Yes Minister - a very courageous decision

This is a great book - as well researched as the TV programme it covers.

Yes Minister was one of the truly great BBC sitcoms - it was a worthy contestant for best sitcom, where it came 6th.  It works on TV on radio, in the magnificent books, and also as recent events show, as a stage show.  Few comedies can cope so well with different mediums.

I think the thing that stops Yes Minister being the funniest is that it is bound by reality and is perhaps too serious.

What is interesting is that not only was a lot of the comedy based on real events, even comedy the writers thought they had invented turned out to have real life counterparts !

One strange thing highlighted is the episode where the Health Minister proposed to clamp down on smoking with a variety of suggestions that seemed funny then but which pretty much became Government policy 20 years later.

Books

Comedy Rules - From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes Prime Minister by Jonathan Lynn. ISBN 978-0-571-27795-7

150 essential rules of comedy.

Probably the best book on writing comedy ever.  It is not a how to do book, not a practical guide,  it is part memoir, part stories and part 150 views on what makes people laugh.