It's depressing because of accurate it is to real life.

@Henry Reed We haven't had a competent PM for ages. If we did we wouldn't have the highest inflation we've seen in decades. Competent PMs can work around Global and National Issues.

@@idleishde6124 I'm not talking about competent leaders. I'm talking about one's who's apathetic to people in general.

Economic Inflation can be rectified....The African and asian population inflation in Britain will be tough to solve...

@@THINKincessantly what's that supposed to mean? The African and Asian population inflation.

The repartee, sorry I do need your pardon for one can only call it sparkling wit outside France, on display from the episode titles downwards was just off the richter.

By this time Hacker is wise to their games

"If I could foresee them then they wouldn't be unforeseen"

*was the best

Yes but when this sketch was aired none of what you’ve explained was active… the pro tobacco lobbying was still going strong. A few public spaces such as trains & stations had a ban and advertising was prohibited by then but it was no where near demonised as it is now, full smoking ban was 2007.

@@jamesdelatour2266 Yes. I was a lad in the 70s and 80s. How times have changed. I always hated smoking, but I am pleasantly surprised how the majority of people now don't want it in their public spaces. It is definitely for the better - mainly because of the harm 2nd hand smoke can do to innocents.

What? Its banned indoors in the UK too and has been for years.....

@@jamesdelatour2266 Yes? No....its been banned indoors in the UK for many years...

@@dontbewoke full smoking ban was 2007… decades after this show aired.

I took it to mean Humphrey *did* think Hacker was a spy, implying the Civil Service was fine with a compromised PM as long as they thought they could still run circles around him

The PM would be a terrible spy, since no one tells them anything.

Yup. Humphrey had cleared people who were Soviet spies because they were all “one of us”.

and a hundred times smarter

Actors are well trained and good at their jobs, unlike…..

But they HAVE banned advertising and raised tobacco taxes sky high.

@@tombarter3287 Yes, but according to the plans as described in this episode. They could never ban smoking outright because of the financial hole it would leave so the plan was always to do it incrementally. So they banned advertising and then brought in the health warnings on the packaging years later, then screens over the products in shops etc. This episode is over thirty years ago and we're still decades away from eliminating tobacco use entirely.

I would say it is very difficult to evaluate the last few PMs' character just from their public decisions.

That is something I both love and am terrified by about his character - he is very cynical, but he is usually correct. Obviously he has his own agenda, but when it comes to the human nature and the nature of governing, he has seen it all and he knows how people think and act. And his verdict is rarely approving, but also rarely wrong.

My sentiments exactly. You can’t really fault his argument that all those people dying prematurely are saving the treasury considerable sums of money in pensions and social care whilst boosting the coffers in tobacco taxes!

remember , his are facts, the PM has statistics

Provided of course those statistics are true (which they are no doubt in-series

I am a huge fan of 'Yes (prime) Minister' series and i know this is a comedy :) - so keep that in mind reading this below: I am not quite sure that they are THAT compelling. I mean people don't live forever just because they don't smoke. Which means not every one of the 110k deaths would go away which makes the 'pensioner' problem somewhat smaller. (household, car accidents, other illnesses...) also it has been proven that smoking has multiple ways to cause cost to the NHS. Which were not considered in the direct costs. various children sicknesses living with smoking parents or in fact the measurably lower / slower brain development in the womb of a smoking mother. And then the secondary implication which this statistics simply does not factor in: people who die from smoking related issues, are tend to do it on a different timeline. But rarely on the first day of their pension. Dying earlier removes all the taxes, consumption, innovation.. etc : economic activities of the person dying. I mean a dead person wont ever go to a restaurant again, won't buy a ticket to a sporting event and of course rarely would by milk to make sure the skeleton gets enough calcium. And of course while they are on NHS services (when they not about to die) they are not actively producing anything for the economy, which is a net loss already. (sickleave and such) this is such a complex system that 'pension vs direct-nhs cost' is anything but factual. besides as we can see many countries went through banning smoking in public events / pubs / restaurants etc. and none of those countries collapsed.. or at least not because of that... khm... lettuce. so in fact Sir Humphrey's argument is exactly what a tobacco company would want to push, but if you start adding the numbers together on all around the problem, it gets less and less compelling. Simplifying the topic down to two factors and thus only two numbers, is something a 6 years old would do. the actual mathematics around the topic is incredibly more complex. However it is far more easier (this way) to deliver it in comedy :)

Fascinating! Is that scheme still going?

@@a1990hussain Not sure if that specific scheme is going, but I can say that there's certainly no televised cigarette advertisements during e.g. sporting events (I'm not sure if this extends to logos on sports uniforms or only televised ads though and I can't recall the last time I actually saw a non-televised cigarette ad that was not a 'quit smoking' ad.

Different styles of comedy. Essentially physical comedy versus cerebral/verbal comedy. Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Black Adder, The Young Ones, Dad's Army all had very strong elements of physical comedy. Yes Minister/Prime Minister had almost no physical comedy .. apart from one episode when Sir Humphrey was deliberately locked out of the PM's office and had tried to sneak in through the window, which was probably one of the funniest moments of the entire series 😂

Different types of comedy. But obviously anyone who thinks this is better than only fools. Then that program is way above your head. And I enjoy both. Only fools is way out in front.

You're not even comparing apples with oranges , more like apples with ice cream. This is satire , OFAH was a sitcom. This was written for the middle classes , OFAH for the working classes. Totally different and both brilliant.

