The show is over 20 years old now, but surpisingly, it’s still not dated. All I can say was that this was a remarkable show, and the characters played off each other well. Nigel Hawthorne was wonderfully slimy as Sir Humphrey, Paul Eddington could pull off clueless idealism better than most other actors I’ve seen, and Derek Fowlds was great as the constantly harrassed Bernard.
So, is anyone else here a Hacker backer?
Aha - yes. Well, I suppose as long as politicians continue to be slimy types who need careful watching, the show will not date. I have not, of coursek, seen the show for ages, but recently re-read I have that is all the scripts for the first series. Very funny.
Perhaps we need an updated version - I am sure our current crop of politicos would provide sufficiently amusing materal.
Yes, Minister
I always thought it was a documentary.
A pity we lost the two stars.
Damn you Grim Reaper!
The Captain is correct, Eddington was great. He was also great as Jerry Ledbetter in The Good Life.
Warning: I am going to use the phrase “jump the shark”.
Great show, but I thought it jumped the shark when he became Prime Minister. Part of the premise was that Hacker was an ambitious but inneffectual political drone - the fact that even in an obscure, inconsequential government department like the Ministry for Administrative Affairs there was all this Machiavellian scheming going on was the whole joke. When he became PM the storylines had them fighting over things that actually mattered, and the show lost something of its point, IMO.
The TV show is brilliant, but the books are better. It would be great to have an American (Canadian) version, except of course it would be FUBARed.
“Yes, PM” had one of the most wonderful jokes I’ve ever heard about newspapers. You know the one I mean - it’s on this page: http://www.michaelmoser.org/yesminister.htm
And here’s a US version (almost as good): http://www.skrause.org/humor/whoreadswhat.shtml
I think it was on “Yes, PM” that this exchange took place:
LOL!
Yes, great show. I’ve got both of the books and like to browse through them once in a while. The amazing thing is that it actually contains good advice (presented in a cynical way) for politics!
That’s what set the show apart from other political comedies, IMHO. It was shot through with a certain realism, presented in a humorous way. Look at almost any episode, and you could easily believe that things like that actually happened. The books have footnotes that in some cases refer to actual events that apparently served as inspiration.
Yes Minister was a part of my bizzarre political education when I was a kid, along with Punch magazine. I think I knew more about the British government than I did about the Australian government when I was little. It was great watching reruns when I was actually old enough to get a few more of the jokes. The writing for the show was some of the best comedy writing I’ve seen on tv.
I got the two double videos of Yes, Prime Minister for Christmas. Excellent scripts, very funny. I was never quite as keen on the first few series’, although the opening episode (with all the secretaries) was a classic. Shame that two thirds of the leads are now dead.
I assume everyone knows about this site for us fans.
Delightful show; read the books, recorded it avidly on PBS. When I left my government job I bought up about five copies of each of the trade paperbacks and gave them to friends there. A few of the plots, such as the Cold War ones, are dated, but the majority hold up beautifully. The books are full of footnotes and anecdotes and ‘recollections by Sir Bernard Woolley’ (who rises to the same level Sir Humphrey did, eventually) and are worth getting even if you’ve already devoured the TV series. And I also read PUNCH at my college library around this time, and I think both things helped immeasurably with my education about the world. Of course, the point was that democracies are the same around the world. I would sometimes recast in my mind the whole series with an American setting and theater actors who would blow the parts away; but of course I trust few people in American TV to do it right, so I’d prefer it stayed in my head.
Something I loved is that they never wanted to tell us which party Hacker belonged to. Lynn said that in fact they were careful to monitor the scripts for something that would tilt him towards one party or another in 80’s Britian; the whole point was that politics behaved the same way for every politician no matter what they believed. That is so right.
RIP, Paul and Nigel. Your immortality is assured as one of the great comic duos of all time.
I love it. With Fawlty Towers and Blackadder, by far the best sitcom of all time.
There was great surprise by the shows’ creators about the sucess of the show in the US.
Let’s face, bureaucracy is pretty much the same wherever you go.
Who doesn’t like to make fun of politicians?