The Complete Yes Minister

In the spring of 1983 the BBC TV series Yes Minister achieved a unique hat trick: it became the first programme ever to win the British Academy Award for Best Comedy Series for three years running. In those three years the series had progressed from an innovation to an institution, as more and more people realized that behind all the laughter there was a great deal of accurate observation and pertinent revelation about the way the British are governed.

As the series grew in popularity, however, viewers increasingly found that a television tour of British democratic government in the Eighties, however hilarious, was not enough. They wanted this expose of Westminster and Whitehall in a more permanent and portable form. By re-interpreting the stories as Jim Hacker's political diaries (augmented by Sir Humphrey Appleby's papers and a good helping of new material) the authors have produced not just a potted version of the series but books which stand up as works of sharp political comedy in their own right.