Why 'Yes Minister' is as true as ever

Yes, Minister, the classic BBC comedy series, has just been sold to the Ukraine. Proof, says its co-creator Antony Jay, that incompetent politicians are something the whole world can relate to. -------------

When Jonathan Lynn and I started writing Yes, Minister back at the end of the 1970s, we had no idea whether the television audience would find it funny. We did, however, think they might be interested in a series that took them behind the scenes of government – there had never been a TV comedy series set in Whitehall. So from the very first episode we tried to make sure that all the details were as authentic as we could make them; obviously we included lots of things that never happened, but nothing that couldn’t happen. Our hope was that even if people didn’t laugh, they would still be interested enough to switch on again next week. This brought an unexpected benefit. We discovered that the further you delved into the realities of government, the funnier it all became. Who could invent a plot in which a schizophrenic clambered over the walls of Buckingham Palace, climbed into the Queen’s bedroom, and cadged a cigarette off her? Impossible – until Michael Fagan did exactly that in 1982. And even when it turned out that the British television audience got the joke, we didn’t expect it to go any further. Well, possibly to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who had similar political systems, but that was about it. Except that it wasn’t. In the end, 80 different countries took it, some such as Holland and India translating the scripts and producing their own versions. We even found, from Peter Ustinov, that Samizdat copies were circulating rapidly (and illegally) in Soviet Russia.

"Two kinds of government chair correspond with the two kinds of minister: one sort folds up instantly and the other sort goes round and round in circles."

"'The matter is under consideration' means we have lost the file. 'The matter is under active consideration' means we are trying to find the file."

"Asking a town hall to slim down its staff is like asking an alcoholic to blow up a distillery."

"Politicians must be allowed to panic. They need activity. It is their substitute for achievement."

"There has to be a nuclear bunker in Whitehall. Government doesn't stop merely because the country has been destroyed. Annihilation is bad enough. Without anarchy to make it even worse."

"The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets, it is to protect officials."

"People do not want to know how welfare money has actually been spent. Nobody asks the priest what happen to the ritual offering after the ceremony."

"It is only totalitarian governments that suppress facts. In this country we simply take a democratic decision not to publish them."

"A good political speech is not one in which you can prove that the man is telling the truth; it is one where no one else can prove he is lying."

"All governments departments are lobbies for the pressure groups they deal with. The Department of Education lobbies the government on behalf of teachers, the Department of Health lobbies for the doctors and hospital unions, the Department of Energy lobbies for oil companies and so on. Each department of State is actually controlled by the people it is supposed to be controlling."

"Politician's logic:
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore we must do it."

"The Church of England is primarily a social organization not a religious one."

"An atheist clergyman could not continue to draw his stipend, so when they stop believing in God they call themselves 'modernists'."

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