Well If Art Gets Funding, Why Shouldn't Football? | Yes Minister | BBC Comedy Greats 

Bernard´s face... priceless!

In 2010, a local council in Britain used government funds allocated to provide services for the disabled to send a learning-disabled man to Amsterdam to hire a prostitute, thereby subsidizing sex. There is a thin line between parody and prophecy.

Bernard was the absolute best character

PaREntAl LeaVe pAY

And here we are: 40-50 years after this was filmed and STILL no subsidy for sex! 🤣

But Hacker feels fine

definitely trolling

Bernard was Stone Cold with that line.

Bernard's best moment during this scene was his expression when Hacker pointed at him and said "Why should the working man on the terrace have to foot the bill for the gentry in the stalls?"

In the end Sir Humphrey was still successful

@@felixlps1 hacker and Humphrey were both successful. Hacker got another ministry, meaning a slight promotion. Humphrey made his department bigger, making sure that all civil servants realised his cunning.

That would be an interesting business - Opera on a bus.

What is Watney's red barrel? Is it martian beer?

I had to think about it to understand it LOL, it IS brilliant

I didn't understand this, could you please explain this joke?

@@AnirudhSrivatsa "Work outing" for most people would be a couple beers down at the pub, not a night at the opera in full tuxedo

@PatchesRips Jim Hacker came to power in part due to nationalistic public sentiment against EU mandates from Brussels, particularly regulations that would force the relabeling of the traditional "English sausage" into something unappealing like the "high-fat offal tube." Jim Hacker was elected to protect the beloved English sausage from the dreaded Eurosausage.

@PatchesRips to be fair, someone who is around their age at the time would have been children/young men during the war. I imagine it can be hard to not have that influence your views on certain countries that you were at war with in your lifetime. I imagine it is understandable.

At the same time, he was a "good European" and tjought about accepting a job in Brussels. Not the man one would expect to be comllaining abiut subsidizing the cultures of Axis Powers.

@@thiagodeandrade7081 well, that wasn't really his issue, he made it as a counter argument for humphrey saying culture must be subside to be preserved and hacker fired back by saying "it's not really english culture is it?" the point was to call humphrey on his bullshit and to point out the real reason is self indulgence of the middle-class.

@@blaze4111 Sure. He was being witty and sarcastic. Still, not the kind of argument he would like to see associated to him in the papers.

That's the beauty of the show. No one's wrong. That's brilliant writing.

@@ahmadyasin8674 I'd say those guys trying to keep a hospital with no patients running were firmly in the wrong.

@@ahmadyasin8674 One side is the people with less power (or money) in the country and the other side is the one with more power (and money) in the country.

@@matthewcoates756 Doesn't mean one side is better than the other - envy of the wealthy has always been a thing, but it doesn't mean that they're wrong.

As I grow older and work longer, more and more I’m on Humphrey’s side.

I think of this as quite right-leaning. It argues for less government intervention and letting business stand or fall on its own merit. It only uses the left-leaning “subsidizing the middle class” language as a tool.

I think the christmas special indicates. Since Labour are far too queasy about kicking their own out, the Tories where brutal. There's a brilliant scene where Humphrey asks Hacker if he's being Indecisive, and Hacker starts panicking.

The writers have actually indicated Hacker was written with a moderate Conservative party minister in mind. It becomes a bit more obvious in the Yes, Prime Minister series, in particular in the scenes with his political assistant.

I'm lean slightly to the right and I agreed with almost everything he said. That's actually the brilliance of the writers. They don't make things like this anymore. More like they can't.

Hacker is always looking to cut costs, cut taxes and is only too happy to pick a fight with the unions. So clearly a conservative but perhaps small c

i think it was patronage - different from subsidies. But then, i could be wrong.

It's worth noting that 9 million pounds, even in the 1980s, is nothing by the standards of Government expenses. That 9 million pounds would be worth about 35 million pounds today, roughly comparable to what was spent to build the first Wembley Stadium in the 1920s (750k, 45 million in today's pounds). Both of those suns are small fry compared to the 60 billion pound defense budget, the 115 billion pound budget for the NHS, and the other 700 billion pound in the budget over all. If a Minister is complaining about 0.004% of the budget being wasted, he's probably politically grandstanding, and if a country like the UK can't afford to spend more than 0.004% of its budget on art *and* more than 0.004% of its budget on sport at the same time, and still do everything else it needs to, it's in serrious trouble.

@@jesseberg3271 sums

@@jesseberg3271 No one here is claiming that we can't build infrastructure. If there is a demand for more theaters, I say the government should step in and help to some extent...although, if there was such a high demand for more theaters then the government wouldn't have to subsidise anything - they would have the money to do it themselves. The issue at hand is government sponsoring of a highly unprofitable branch which only serves as a mean of acquiring feelings of moral and intellectual superiority among the select few. Throwing in national defense and healthcare in that conversation is completely ridiculous.

@@markomarkovic8177 yeah gotta love the false equivalence of literal lifesaving with literal snobbery

@@markomarkovic8177 I can tell you that all theaters, museums etc... would have to close (also btw. not only rich people go to theaters, but without cheap tickets no one from below the high class could afford a ticket). And if you CAN'T see that this would make society poorer and more boring even, than you should maybe go to North Korea or to Afghanistan to see how you like a life without music, theater, movie theaters, sports. Living in cities without variety even without public displays of art like sculptures, paintings, artful parks etc... Not really worth living. Only a sociopath might enjoy such a society like very fitting Kim Jong-Un.

