The Challenge was a series III episode of Yes Minister (1982), in which Jim Hacker’s Department of Administrative Affairs assumes general oversight of local authorities. As Ludovic Kennedy (playing himself as BBC interviewer) points out, Hacker is now ‘Mr Townhall as well as Mr Whitehall’.
Echoing the Thatcher government’s zeal to reform the local government sector, Hacker is determined to make councils more efficient and to curb their extravagance. The Cabinet Secretary and Sir Humphrey are not so keen, worried that any reforms, such as direct financial accountability for the success or failure of council projects, could be extended to the civil service as a whole.
To deflect his attention, Jim Hacker is urged to tackle the largely ridiculed and tricky business of civil defence, in particular the provision of public fall-out shelters by local authorities, and is sent to confront the leader of the London Borough of Thames Marsh, Ben Stanley, over their anti-nuclear activism and budget blowouts. Stanley was reportedly based on Ken Livingstone, leader of the ill-fated Greater London Council.
There are a couple of interesting cameos, aside from Ludovic Kennedy, and Moray Watson as a BBC controller. Ian Lavender (Private Pike from Dad’s Army) plays Dr Cartwright, a departmental economics boffin doomed to spend his entire career as a middling undersecretary. “I fear I shall rise no higher,” he explained sadly to Jim Hacker, “Alas, I’m an expert.”
Ben Stanley, the unilateralist leader of Thames Marsh Council is played by Doug Fisher (Man About the House), and is unimpressed by Cartwright’s suggestions on how to save ratepayers' money, which include closing the feminist drama centre, abandoning plans for a leisure centre featuring an artificial ski slope and jacuzzi, closing the gay bereavement centre, selling the Mayor’s second Daimler, and cancelling a councillors’ fact-finding junket to the Caribbean.
The episode lampoons the council’s hypocrisy in taking an anti-nuclear stance while providing fall-out shelter space solely for the leader and some senior councillors. Paul Eddington himself (Jim Hacker) was a Quaker pacifist, and in a later interview recalled that he was very uncomfortable with the way the writers (Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn) had ridiculed the anti-nuclear issue and peace activism, and that they had allowed their own political bias to influence the story. Eddington objected, and some moderating changes were made to the final script.
