BiteBack Publishing

“Yes Minister was more than a sitcom, it was a crash course in Contemporary Political Studies” Armando Iannucci

A collection of the funniest sketches, anecdotes, interviews, lists of interesting facts, character and actor profiles, and personal recollections from the enduringly timeless series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister in one perfect small-format volume.

Yes Minister, together with its sequel, Yes Prime Minister is one of the most popular and critically successful British sit-coms of all time, largely due to its fascinatingly accurate observations of the sparring between Paul Eddington’s naïve senior minister, Jim Hacker, and Nigel Hawthorne’s infernally cunning Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby.

The series, originally broadcast in the early 1980s derives its humour from the eternal conflict between the interests of politicians and the interests of their civil servants and has coloured the way we look at politics today, and how politicians see themselves.

This brilliantly funny book includes lists of interesting and little-known facts about the series, Sir Humphrey’s finest obfuscations, Jim Hacker’s speeches, the service’s best acronyms, famous fans and their reflections, profiles and obituaries of the characters and the actors who played them, the Department for Administrative Affairs guide to using “creative inertia”, important dates, classic scenes, the entire legendary Margaret Thatcher sketch, and interviews with “those in the know”. This is the perfect Christmas gift for fans of great British comedy.