History Radio / TheMenFromTheMinistry

-->'''Mr. Lamb''': "I've done it, One! You'll never guess what I had to do to secure the pelican!"

-->'''Attaché''': "We have tried many times to introduce our national delicacy to Britain but you English always say 'bleurgh'."
-->'''Mr. Lamb''': I'm sure it can't be that bad. What is it?"
-->'''Attaché''': "Tinned soldier ants in syrup."
-->'''Mr. Lamb''': "Bleurgh."

-->'''Mr. Lennox-Brown''' (Who has just heard the whole thing from a very angry Sir Gregory): "A consignment of tinned solder ants in syrup.
-->'''Mildred''': "Bleurgh."

* ForeignQueasine: In the episode "Getting the Bird" Lamb attempts to import a pelican from the attach&eacute of a BananaRepublic, who suggests exporting his country's national delicacy to Britain as part of the deal.
-->'''Attach&eacute''': "We have tried many times to introduce our national delicacy to Britain but you English always say 'bleurgh'."

-->'''Attach&eacute''': "Tinned soldier ants in syrup."

** Mildred has a habit of saying "righty-ho" in the place of "right away", which annoys One greatly.

* ForeignerForADay: In ([[MissingEpisode sadly lost in original English]]) episode "Rebel in Regents Park" an old gardener of the titular park refuses to retire on Ministry's orders, instead creating his own country on a small island in the middle of park's Duck Pond. Turns out that back in 1818 Prince Edward gave away the island to his family for all time.

* TyopOnTheCover: Mildred is bound to make typos, leading to this:

''The Men from the Ministry'' is a radio sitcom and political satire produced by Creator/TheBBC which ran from 1962 to 1977, with one additional series made of re-recordings produced by BBC Transcription Services in 1980, which was never aired. This radio forerunner to the ''Series/YesMinister'' was created by Edward Taylor and starred Wilfrid Hyde-White and Richard Murdoch as civil servants Roland Hamilton-Jones (“One”) and Richard Lamb (“Two”), with the former leaving after two series and being replaced by Deryck Guyler's Deryck Lennox-Brown (Also referred to as “One”). Other characters of the show are the duo's secretary Mildred Murfin (Norma Ronald) and their rather tyrannical, self-centered boss and Permanent Under-secretary, Sir Gregory Pitkin (Roy Dotrice on the first two series, Ronald Baddiley third series onward).

%%* JerkWithAHeartOfJerk: Sir Gregory's one in and out.

* CriticalResearchFailure: In-Universe, in "The Big Big Big Ben Bungle" Lamb refers to the "Hunchback of [[Literature/TheHunchbackOfNotreDame Amsterdam]]"

* JerkWithAHeartOfJerk: Sir Gregory's one in and out.

* SpotOfTea: One and Two love tea beyond anything as the British gentlemen they are.

* ForeignerForADay: In ([[LostEpisode sadly lost in original English]]) episode "Rebel in Regents Park" an old gardener of the titular park refuses to retire on Ministry's orders, instead creating his own country on a small island in the middle of park's Duck Pond. Turns out that back in 1818 Prince Edward gave away the island to his family for all time.

* ChuckCunninghamSyndrome: April Adams, General Assistance Department's second secretary, disappeared without a word after the first series, [[AdaptedOut and was replaced by Mr. Crawley/Wilkins and other characters in the 1980 re-recordings and the Finnish translations.]]

* CompositeCharacter: The Finnish version combined the characters of Mr. "Whizzer" Wilkins and Mr. "Creepy" Crawley ([[SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute who were pretty much the same one already]]) into "Vinku" Wilkins, taking the former's name, stuttering, and absent-mindedness and the latter's VerbalTic.

** While not a huge example, Hamilton-Jones's/Lennox-Brown's character varies a bit between episodes. For example, his fondness of Lamb can range from panicking after mistaking Lamb's antics for a suicide attempt, to being onboard with Sir Gregory's plan to let him launch a rocket which both believe would get him assassinated.

* RememberTheNewGuy: Despite being AdaptedOut, April Adams appears in one Finnish episode. Oddly enough, said episode (The War with the Isle of Wight) ended up being one of the last scripts of the original BBC run to be translated into Finnish, a weird time to bring back a previously unheard character.

