His various struggles to formulate and enact policy or affect departmental changes are opposed by the British Civil Service, in particular his Permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, played by Nigel Hawthorne.

He spent a good deal of time in Parliament on the Opposition benches before his party won a general election, including serving as the Shadow Secretary for Agriculture.

In a Radio Times interview to promote Yes, Prime Minister, Paul Eddington stated, "He's beginning to find his feet as a man of power, and he's begun to confound those who thought they'd be able to manipulate him out of hand.

Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne) serves throughout the series as permanent secretary under his minister, Jim Hacker at the Department of Administrative Affairs.

[6] Sir Humphrey is a master of obfuscation and manipulation, baffling his opponents with long-winded technical jargon and circumlocutions, strategically appointing allies to supposedly impartial boards, and setting up interdepartmental committees to smother his minister's proposals in red tape.

In Britain's Best Sitcom, Stephen Fry comments that "we love the idea of the coherence and articulacy of Sir Humphrey ... it's one of the things you look forward to in an episode of Yes Minister ... when's the big speech going to happen?

[6] Loquacious and verbose, he frequently uses both his mastery of the English language and his grasp of Latin and Greek grammar both to perplex his political master and to obscure the relevant issues.

Woolley tends to side with Hacker when new policies are announced, because they seem radical or democratic, only for Sir Humphrey to point out the disadvantages to the status quo and the civil service in particular.

[10] As Hacker awaits confirmation of his elevation to Prime Minister, he asks Woolley to join him in Downing Street as his principal private secretary, which Sir Humphrey endorses, thus keeping the trio together.

In a 2004 retrospective, Armando Iannucci commented that Fowlds had a difficult task because he had to "spend most of his time saying nothing but looking interested in everyone else's total and utter guff" but "his one line frequently had to be the funniest of the lot."

Although Lynn comments that the word "spin" has "probably entered the political vocabulary since the series,"[4] Iannucci suggests that the show "taught us how to unpick the verbal tricks that politicians think they can get away with in front of the cameras.

[15]Jay, however, has elsewhere emphasized that he and Lynn were interested first and foremost in the comical possibilities present in government and bureaucracy and that they were not seeking to promote any agenda: "Our only firm belief on the subject was that the underlying conflicts between ministers and ministries were better brought out into the open than kept secret".

[17] Jay has written that as early as 1965, he had been induced by developments in the Timothy Evans case to wonder about an "inverted alchemy" operating in Whitehall, capable of frustrating the most impassioned campaigner.

"[4] In a programme screened by the BBC in early 2004, paying tribute to the series, it was revealed that Jay and Lynn had drawn on information provided by two insiders from the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, namely Marcia Falkender and Bernard Donoughue.

[23] The opening titles were drawn by artist and cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, who provided distinctive caricatures of Eddington, Hawthorne and Fowlds in their respective roles to represent distortion.

[25] The pilot opening and closing title caption cards feature drawings of most of the cast, but far less exaggerated than those of Scarfe, while the music by Max Harris is a more up-tempo piece for brass band.

Whilst Hacker occasionally approaches an issue from a sense of idealism and a desire to be seen to improve things, he ultimately sees his re-election and elevation to higher office as the key measures of his success.

Sir Humphrey, on the other hand, genuinely believes that the Civil Service, being politically impartial, has the most realistic idea of what "good governance" means, and therefore knows what is best for the country – a belief shared by his bureaucratic colleagues.

In the case of the episodes "The Skeleton in the Cupboard" and "The Tangled Web", Hacker manages to exploit embarrassing mistakes committed by Sir Humphrey; blackmailing him into adopting his stance.

Initially, he naively sees his job as the disinterested implementation of the Minister's policies, but he gradually finds that this conflicts with his institutional duty to the department, and sometimes (since Sir Humphrey is responsible for formally assessing Woolley's performance) his own potential career development.

[1] Consequently, another recurring scenario is one where Bernard must "walk the tightrope" — that is, balance his two conflicting duties by resorting to elaborate verbosity (much like Sir Humphrey) so that he can avoid the appearance of being disloyal to one, in favour of the other.

In one episode, his sociology student daughter, Lucy (Gerry Cowper), becomes an environmental activist, campaigning against the department's intention to remove protected status from a wooded area believed to be inhabited by badgers.

By the time of Yes, Prime Minister, the producers were permitted to use Downing Street itself for some exterior shots, most notably in the episode "The Key" where Sir Humphrey has to re-enter the building through the door of No.10.

[38] The Washington Post considered its "ideas were at the center of the Thatcher and Ronald Reagan administrations in Britain and the United States, which favored cutting government and shifting its functions to the private sector".

"[40] Lord Donoughue, an admirer of the series who was head of James Callaghan's policy unit at 10 Downing Street from 1976 to 1979, noticed that, when the Labour Party returned to power in 1997 after 18 years in opposition, a number of junior Ministers took so seriously the relationships with civil servants as depicted by Jay and Lynn that they were unduly wary of senior officials and allowed this suspicion to influence their behaviour.

[6] Thatcher performed a short sketch with Eddington and Hawthorne on 20 January 1984 at a ceremony where the writers were presented with an award from Mary Whitehouse's NVLA,[42] an event commemorated on the cover of the satirical magazine Private Eye.

[44] In an interview to promote the first series of Yes, Prime Minister, Derek Fowlds said that "both political sides believe that it satirises their opponents, and civil servants love it because it depicts them as being more powerful than either.

In 1997, Derek Fowlds reprised the role of Bernard Woolley to read Antony Jay's How To Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen's Guide To Fighting Officialdom.

Warner appears to have added RCE region coding to the individual release of the second series of Yes Minister, but there are no similar reported problems on playing the complete collection.

"[67] The style shows many identifiable hallmarks of Yes Minister, namely the blundering politician virtually entirely dependent on those whose presentational and political nous greatly eclipse his own limited abilities.