There are shows that age well, and then there is Yes, Minister , which, in its plots, contains almost everything you need to learn about bureaucracy, democracy, the civil service, inter-departmental committees and even life itself. The BBC show was deemed so realistic that Margaret Thatcher was a huge fan and even appeared alongside Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne in a special sketch. Now, anyone who has watched the show knows that Sir Humphrey Appleby doesn’t goof up often, but when he does, it is usually a doozy.
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And Yes, Minister , like the works of Franz Kafka, often feels less like satire of its own time and more like an unnervingly accurate portrait of the future.
Take, for example, the plot of The Skeleton in the Cupboar , where it emerges that, in the years after the Second World War, a junior civil servant had bungled the lease of a Scottish island on which the War Office had built a military base and associated installations. Thirty years later, the lease was expiring and the government discovered that, thanks to the original agreement, the entire lot — some £40 million worth — would revert to the owner.”
The junior civil servant, of course, turns out to have been Sir Humphrey Appleby, who is reduced to a blubbering idiot shouting about “foreign powers”, MI5 and MI6 before giving perhaps the most loquaciously verbose admission of guilt ever committed to television.
And while that might seem like an amusing bureaucratic obscurity from an old BBC sitcom, reality has a way of becoming a Yes, Minister re-run. The recent talk of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales potentially ‘leaving’ the United Kingdom — coupled with the new Greenland deal between Denmark, Greenland, and the United States — makes the episode look almost accidentally prophetic.
But to understand why all of this matters without reading a thousand think-tank pieces in gobbledygook, one needs to understand a few things, starting with a rather innocuous-sounding acronym: GIUK.