** IN "A Motley Crew" General Assistance Department is set to inspect an oil rig. As Sir Gregory tells, all oil rigs have names, there's Penelope rig, there's Veronica rig, and GDA is set to go on [[Creator/DianaRigg Diana rig]].

The show is set on the Ministry's “General Assistance Department,” an office that is designed to help other offices when they are overloaded with too much work. Typical episodes are centered around one or two assignments given by other offices. The staff of General Assistance Department are lazy and incompetent people determined to tangle in every bureaucratic thing, and HilarityEnsues: Assignments are mixed up, there are memos and letters that end up to the wrong people and misunderstandings resulting from communication problems. The result is usually complete chaos, ranging from traffic wardens ending up with ballerina outfits to the whole of Britain losing all physical currency.

!!''The Men from the Ministry'' contains examples of:

* AccidentalArt: Mr. Lamb's bicycle [[NoodleIncident apparently]] was run over by a truck, and after leaving it in the Ministry's lobby it had been displayed the next day as modern art.

* GladIThoughtOfIt: Pretty much every higher-up will take their employees and subordinates good ideas and claim credit for them, only to blame them if it goes wrong.

* HamsterWheelPower: "A Sense of Power" ends with Britain getting a new power source in the form of thousands of hamsters spinning a wheel-machine.

* NoPartyGiven: The current ruling party of the House of Commons never specified in the show, and "the opposition" is always referred to as just that. That being said, the Prime Minister is clearly a caricature of [[UsefulNotes/HaroldWilson Wilson]] in the original BBC run, and in the episodes of the Finnish run recorded in the 80's she's clearly a caricature of [[UsefulNotes/MargaretThatcher Thatcher]].

* OneDialogueTwoConversations: During an episode of tv program ''Panorama'' dedicated entirely to the Civil Service Sir Gregory is being interviewed on Ministry's Hospitality budgets. However, due to a mistake caused by the General Assistance Department the Interviewer Robin Gay thinks he is interviewing Sir Gregory about sex in the civil service. The result is as hilarious as you think:

** After Lennox-Brown and Lamb have an argument over the below-mentioned Stilton cheese purchase, he and Mr. Crawley hear Lennox-Brown and Mildred discussing killing a mouse which pests the office, which they interpret as Lennox-Brown and Mildred trying to kill Lamb.

* ShoutOut: "The Man who Made it Rain" has this exchange:

* WeatherControlMachine: One is the center of the episode "The Man Who Made it Rain". Somewhat of a deconstruction, since rapidly and suddenly changing the climate at a small area [[RealityEnsues ends up having much larger consequences elsewhere]], with the problems growing worse and worse each time the machine is used to fix the previous problems.

* {{Whitehall}}: The setting of the show.

** Happens quite often to Sir Gregory. Whenever One and Two are speaking about him in an insulting manner, he naturally storms into the office moments later and is greeted with said insult: for example, as Lennox-Brown has just called Sir Gregory [[GodwinsLaw "a proper little Hitler"]], he accidentally greets him as Sir Adolf.

* AdaptationExpansion: All the original BBC-produced episodes of the were restricted to 25-30 minutes so scripts were sometimes cut heavily... however, YLE gave no such restrictions during the production of the Finnish version, leading to episodes being anywhere from 25 to 48 minutes, often featuring full versions of gags which were either partially or completely left out from the originals.

* AgainstMyReligion: Mr. Crawley got himself excused from Ministry's flu-vaccination since he is a member of Portsmouth's Puritans who are against injections, though Lennox-Brown mockingly calls him a "devout coward."

* BadBoss[=/=]MeanBoss: Sir Gregory tends to be a rather huge JerkAss to One and Two and often hit them on his anger.

* BestOutOfInfinity: While the supercomputer CECIL is being installed on the General Assistance Department One and Two have ended up in a series of chess-matches against the Foreign Office, with the Foreign Office having won the first 60 games. [[spoiler: During the episode the Foreign Office wins the 61st game, but at the end of the episode CECIL manages to defeat them 10 times in a row]].

