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Yes, Prime Minister
1986 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn
James Hacker MP the Government's bumbling minister for Administrative Affairs is propelled along the corridors of power to the very pinnacle of politics - No. 10. Could this have possibly have been managed by his trusted Permanent Private Secretary, the formidably political Sir Humphrey Appleby who must move to the “Top Job” in Downing Street to support him, together with his much put upon PPS Bernard Wolley. What could possibly go wrong?
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29 comments on Hacker News
Again, there's a lot of nuance here that has been beautifully articulated to great comic effect 40 years ago - and very little has changed regarding the aims, motives and consequences.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074qvc Yes Prime Minister, Season 1 Episode 3 'The Smoke Screen'
The Proposal: Health minister Dr. Peter Thorn proposes a total ban on all cigarette advertising, point-of-sale displays, and sports sponsorship, alongside massive tax hikes.
The Conflict: Sir Humphrey Appleby defends the tobacco industry, arguing that smokers are "national benefactors" because tobacco tax funds the National Health Service and early deaths save the state money on pensions.
The Motive: Prime Minister Jim Hacker backs the anti-smoking campaign not purely for health, but as a clever diversion and weapon to force the Treasury to concede on his separate plans for tax cut
> Iran attacked the British base in Cyprus with drones so has directly attacked British territor
Oh, you mean that base the UK had let the US use for its attacks on Iran?
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/2/starmer-lets-us-use-bases-for-iran-clash-uks-military-legal-quagmire
> Iran has also been sponsoring terrorism in the UK.
You remind me of that 'Yes Prime Minister' episode when Hacker and Humphrey decided to announce they were expelling so-many Soviet diplomatic staff because they were supposedly engaged in espionage.
Your solution (of tackling unemployment by tacking it onto national defense), is eerily close to what they discussed in an episode of Yes Prime Minister in the 80s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
I wish there was a modern day version of "Yes, [Prime] Minister" for this kind of stuff. It's like the episodes could write themselves by the week.
The TV series Yes Minster and Yes Prime Minister have a lot to say about accountability in the governments.
> kind of a fringe take (PS: I just finished watching the movie Her and am in a weird place)
I thought we are closer to robot soldiers, Geoffrey Hinton said US army wants to have 50% robots by 2030, seems strange to invest in human soldiers when they are gonna have T-800 fairly soon. Is there some populist reason for conscription, or perhaps a weird twist to get into UBI?
Reminded me of this episode of Yes, Prime Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
are you worried about the raising crime amongst teenagers, do you think there is a lack of discipline in schools, do you think our young people lack authority and leadership in their lives, would you be in favor of introducing national service? are you worried about the danger of war, are you worried about the growth of armaments, do you think there is danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill, do you think its wrong to force people to take up arms against their will? would you oppose the reintroduction of national service?
If you want to understand how the EU works, like really understand how it works, my best advice is to binge watch 2 or 3 season of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister.
You'll realize most of it isn't stupidity, it's intentional.
> While it was not possible to complete a full Cost Benefit Analysis for this PIR (due to the limitations on the data available at this time and provided by industry), potential monetised benefits were also analysed including an illustrative example of health benefits. That example estimated that a 0.07 percentage point drop in smoking prevalence would be equivalent to $273 million in monetised health benefits
I wonder whether they take into account the long-term cost of people - who quit or don't smoke because of this legislation - becoming more of a burden on the social systems because of extended life? Things like this always remind me of the 'Smoke Screen' episode from Yes, Prime Minister [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsqTz4zg8Xk
This reminds me of an incredible episode of 'Yes, Prime Minister'.
I dug up the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1DviQ9mva0
Edit: To get straight to the point, I would suggest jumping straight to 1:50
Growing up, my dad was a US Congressman (and later chief of staff of a different congressman's office and in retirement a minor functionary in the county tax office.)
I LOVED Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. To this day I ramble on about meeting minutes in attempted imitation of Humphrey Appleby.
I knew Jay and Lynn were onto something when my father watched 5 minutes of one episode and said "I ain't watchin' that bullshit. It's too much like work."
Speaking of chemistry, I caught the play at Chichester a while back (with different actors.) Perfectly good acting and perfectly good writing, but the "chemistry" was definitely different. Not better. Not worse. Just different.
