Bernard Wooley

Bernard Woolley is the newly appointed Principal Private Secretary to Jim Hacker, the minister he now serves. Young, Oxford-educated, and pedantically precise about grammar and protocol, he finds himself squeezed between his master's political instincts and Sir Humphrey Appleby's bureaucratic machinations, anxious to do the honest thing while keeping his career intact.

Bernard is the audience's foothold in a world of doublespeak, and Derek Fowlds plays his discomfort beautifully — the wincing pauses, the throat-clearing qualifications, the way loyalty to truth and loyalty to hierarchy visibly war on his face. His fussy corrections of language are jokes, but they're also a moral compass trying to function inside an amoral machine.