* BrickJoke: After a christmas pudding [[ItMakesSenseInContext that Lamb accidentally placed in Big Ben's leaver]] is removed from the machinery, Lennox-Brown tosses it out of the clock tower's window and dismisses Lamb's worries that it might've hit someone. Later on during a news-broadcast, the newsreader mentions that [[spoiler:the Prime Minister was hit in the head by a christmas pudding near the House of Commons.]]

* CompositeCharacter: The Finnish version combined the characters of Mr. "Whizzer" Wilkins and Mr. "Creepy" Crawley ([[SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute who were pretty much the same one already]]) into "Vinku" Wilkins, taking the former's name, stuttering and absent-mindedness and the latter's VerbalTic.

** How self-serving and/or corrupt Lord Stilton is also varies, as sometimes he's on board with Sir Gregory's morally questionable antics and sometimes he finds the appalling.

-->'''Crawley''': I'll go and see what I can do with these paperclips. Perhaps if I stick them in my whats-its-name.

* DubNameChange: The Finnish version has a lot of these. Most notably from Sir Gregory to Sir Henry, Roland to Hannibal and Lamb to Lamm. In addition, all but 17 of the 120 episodes originally featuring Lennox-Brown were aired with Hamilton-Jones in his place (and three episodes vice versa), and the change was only made due [[TheCharacterDiedWithHim due to the actor Kauko Helovirta's death in 1997]].

* EmbarrassingMiddleName: Mr. Lamb [[NegativeContinuity has several]], including Valentino, Cantebury and Hieronymous.

* ExplosiveStupidity: At one point One and Two have to get to House of Parliament through the sewers [[spoiler:because the package Mr. Lamb left there during their inspection has been mistaken for a bomb]] and the area is sealed by police and military. After snatching the package and attempting to leave Lennox-Brown drops the flashlight in water, and Lamb [[spoiler:lights up a match to help, not realizing it'll lit the flammable gasses of the sewers.]]

* FailedASpotCheck: Hamilton-Jones and Lamb in one episode come up with lots of creative ways to detect Sir Gregory's approach into the Office and repel his advances, including sprinkling sugar on the liner and smearing grease on the sill. [[spoiler: Sir Gregory ends up simply calling to the Office via telephone.]]
* FailureGambit: In "Confidence Trick", Lord Stilton and Sir Gregory send Lamb, Lennox-Brown and Mildred to Paris' international conference to buy pieces of Venus in hopes that they'll screw up and end up with nothing (They can't afford to have landowning-rights on Venus you see). [[spoiler:In this case it fails since the trio are so incompetent that they end up getting the whole planet, not to mention every other nation had the same idea.]]

** Mr. Lamb's landlord Mrs. Bardby is talked about a lot, but never physically appears on the series.

* InjectionPlot: "Don't Let Them Needle You" revolves around flu-vaccination that's going to be injected into all civil servants. Both Lennox-Brown and Lamb try in vain as hard as possible to avoid the shot, and HilarityEnsues: [[spoiler:in the hassle, a new truth drug meant to clear the minds of a couple of British astronauts gets mixed up with the vaccine, and as a result, all the [[ObstructiveBureaucrat staff in Whitehall]] begin to tell the truth.]]

* MistakenForSpies: During a trip to New York two poorly-worded notes One and Two left to their hotel and office back at London leave FBI and the British Government into thinking the two are spies planning on defecting to USSR.

* ObstructiveBureaucrat: Constant source of comedy: whenever One and Two oversee the businesses of others, they tend to attach on to the smallest of regulations and orders no matter how irrelevant they are. The two also often create forms full of questions that A) have nothing to do with the thing the form is about, and B) are impossible to answer.

* OpeningNarration: Every episode opens with the narrator explaining something about Ministry and/or it's workers.
* OneDialogueTwoConversations: During an episode of tv program ''Panorama'' dedicated entirely on the Civil Service Sir Gregory is being interviewed on Ministry's Hospitality budgets. However, due to a mistake caused by the General Assistance Department the Interviewer Robin Gay thinks he is interviewing Sir Gregory about sex in the civil service. The result is as hilarious as you think:

* PoorCommunicationKills: Staple of the show's humor: poorly worded notes end up causing havoc, telephone-conversations are misinterpreted due to being heard only from one end and out-of-context, and instructions aren't laid out properly leading to big misunderstandings among other things.
* PrankCall: After Lamb ([[PoorCommunicationKills thinks he]]) has been made the Permanent Under-Scretary, he spends most of his time making prank calls all across the ministry insulting and mocking pretty much everyone.

