Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister: A Satire

A very significant form of satire, probably the most common type, is Political satire. While its first aim is to simply provide entertainment, mocking and poking fun at political figures, it rarely offers a constructive view in itself and just occasionally is used to influence the political process. Because it is the nature of satire to combine anger with humor, it can be profoundly disturbing and  leading to accusations of poor taste and of simply being not funny. The truth is that, just as all the other kinds of humor, satire is funny for those who understand it and share the knowledge of the object of the “satirical attack”.

It has always been easy to switch on the radio or television and find satirical sketches placed in TV shows such as Saturday night live, but to see an actual sitcom dedicated to this fine type of humor we had to wait until 1980.
 

Written by Sir Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, the classic Brit-com Yes, Minister[1] and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister[2] was first transmitted by BBC television and BBC Radio between 1980 and 1988 and was split in three series of seven 25-minutes-episodes for Yes, Minister and two series of eight 25-minutes-episodes for Yes, Prime Minister.

Set principally in the private office of a British government cabinet minister, in the fictional Department for Administrative Affairs in Whitehall, the series follows the career of The Rt Hon. Jim Hacker MP. His various struggles to formulate and enact a legislation or improve departmental changes are opposed by the will of the British Civil Service, in particular by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby. One of the funniest characters in the show is His Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley, who usually gets caught between the two[3].
 
Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Bernard, if the right people don’t have power, do you know what happens? The wrong people get it: politicians, councilors, ordinary voters!”
Bernard Woolley: “But aren’t they supposed to, in a democracy?”
Sir Humphrey Appleby: “This is a British democracy, Bernard!”
 
The show has been a huge critical and popular success in UK, receiving a large number of awards, including several BAFTAs (British Academy Television Awards), the most prestigious awards given in the British television industry. Ironically, the king of all British satirical shows of the 1980s and a spoof of the then government  was the favorite television program of the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher[4].

The writers were inspired by a variety of sources, including some from inside the government, as well as published material and contemporary news stories. This may explain why some situations that were conceived as fiction were later revealed to have real-life counterparts. The episode The Compassionate Society, for example, depicts a hospital with five hundred administrative staff but no doctors, nurses or patients. One of the writers, Jonathan Lynn, recalls that "after inventing this absurdity, we discovered there were six such hospitals, or very large empty wings of hospitals, exactly as we had described them in our episode."[5]

The episode entitled The Moral Dimension, in which Hacker and his staff engage in the scheme of secretly consuming alcohol on a trade mission to the fictional Islamic state of Qumran, was based on a real incident that took place in Pakistan. The incident involved the former PM James Callaghan and Bernard Donoughue, the latter of whom had informed Jay and Lynn about it. Jay recalls that Donoughue couldn’t tell him where, when and who was involved, but could tell him that the accident had actually happened. About the episode Jay said: “That's why it was so funny. We couldn't think up things as funny as the real things that had happened."[6]

In addition to all this media historian Andrew Crisell suggests that the show was in fact "enriched by the viewers' suspicion that what they were watching was unhealthily close to real life."[7] And they were damn right.

About the reaction of the audience, in a 2004 documentary, Armando Iannucci compared Yes Minister to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in how it has influenced the public's view of the Government[1]. Lynn himself comments that “the word spin has probably entered the political vocabulary since the series", while Iannucci again suggests that the show taught the people how to unpick the verbal tricks that politicians think they can get away with in front of the cameras.[2] 

The series depicted the media-consciousness of politicians, reflecting the Public Relations training they undergo to help them deal with interviews and journalists. This is particularly evident in the episode The Ministerial Broadcast, in which Hacker is advised on the effects of his clothes or in the episode A Conflict of Interest that humorously lampoons the various political stances of Britain's newspapers through their readers.

Jim Hacker: “Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.”
Sir Humphrey Appleby: “What about the people who read The Sun?”
Bernard Woolley: “Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.!”
 
In his three-part  TV documentary The Trap, Adam Curtis, criticized the series as "ideological propaganda for a political movement and that [Yes Minister] is indicative of a larger movement of criticism of government and bureaucracy, centered upon public choice economics.”[10]
Curiously, this view has been supported by Jay himself:
 
“The fallacy that public choice economics took on was the fallacy that government is working entirely for the benefit of the citizen, and this was reflected by showing that in any episode in Yes Minister, we showed that almost everything that the government has to decide is a conflict between two lots of private interest - that of the politicians and that of the civil servants trying to advance their own careers and improve their own lives. And that's why public choice economics, which explains why all this was going on, was at the root of almost every episode of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.[11]”

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[1] Iannucci A., Yes Minister, prod. Verity Newman, Britain's Best Sitcom, BBC, 2004

[2] Iannucci A., Yes Minister, prod. Verity Newman, Britain's Best Sitcom, BBC, 2004

[4] Cockerell M., Live From Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television, Faber & Faber, 1988

[5]Lynn J., Yes Minister Questions & Answers, http://www.jonathanlynn.com

[6] Lynn J., Yes Minister Questions & Answers, http://www.jonathanlynn.com

[7] Crisell A., An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, Routledge, 2002

[8] Iannucci A., Yes Minister, prod. Verity Newman, Britain's Best Sitcom, BBC, 2004

[9] Iannucci A., Yes Minister, prod. Verity Newman, Britain's Best Sitcom, BBC, 2004

[10] Curtis A., The Trap: What Happened To Our Dreams of Freedom, Part 1, BBC, 2007

[11] Curtis A., The Trap: What Happened To Our Dreams of Freedom, Part 1 - BBC, 2007