The writers were brilliant, the execution by the actors first class.

Yes, well we will never get truly great comedy like this again. And a lot of the reasons for that is because the way society is in 2022.

A study done by KPMG, if my memory is correct.

Well put 😁

It's "to discourage anti-smoking _speeches_ by ministers". That seems perfectly clear.

They don't have the spine or the writers

It's hard to find writing this sharp and actors who can embody their roles so completely. Every intonation and pause so finely executed for maximum comedic effect.

@@nicholashylton6857 👍

You're right, but in the 2000's we got Armando Iannucci. His writing in The Thick Of it, and in the spin-off movie In The Loop, stands up extremely well against Jay and Lynn. Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) simply chews the scenery as the psychopathic Scottish spin doctor from No. 10. Veep is also surprisingly good for an American remake.

Nowadays the world is all about puerile and classless humour.

I smoked for nearly 15 years. And boy am I glad I stopped. Cigarette smoke stinks. Your clothes smell sour all the time and so does your hair not to mention it’s expensive as hell. But I do admit smoking is one of the few really nice things in life as well. A nice summer day. A good glass of beer and a cigarette in your mouth. I miss it

Power. The PM has power to make changes. A minister needs to beg to influence changes.

PM can fire the cabinet secretary, the minister can't do the same to his undersecretary.

@@qichen85 can they actually fire them?

@@kb4903 Yes. While it is not exact the cabinet secretary, just last year (2023), the UK PM Rishi Sunak fired the home secretary Suella Braverman. Mind you, the actual situation is actually quite complicated. Generally, PM and Minister tread careful when it comes to firing undersecretaries and department secretaries because political offices and civil service are two separate tracks. While the political office (PM, ministers) technically has higher authority, the civil servants are the ones that actually runs most of the operation and the PM firing the home secretary will be viewed as an outsider attacking one of their own. This is just not the fight you'd like to see. On the other hand, it is also understood that if the secretary steps out of the line (like being caught red-handed plotting against the minister), then the political office will have the justification to do the sacking. It is a matter of balance. Look, if this sounded complicated, just think about this way: an navy officer of higher rank can't exactly just punish a junior office from the army, because that just invites inter-service rivalry. On the other hand, if the junior officer is caught with blatant disrespect to the senior officer, then they will got a justification that can ignore their different track.

@@kb4903 Of course, there is also the matter that the relative strength of political office and civil service changes all the time. Yes PM series is made in a time where the civil service was relatively powerful.

It's massively reduced, and you have to take inflation into account.

It's massively reduced, and you have to take inflation into account for the real price hike.

Absolutely. It is one of the things to look forward to in each episode.

There is joy in watching a master at work. Most people use language to bludgeon an opponent into submission while Sir Humphrey uses language with skill and eloquence, a master artist in a room of finger painters.

Agreed - a targeted tax rise is literally adding a tax upon a possible choice someone can make, making that a choice a more costly one to make and actively discouraging making it as a result. It doesn't eliminate freedom, but it certainly attacks and diminishes it. I don't mind any tax that is targeted at recovering a government cost, but when the intent is explicitly to discourage a choice then there is no other way to see it than a deliberate attempt to constrain freedom.

@@j.a.b.nijenhuis8124 Protecting people from themselves is a very big heading, and the springboard for most villainous motivations for any story where control is the goal of the villain. I've never been particularly convinced on the merits of positive liberty, though like everything it exists on a spectrum. But, despite things like parenthood, love, hunger, exhaustion, pain, fear, deadlines, etc, all being factors that constrain our ability to make fully autonomous choices, we would hardly thank the government for taxing them in an effort to somehow make our decision-making more free. The factor constraining our ability to make choices honestly doesn't change at all, and now the government is profiteering from it at the same time as adding further, entirely artificial and external, constraints. No liberty is restored, just further removed by something fully imposed from beyond ourselves. I agree in principle there is a line where the government has good cause to protect its people from harm, and that line is incredibly difficult to draw cleanly. Most laws that exist to protect people from harm by other people are standing in the correct spot, but harm from themselves? Most of them, while well intentioned, fall outside that line and stray too far into the realm of oppression, imo, which is exactly the thing we formed governments to seek protection from. There is a good argument to be made about children, and about making sure people are well informed of the risks associated with their possible choices, but after that I'm very much in favour of letting people poison themselves however the heck they like. It's not like we are all born immortal if only we didn't ruin it for ourselves.

I don’t know how people afford to smoke buying cigarettes in the UK. Everyone I know, myself included, goes out of there way to buy duty free cigarettes to avoid paying £12 a pack.

@@jamesdelatour2266 One of the many reasons I'm glad I never picked up the habit....

I'd say a good 25% of fag packets I see nowadays are clearly illegal imports with colourful packaging and/or foreign health warnings.

The difference between smoking and, say, alcohol or drugs is that the latter only harms you, whereas the former kills everyone around you. If you want to jump of a Goulding go ahead, but if you want to pull me of with you then we have a problem.

Perhaps I could have a precis (summary) of that.

Then why are nicotine replacement therapies so goddamn expensive??It's actually cheaper to continue to smoke!!

Culturally and quickly, what are you talking about.

To be fair, Ireland did it first, and the sky didn't fall...

They should be banning you from having children

That ships already sailed mate🤣🤣

its not real, its a comedy programme

Explain?

Shame that they did that

@@robinhoodsherwood2646 Agreed. Should be higher.