The New Yes Minister

To continue

I have seen 3x adverts for this and 1x 10 second burst while channel surfing. It is quite enough for me to say with habitual confidence that is is by some distance the worst idea of all time.

And the worst british comedy effort since, oh the thin blue line, say. and i'm not picking that cos they share an actor (but it is neither a coincidence that the fucker is in both steaming piles)

yeah looked like it wasn't going to be great. The history of the show that it prompted had some interesting bits in and the old show has quite a bit of good in it, as long as you can separate it from Thatcher, who the cast apparently loathed anyway.

Did see that it was the same writing team so thought it might be redeemed but it also looked like it was going to be played more as open farce than the old version.
Nigel Hawthorne was great in the old series & Paul Eddington wasn't bad but both are long dead now. I think they died within a year or two of the end of the show. Think Yes Prime MInister actually stopped because Eddington was in too much pain too continue since he was already dying of cancer I think. Hawthorne went a couple years later if I'm remembering right.

by some distance the worst idea of all time.

Shane Richie remake of Minder was worse.

Tbh stevolende (how does one shorten that?) I'll rep quite hard for the original; while you can certainly call it out as practically identikit every episode, the politics etc are something you could probably just leave aside when judging it as a piece- certainly i never found it v strongly one way or t'other as viewed in its day (i dont think the point was right vs left nor to find a 'bad guy' between the two, it revolved, like the thick of it, around the processes and tensions of govt itself as a conflicted entity (not an exact parallel obv).

But in terms of execution it's an almost total delight

it also looked like it was going to be played more as open farce than the old version.

True. And one other problem with the writing of the stage revival: Jonathan Lynn said in an interview that YM/YPM has always been a satire on government, not on politics. Yet it feels like this time he's broken with this: he (and Antony Jay?) hone in on what they see as the hypocrisy of condemning child prostitution while condoning child killing (in the shape of the Iraq war), and on his doubts about climate change science. So it becomes an awkward partisan piece about his own hobby horses.

The TV version, post-Savile, changes the former storyline into one about group sex prostitution, which doesn't work for a different reason: it's just not much of a shocking moral situation for a modern audience.

(but it is neither a coincidence that the fucker is in both steaming piles)

Haig was dope in Cracker and a 1980 Dr Who where life grapes moulted off his forehead tho, fair play

fair play he was p well cast and p good in the thick of it himself