Tuesday 4 November 2014

Yes Minister - a very courageous decision

This is a great book - as well researched as the TV programme it covers.

Yes Minister was one of the truly great BBC sitcoms - it was a worthy contestant for best sitcom, where it came 6th.  It works on TV on radio, in the magnificent books, and also as recent events show, as a stage show.  Few comedies can cope so well with different mediums.

I think the thing that stops Yes Minister being the funniest is that it is bound by reality and is perhaps too serious.

What is interesting is that not only was a lot of the comedy based on real events, even comedy the writers thought they had invented turned out to have real life counterparts !

One strange thing highlighted is the episode where the Health Minister proposed to clamp down on smoking with a variety of suggestions that seemed funny then but which pretty much became Government policy 20 years later.

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