Heh...excellent...great find. I remember the show from waaay back. And yes...it's spot on!

what's this? an inquisitive, deep-probing press corps? my GOD this must be very VERY old indeed...

Remember way back when bush stole the White House, there was a comedy series based on his buffoonery which was immediately pulled from the air....time to bring it back

Thanks for posting a YPM clip. I think of this show often given the current situation. Despite being a comedy, I reccomend this show to anyone who wants to understand how politicians, and public servnats think. It is intersting that high level government officials "leaked" their methods and their inner workings to the writers of the show. Thanks again.

That really sums it up perfectly. Astonishing, after all it's more than 20 years old. How did you get it? And how did you get the idea? Coincidence?

Coincidence? Hmm, it's an interesting story. I saw a post somewhere in my perusal of the internets discussing an episode where there was a leak and search for the leaker and the kicker was that it was the PM who was the leaker. The dialogue was something like have you found the leaker and the response yes, The PM asks who is it, the repsonse it's you PM. The blogger relating the story said he was speaking from memory. So I went looking trying to find the episode. This was the only one that looked promising so I found a torrent and downloaded it. I looked for that specific dialogue, but didn't find it, but as you've noted it really makes the point well, and captures the relationship of the press and government.

Yes, Prime Minister is a classic indeed, and it keeps on giving and giving!

It's available for rent from Netflix. I reviewed all the episodes of it (and the predecessor program "Yes, Minister" a couple of years ago.

One major difference: Hacker is a good, smart man who is led around by the entrenched civil-service bureaucracy. Bush is a not-smart man being led around by his own self-serving cadres of 'good 'ol boy' bureaucracy.

"Astonishing, after all it's more than 20 years old."

Not at all, corruption and imcompitance are timeless and universal.

Here are two quotes from YPM. I thought the second one's definition of a lie nailed it.

Sir Arnold: "Are you suggesting that I give confidential information to the press?" Sir Humphrey: "Certainly not, Arnold. This is confidential disinformation." Sir Arnold: "Ah, that is different."

Sir Humphrey: "So I gather, you denied that Mr. Halifax's phone had been bugged?" Jim Hacker: "Well obviously, it was the one question today to which I could give a clear, simple, straightforward, honest answer." Sir Humphrey: "Yes, unfortunately although the answer was indeed clear, simple and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated is such as to cause epistemological problems of sufficient magnitude to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear." Jim Hacker: "Epistemological? What are you talking about?" Sir Humphrey: "You told a lie." Jim Hacker: "A lie??" Sir Humphrey: "A lie." Jim Hacker: "What do you mean a lie?" Sir Humphrey: "I mean you ... lied. Yes I know, this is a difficult concept to get across to a politician. You ..... ah yes, you did not tell the truth."

Courtesy of the site: http://www.yes-minister.com/

An ingenious discovery, Norm. Side-by-side with the McLellan briefing from last Thursday, it would be compelling enough to use in court--or an impeachment hearing!

An ingenious discovery, Norm. Side-by-side with the McLellan briefing from last Thursday, it would be compelling enough to use in court--or an impeachment hearing!

The roots of all-things-Bush flourished in the Reagan years, and Maggie Thatcher was a more butch version of the gipper. Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister revelled in the material that the right-wing supplied.

Watch as many episodes as you can, and you'll find all sorts of topics that directly touch on today's right-wing nuttia. There are several episodes, in particular, that comment upon Big Brother powers in the government. And Jim Hacker sometimes sadly, but comically, falls in line with the government's right to not let anyone know anything about what it's doing. There was even an episode on spying on the British public.

More interestingly, the shows commented all the time on how politics is styled. That was always as much the focus as was the actual political topic, and that's where the timelessness of the shows really lies. One of the greatest TV shows of all time.

Great find, thanks for this!

But isn't it sad that, in the 80s as today, this was comedy and people laughed about it on the tele - yet suffered politicians saying the exact same sentences and even elected and reelected them? And for years a White House press corps sat in front of spokespeople, uttering the same nonsense, didn't laugh them in the face but afterwards explained to the public how ingenious this all is?! Maybe laughing after work at reruns of "Yes, Prime Minister"...?

lol, Yes (Prime) Minister was a fantastic show indeed. Surprisingly enough Margaret Thatcher was a big fan of the show too. Go figure, conservative with a sense of humor