I grew up watching Yes, (Prime)? Minister. The 70s to the early 80s were really the golden age of British TV. This show, Blake's 7 (if you like sci-fi and haven't seen this it's still great, go watch it), Dr Who's golden years (ie Tom Baker), even the Goodies. probably even Grange Hill (which had a high school student die of a heroin overdose).
One particularly prescient piece was the Nuclear Deterrant [1]. Even 40+ years ago this episode argued that nuclear weapons were mostly pointless because you'd never use them and instead you should invest in smart weapons. The linked segment even has a line that the Soviets can't take Western Europe, they can't even hold Afghanistan. Consider that in light of Ukraine. Think about where munitions have gone and "smart" weapons are particularly prevelent.
And of course the writing and performance for Sir Humphrey in particular was absolutely top notch.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4
"It would appear that the American report leaves some important questions unanswered, some of the evidence is inconclusive, some findings have been questioned, and the figures are open to interpretation and different results might come from a widened, more detailed study over a longer time scale." [1]—words that killed any possibility of science under the umbrella of the political since 1981.
I don't understand why the author needs to qualify: "Yes, Minister is one of the most seminal British political satires", it simply is the most seminal political satires [2], together with the follow-up, Yes, Prime Minister [3].
[1] Around minute 25 of the episode 4, season 2.
[2] Of course, some might say de gustibus, however, even Veep could not succeed in combining wit, humor, and relevancy in such a manner. Not to even mention the unique use of the English language: any of the Humphrey-ian soliloquyial verbiages is up there with any speech from Hamlet and above. The fact that there are so few episodes certainly helps in keeping the essence dense.
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086831/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
The episode "Power To The People" in the satirical comedy Yes Prime Minister deals with exactly this. It also looks at the trade-offs, which explains why this will almost certainly not actually happen. Well worth a watch :-)
https://archive.org/details/yes-prime-minister-power-to-the-people-1991-uk-vhs
An alternative approach which I was taught at an enrichment course at school but which became more relevant as life and career progressed - be the minute-taker.
A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."
I understand the intent of the question, but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable, not just a European alternative. The UK is more likely to find itself at odds with France than the U.S.
That thought reminds me of a conversation in an episode of Yes Prime Minister:
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder why we need the [nuclear] weapons.
> Sir Humphrey: Minister! You're not a unilateralist?
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder, you know.
> Sir Humphrey: Well, then, you must resign from the government!
> Hacker: Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?
> Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?
> Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.
> Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!
This just reminds me of an episode in yes prime minister where there is a new hospital fully staffed by administrative staff and no medical personnel because it never officially opened to the public.
From across the pond... Yes Minister and the follow up series Yes Prime Minister are the most rewtchable TV shows I've ever seen. When it was originally on air, it's said that the prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, loved it. And it's still absolutely relevant and witty today.
Indeed, "Masterly Inactivity" is an established concept:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/masterly_inactivity
and used to great comedic effect in Season 1 of "Yes, Prime Minister":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESIJ_C9mUBI
> Q: I've been asking myself what can I do to continue this run of success?
> A: Have you considered... masterly inactivity?
> Q: No, Humphrey. A Prime Minister must be firm.
> A: Indeed. How about _firm_ masterly inactivity?
I've bought it on DVD years back, and still re-watch it somewhat regularly. Love that series... both of them (Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister). That said, and as many echo again and again... for the technically skilled: piracy is an option. It's sad, but once you've exhausted a "reasonable" amount of effort to watch something legally, it's up to you how "bad" you feel for reverting to other means. Pretty sure any film enthusiast is faced with that conundrum on a regular basis.
side-note: I'm so happy to have found a reason to talk about the series. So many scenes are stuck in my head and come to mind when reminded about world affairs constantly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4 this one for example with Russia and Crimea (just an example off the top of my head)
I have to ask the same question: why do we tolerate this Russophobia, where "Russia" is used as a boogeyman to solve the internal political problems, and redirect the outrage away from the real issues facing our societies?
This whole issue has been so old, it's been one of the story plots in a popular 1980s British TV show called Yes, Prime Minister:
- Why don't you expel 76 Soviet diplomats? That has been our practice in the past, when we wished to ensure that the press lose interest in something?
