{"id":4681,"date":"2026-04-24T04:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T11:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=4681"},"modified":"2026-04-24T04:26:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T11:26:16","slug":"sir-humphrey-appleby-at-the-opera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2026\/04\/sir-humphrey-appleby-at-the-opera\/","title":{"rendered":"Sir Humphrey Appleby at the Opera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Yes, Minister<\/em>\u00a0ran on BBC television in the early 1980s, the early Thatcher years (I\u2019ll come back to the importance of this). I enjoyed it at the time (I was pretty young), and recalled it when I went to work in government myself in the 1990s. Canada has a UK-style Westminster parliamentary system, with more of a permanent staff of senior bureaucrats than in the US where political appointments play a much larger role (If you are following the debacle in the UK parliament right now, note that Olly Robbins, the very high-ranking official at the centre of the scandal, had senior positions in Labour\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Conservative governments over many years). The theme of the show is how the permanent secretary (the civil servant at the head of the bureaucracy) Sir Humphrey Appleby (played by Nigel Hawthorne) attempts, sometimes with success and sometimes not, to get the elected politician and new cabinet member Jim Hacker, \u201cMinister of Administrative Affairs\u201d (Paul Eddington) to adopt policies that he, Sir Humphrey, would like to see, even when Hacker initially disapproves. The joke in the title is that each episode ends with Sir Humphrey saying \u201cYes, Minister\u201d as if following a directive from Hacker, but in fact often it is Sir Humphrey who has managed to get Hacker to come around to Sir Humphrey\u2019s views. It is genteel comedy, cleverly written and acted. It is not like the other, later, great British program about the relationships between cabinet and the senior civil service,\u00a0The Thick of It<\/em>, which is much more explicit in its anger and disgust at the methods of the government of Tony Blair. Still,\u00a0Yes, Minister<\/em>\u00a0also has a pretty bleak view of how governments make decisions, as we shall see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Season 3, Episode 7 is called \u201cThe Middle Class Rip-Off\u201d, and it is about public funding for the arts. You can find the episode for a dollar or two on most streaming platforms, but here is a free clip that gives the gist:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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