* RudelyHangingUp: Sir Gregory ends most of his phone-calls into the General Assistance Department by hanging up on One whenever he's halfway through his sentence.

* SeaMine: The episode "The Thing on the Beach" revolves around a sea mine on an English beach-resort that Mr. Lamb [[BombDisposal is forced to defuse]]. [[spoiler:It turns out to be a mine-shaped collecting box.]]

* SignsOfDisrepair: As Britain is struggling with an energy crisis, Sir Gregory comes up with an idea to cut fuel consumption by ordering the West End's neon signs to be shown only half the time. Unfortunately General Assistance Department fails to relay his orders properly, instead ordering the advertisement to show half the ''words''.

* TheSlacker: The staff of General Assistance Department tends to avoid work at all costs, only completing it on the last minute.

** Hamilton-Jones and Lennox-Brown are practically the same character with just different names and voice-actors.
** Series 9, 10, 11 and 14 feature Mr. Crawley, an odd man from the neighboring office that has many quirks. In Series 12 and 13 he is absent and is replaced by Mr. Wilkins, an odd man from the neighboring office with many quirks. The Finnish version [[CompositeCharacter simply makes them the same character.]]

* TheTelevisionTalksBack: When listening to a horse race from the radio all a sudden the speaker informs that horse My Wotsit (which everyone thought was going to lose) starts to moving up. Lamb says that they said that My Wotsit didn't have a chance, which the speaker replies that he was wrong in his earlier statement about My Wotsit's chances.

* TranquilFury: After Lamb accidentally buys thousand pounds worth of light Stilton cheese, Sir Gregory is pretty much this.

* ThriftyScot: Several ones pop up throughout the series, such as Sir Calvin [=McFrugal=], the financial advisor of the Ministry of Works who considers having two chocolate-biscuits during the elevenses insane extravagance.

** Mistaking that the General Assistance Department is the head of British Intelligence, two Soviet spies use their new experimental truth serum on Mr. Lamb in order to get information. Hidden on sugar, nobody realizes what causes them to blurt out the truth, until Sir Gregory stars showing the side-effects (hysterical laughter), after which they offer him more.

* AssumedWin: When Lamb is applying for the executive post of [[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment the Junior-Assistance-Deputy to the Assistant-Deputy-Junior to the Deputy-Junior-Assistant]], he assumes that he has got the job from the get-go because he is fifteen years senior to all other applicants. Upon receiving the letter from Staff Appointments, he doesn't even bother opening it until Lennox-Brown convinces him to at least read what exactly they are saying about his acceptance. Turns out Mr. Haggit from the cantine got the job instead.

-->'''Mildred''': I just saw Permanent Undersecretary in the passage. Any minute now he'll charge in here and say-

* EvenEvilHasStandards: Subverted. Sir Gregory wants One and Two to somehow get rid of Ms. Bentwater's overbearing mummy, and this exchange occurs.

* PoorCommunicationKills: Staple of the show's humor: poorly worded notes end up causing havoc, telephone-conversations are misinterpreted due to being heard only from one end and out-of-context and instructions aren't laid out properly leading to big misunderstandings among other things.

** Sir Clive (Replaces Sir Gregory in the Finnish version following actor Yrjö Järvinen's retirement) differs from his predecessor by his voice, he has an affair with a different secretary, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking and has a poodle.]]

'''Hamilton-Jones''': [[ObstructiveBureaucrat Well they can't have it.]] Stamp their letter "Permission refused" and [[ImplausibleDeniability tell them we haven't got one.]]

* BeleagueredBureaucrat: Mildred becomes one when she's promoted from secretary to a civil servant in "I Want My Mummy". As an acting junior executive, she doesn't have immunity yet and everyone else dumps their work on her, and because of the workload [[spoler:she ends up mixing the British Museum's Egypt exhibition and Mr. Crawley's order for traffic warden uniforms together, as well as accidentally sending the exhibition's mummy to a hotel in Paris.]]