- I can do that?!
- It must be a story that nobody can disprove.
- And which will be believed even if it's denied!
https://twitter.com/rusembmalta/status/980521180460388352
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW10zLDI3Eg
(Yes, Prime Minister, "Official Secrets", 1987)
The episode in question is episode 6 of series 1 of Yes, Prime Minister "A Victory for Democracy". Highly recommended!
What the video describes is massive retaliation doctrine. Mutually assured destruction is not the same as massive retaliation doctrine. Massive retaliation was abandoned soon after the the Cuban crisis. Kennedy saw how impossible it was in practice and demanded more options.
At the time this episode of Yes Prime minister was written NATO had completely different strategy called flexible response.
Except it mostly doesn't work.
My dashboard has recommended Minions "because you watched The Thick Of It". Out of the whole list, only Yes Prime Minister comes close, and even at that it misses the (more) obvious Yes Minister series.
There was a lovely TV show from the UK back in the 1980's called Yes Prime Minister - one of the frequent exchanges between the senior public servant, and the PM, when the former wanted the latter to back down on something, was for the phrase 'That's very brave of you ...' to be uttered. Brave does not necessarily imply profound, good, worthwhile, etc. Canonical's 'brave decision' to go out and create their own DE (despite two very competent options already existing) does not imply it was a good decision.
> When Apple makes a "pro" laptop without any USB A ports, people laugh, but then buy it.
This is the classic mixup of 'people'. The people that scoffed at a laptop with a single USB port (or a phone without a headphone jack, etc etc) are NOT the same people that bought those items.
> When Ubuntu makes a phone, Ubuntu regrets it.
The proverbial 800lb gorilla made a phone, and also regretted it. There are plenty of propositions explaining why two mobile phone platforms were all that the market could sustain.
The British TV series, "Yes Minister" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_Minister) and "Yes Prime Minister" was a satirical series based around exactly that premise - a clueless politician who felt he was making all the decisions, and the actual power-behind-the-scenes bureaucrat who did. Although aging, it is still scarily accurate, if not more so.
Paul Eddington was an acclaimed actor who played the "minister" on British TV series "Yes, minister" and "Yes, Prime minister". Quoting him (Ref: Wikipedia page [1] and references therein)
PE: "A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me."
I found that quote moving when I came across it several years ago, especially given his life experience. His attitude makes me enjoy his acting even more. (To those who haven't seen the TV series I mentioned above, they're simply brilliant)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Eddington#Final_years_and_death
Sorry to pick on you, but the responses of net neutrality advocates vis-à-vis competition sound like the standard strategy of the Foreign Office when dealing with crisis from Yes, Prime Minister.
"maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do", it's a natural monopoly.
"maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now", they already have a stronghold.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/quotes?item=qt0190692
The most famous British political satire TV-series is "Yes Prime Minister"[1]. Believe the IMDB 8.2 doesn't make justice to this masterpiece which most often than not proved to be spot-on about how matters of the state are approached by politicians.
Here is a snippet from Episode 1, season 2:
----------------
Late in the evening PM at home. Bernard, PM’s personal secretary, enters the room:
PM: All the cabinets have got to make cuts in their spending plans.
PM’s wife: Bernard would you like a scotch?
Bernard: Yes, I can have a large one please!
PM’s wife: Another triple!
PM: Humphrey should have seen this coming and warn me.
Bernard: I don’t think Sir Humphrey understand economics prime minister. He did read the classics you know.
PM: Well that’s the thing. He is head of the treasury.
Bernard: Well prime minister, I’m afraid he is in even greater disadvantage understanding economics. He is an economist.
----------------
I never heard of a more accurate description of an economist.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086831/
The best advice for dealing with the possibility of being "ambushed", or otherwise being made to answer awkward questions, comes from the British television series "Yes, Prime Minister".
(Prime Minister Hacker speaking to Bernard Woolley, his hapless Principal Private Secretary who has made unwise remarks to the press after being ambushed):
"If you have nothing to say, say nothing. But better, have something to say and say it, no matter what they ask. Pay no attention to the question, make your own statement. If they ask you the same question again, you just say, 'That's not the question' or 'I think the more important question is this:' Then you make another statement of your own."