ABSTRACT
This narrative takes inspiration from and adopts the genre of a legendary BBC 1 comedy series, Yes Minister. The series was produced between 1980 and 1984 and managed to convey, in and through comedy, the somewhat ‘crazy reality’ of policy issues and policy processes in government. 2 It vividly ‘rang true’ with, for example, Ball’s (1998) contention that:
National policy making is inevitably a process of bricolage: a matter of borrowing and copying bits and pieces of ideas from elsewhere, drawing upon and amending locally tried and tested approaches, cannibalizing theories, research, trends and fashions and not infrequently flailing around for anything at all that looks as though it might work.
(Ball 1998: 126) The series centred on three characters, Jim Hacker, Minister for Administrative Affairs; Sir Humphrey Appleby, Permanent Secretary (senior civil servant); and Bernard, Private Secretary to the Minister. Particularly pertinent to this narrative is the observation that Sir Humphrey’s stance and political skills epitomized government as ‘a machine that has no gears, only brakes’ (BBC n.d).