes, Minister has been shown in many countries around the world, but only two - India and Turkey - have purchased the rights to the format and made their own version. Now there's going to be a Dutch version. Public broadcasting organisation VPRO has awarded a contract to independent production company S&V Fiction to make an updated version, which will be called Sorry, Minister, reflecting Dutch public life in 2009.
Moroccan secretary
Inevitably there are going to be some changes. When the original was made in the UK, Margaret Thatcher had just become Britain's first woman prime minister, and government and the civil service were even more male-dominated than they are now. Devious civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby will be replaced by a woman in the Dutch version. The minister's principal private secretary will be re-cast as an assistant private secretary called Mohammed, who's Moroccan, in a bid to reflect the multi-ethnic character of Dutch public life.
Other smaller changes will be made to bring the characters into line with their real-life Dutch counterparts, but, according to Pita de Leeuw, head of production at VPRO's drama department, the show will retain the classic elements that made it such a successful sitcom - bureaucratic red tape, political deal-making and the closed ranks in the civil service. In some respects, bearing in mind the Dutch system of proportional representation and the fact that every government here is a coalition, there should be even more material for the scriptwriters than in the original.
Eleven episodes have been commissioned by VPRO. The quality of the scripts will obviously go a long way to determining how successful the programme is, but so will the casting, which hasn't yet been announced. The original series, and its follow-up Yes, Prime Minister, had the good fortune to feature three principal actors whose personal chemistry worked brilliantly. If the Dutch producers can find a trio like that, making the scripts work should be relatively easy.
Balkenende as Thatcher?
It will be interesting to see what plots the writers come up with. In the original British version, a former government minister acted as an advisor to make sure that the storylines remained credible. It turned out that some of the most outrageous episodes were based on events that had actually happened.
Unless the VPRO writers take a very different line from Sir Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, who wrote the original, Dutch politicians should not lose too much sleep about the prospect of being ridiculed. The humour was never vicious or aimed at any politician in particular, but was designed to make fun of the political system rather than individuals.
Prime minister Margaret Thatcher was such a fan of the Yes Minister series, that she and her press secretary Bernard Ingham co-wrote a sketch about a plan to abolish economists. In it she played herself, supported by actors Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne. It was performed in public at the National Viewers and Listeners Awards ceremony in 1984. Whether Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende ever writes or performs a similar role remains to be seen.
