#Sir Humphrey Appleby

[ferret-propaganda]

Been looking at the NHS "your ideas for change" website.

[georgefairbrother]

An important message from the government...

[flammentanz]

"Yes Minister: The Challenge" (1982)

Derek Fowlds: Bernard Woolley Nigel Hawthorne: Sir Humphrey Appleby Paul Eddington: James Hacker

[blackswaneuroparedux]

People enter politics or the Civil Service out of a desire to exert power and influence events; this, I maintain, is an illness. It's only when one realises that great administrators and leaders of men have all been at any rate slightly mad that one has a true understanding of history.

- Auberon Waugh

[spamuelsonofspamothy]

Rewatching Yes, Minister and thinking about Sir Humphrey in "The Whiskey Priest". Upon being told that, if he doesn't care about morality in government, he's going to hell, the man grins. When asked about whether the Civil Service should believe in the government's policies, Sir Humphrey lectures us about how that would mean holding several contradictory views whose net effect would be to drive any man mad. And for all his amoral cynicism, he is sort of trying to help Hacker out: telling the PM what he knows would at best make Hacker a martyr for embarrassing the government (and leave him unable to help anyway) and at worst bring down the whole cabinet, PM included. An interesting episode, all around.

[carnivore-ivy]

A crossover of Yes, Minister and Star Wars.

Since both of OK and HA are called as “peacock” in China.

[savolaxsavoia]

[emotionalsupportbastardmen]

The Bastard Man (affectionate) Championships: round two

*(Humphrey is a surprise late arrival because I forgot to include him in round one lol. So he's here for his second chance.)

[lifewithaview]

Yes Minister (1980) The Right to Know

Once again, the Minister, Jim Hacker and the permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, clash over the Minister's role in running the Department.The Minister instructs his senior civil servant to keep nothing from him and he is promptly flooded with everything under the sun. For Sir Humphrey, the Minister's meeting with constituents concerned about saving a local den of badgers is exactly the kind of work he should be doing. When he learns that Hacker's daughter will stage a nude protest over her father's decision on the badgers, Appleby must come to the rescue.

[pleasewriteusernamehere]

sir humphrey appleby-core

[ferret-propaganda]

[georgefairbrother]

The Challenge was a series III episode of Yes Minister (1982), in which Jim Hacker’s Department of Administrative Affairs assumes general oversight of local authorities. As Ludovic Kennedy (playing himself as BBC interviewer) points out, Hacker is now ‘Mr Townhall as well as Mr Whitehall’.

Echoing the Thatcher government’s zeal to reform the local government sector, Hacker is determined to make councils more efficient and to curb their extravagance. The Cabinet Secretary and Sir Humphrey are not so keen, worried that any reforms, such as direct financial accountability for the success or failure of council projects, could be extended to the civil service as a whole.

To deflect his attention, Jim Hacker is urged to tackle the largely ridiculed and tricky business of civil defence, in particular the provision of public fall-out shelters by local authorities, and is sent to confront the leader of the London Borough of Thames Marsh, Ben Stanley, over their anti-nuclear activism and budget blowouts. Stanley was reportedly based on Ken Livingstone, leader of the ill-fated Greater London Council.

There are a couple of interesting cameos, aside from Ludovic Kennedy, and Moray Watson as a BBC controller. Ian Lavender (Private Pike from Dad’s Army) plays Dr Cartwright, a departmental economics boffin doomed to spend his entire career as a middling undersecretary. “I fear I shall rise no higher,” he explained sadly to Jim Hacker, “Alas, I’m an expert.”

Ben Stanley, the unilateralist leader of Thames Marsh Council is played by Doug Fisher (Man About the House), and is unimpressed by Cartwright’s suggestions on how to save ratepayers' money, which include closing the feminist drama centre, abandoning plans for a leisure centre featuring an artificial ski slope and jacuzzi, closing the gay bereavement centre, selling the Mayor’s second Daimler, and cancelling a councillors’ fact-finding junket to the Caribbean.

The episode lampoons the council’s hypocrisy in taking an anti-nuclear stance while providing fall-out shelter space solely for the leader and some senior councillors. Paul Eddington himself (Jim Hacker) was a Quaker pacifist, and in a later interview recalled that he was very uncomfortable with the way the writers (Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn) had ridiculed the anti-nuclear issue and peace activism, and that they had allowed their own political bias to influence the story. Eddington objected, and some moderating changes were made to the final script.

[flammentanz]

"Yes Minister: Party Games" (1984) Derek Fowlds: Bernard Woolley Nigel Hawthorne: Sir Humphrey Appleby John Nettleton: Sir Arnold Robinson

[calandrinon]

almost the perfect balanced sample >:)

In honour of Rishi Sunak's plans to bring back national service, I have a question for you all: Have you ever been surveyed?

[carnivore-ivy]

[hipstersbleedroses]

love writing the minutes to a meeting in advance. sir humphrey appleby would be proud