The latter agrees but finds a rival sleuth in Evadne Mount, one of the house guests and a celebrated author of whodunits in her own right. When the Chief Inspector and Mount start their preliminary investigation of the crime, it soon turns out that each of the guests has a skeleton in the cupboard.
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The film's reputation has risen in recent years. An article in The Scotsman praised the film saying: > There is sex, there is violence, there is nudity and there is one of the > most shocking killings ever portrayed in a mainstream movie. An informer, > who has reported illicit whisky trafficking, is bound hand and foot, with > cork floats under his armpits and a fish tied to his cap. He is then sent > bobbing out to sea, to await a passing seabird that will spot the fish and > dive hundreds of feet to pierce fish, cap and skull in a single fatal > movement....The Brothers is... the skeleton in the cupboard no-one talks > about.
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Sir Humphrey won a "classical scholarship" at Winchester College before reading Classics at Baillie College, University of Oxford (clearly based on Balliol College, Oxford: Humphrey is frequently seen wearing a Balliol College tie) where he got a First. After National Service in the Army Education Corps he entered the Civil Service. From 1950 to 1956 he was successively the Regional Contracts Officer, an assistant principal in the Scottish Office, on secondment from the War Office (where he was responsible for a serious mistake that was revealed in "The Skeleton in the Cupboard"). In 1964, he was brought into the newly formed Department of Administrative Affairs, where he worked until his appointment as Cabinet Secretary.
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He begins the sentence, "But surely, in a democracy..." and is immediately dismissed by an exasperated Sir Humphrey. In "A Victory for Democracy", Bernard is genuinely outraged when he learns that the Foreign Office is conducting its own policy with little regard for the Prime Minister's wishes. On the other hand, we frequently see Bernard forced to hide something, at which point he tries to mimic Sir Humphrey's distinctive style of confusing never-ending sentences in order to play for time with the Minister. An example of him attempting to "walk the tightrope" in this way occurs in "The Skeleton in the Cupboard", when he has to conceal a betrayed confidence from Hacker.
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In the past they were often used as stereotypical figures in British comedy, with a tea lady usually portrayed as a harassed, overweight, middle aged woman in a uniform and cap, or as a very pretty recipient of all sorts of lewd comments from the workforce, as in the film Carry On at Your Convenience (1971). In Australia, a sitcom called The Tea Ladies aired in 1978. Tea ladies in general were a frequent target of illusory "cuts" and "economies" in Yes Minister, frequently conjured up by Nigel Hawthorne's character Sir Humphrey Appleby, but a tea lady was only once seen onscreen during the whole five-series run of the show, sharing a lift with Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby in the episode "The Skeleton in the Cupboard" (1982).
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Initially, he naively sees his job as the disinterested implementation of the Minister's policies, but he gradually finds that this conflicts with his institutional duty to the department, and sometimes (since Sir Humphrey is responsible for formally assessing Woolley's performance) his own potential career development. Consequently, another recurring scenario is one where Bernard must "walk the tightrope" — that is, balance his two conflicting duties by resorting to elaborate verbosity (much like Sir Humphrey) so that he can avoid the appearance of being disloyal to one, in favour of the other. For example, in "The Skeleton in the Cupboard", he sees the importance of notifying Sir Humphrey that Hacker has left his office, whilst still assisting Hacker in his aims. Such is Bernard's success in performing this balancing act, that after the third series, following Sir Humphrey's promotion to Cabinet Secretary, when Hacker becomes Prime Minister he requests that Bernard continue as his Principal Private Secretary, reasserting the perception that he is a "high flier".
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