You wouldn't have an Internet on which to say this if it hadn't been for public subsidy.

Well opera houses aren’t things that ‘ought to be having’ either, if u come to think about it and some others would beg to differ.

And who gets to decide what the people aught to have?

If people don’t want it they shouldn’t ought to have it.

@@ZATennisFan a conservative government....local or central

There are two other shows made here in Australia that are in the same vein, both made by the same production company. There was The Hollowmen, which was about the civil servants who have to work around the offices of power and now there's Utopia, which is about the Nation Building Authority, which is a new government organisation and how they cope with bureaucracy combined with the ambitions of government. Both are HIGHLY recommended, although you might get a bit frustrated by the latter show, as you really feel for the protagonists and how they're forced to cope with things. Still great though :)

@@jeremyadler9620 nice one thanks I'll have a look at them 👍

@@robmarrin6720, Hope you enjoy them :)

@@jeremyadler9620 Oh this does sound good, hopefully not too difficult for non-Australians to understand.

@@MrThorfan64, I doubt it'll be difficult to get. It's all pretty straightforward :)

Yes, Sir Humphrey's case is definitely stronger here

Nopes! It was not subsidy. It was patronage. That is different from subsidy. In the book version Hacker makes this point.

@Lauren Michelle Lynley Might it be inopportune to point out that the Royals owned a significant of the country and were stinking rich to start with? Slightly besides the point, but the Medici's, the original big bankers, that probably would have made the Rothschild's look like school kids, paid for almost all of the Renaissance.

@@narendrapanse7844 Not inopportune if true. And it is true. Here is a short version of how economic systems evolved: Medieveal Feudalism -> Mercantiilism -> Laissez Faire Capitalism -> Social-Democratic Capitalism. The movement of money was always from the top to bottom regarding subsidies or patronage and from bottom to top regarding production. Serfs give X amount of assets to their lord = lord is rich. Then lord provides X amount of assets to whomever they deem fit. Granted, lords didn't do that much. But someone always had to pay for artworks. In order to pay, these artworks had to be directed at something of interest. So, go to any museum in Europe, look at Renaissance paitings, and you'll see some 90% of painting Biblical motifs. As with modern system of subsidies, the model of patronage relies on money earned by someone at the top and distributing it to someone below themselves. Now, how did the rich become the rich? That's an interesting question. In Feudalism, it was taxes. In Mercantilism, taxes, or investments via credit or both in combination. In early capitalism, the asset was labor of people in factories (something that deluded Marx in trying to build an economic system out if it - an unsurprising failure at that), and in the modern system it's taxes again, but now with greater accountability than before and with the knowledge of where (for some/the most part) the tax money is going. But that is just public subsidies. Private investing is still present, as it was in mercantilism, and it too can have tremendous public benefit. For instance a bunch of programs on PBS are financed by private foundations. So, it's a complex topic, and a fascinating array of historical developments, but one common thread is that the arts cannot, and never could have, survived on their own. Someone 'upstairs' always needed to support them, and the public interest was never sufficient for that (the great 'Myth of the Public' would have you believe that once people enjoyed arts more than today, but that is simply not true). Anyway, thanks to the great show for inspiring this diatribe. :)

Perfectly

Mostly because they do not need to. This will be applicable in all governments, for ever.

You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

I agree somewhat with Hackett's sentiment about the arts being primarily accessible to the elites of society, but I disagree with his takeaway. The solution should not be to just fund things that are accessible to the greater mass of the public (like commercial sports), but rather to make the arts more accessible to the wider public. Demand subsidies for galleries and symphonies be used to make tickets cheaper. Have set nights where the opera or symphony is free, and the performance in a large enough venue to accommodate as many people as possible. Limit the number of tickets that can be sold in advance to avoid them only going to people with connections. I firmly believe these things have benefits to society and people, and having them trapped behind a paywall is almost obscene...

@@Robert-hz9bj Yeah, if the complaint's that only the wealthy/influential get in, taking subsidies away isn't gonna make things any better.

...which is enjoyed by the masses majority of whom, probably couldn't afford cable or subscription based tv. If its left to Bernard (and, yours truly too!), we'd be subsidizing for better quality on The Sun's Page 3, which is of course, still enjoyed by the masses .....

Bernard is a stand-in that represents the wider audience, the people who are watching the show (hence the questions that he usually asks Jim/Humphrey that the audience themselves would). So he really refers to "the working man" even though it is a fourth-wall-breaking kind of a deal.

I'm with Hacker more but 100% with him when he mentions films.

Yes, the subsidised art that can be enjoyed by the masses, the same kind he promoted in the first place

No its not. PATRONAGE is not "public subsidy" and patronage is exactly what should be supporting the Arts. Build tax breaks into it if necessary... but make it PRIVATE sponsorship.

Do you seriously think that if the average person had the time and money to see a play or opera that they would not? It is one of the things in the ex-Socialist countries that the people miss the most! They could see the entire Wagner library over the weekend for pocket change. You think people in America wouldn't do the same for a Sondheim series? I know a dozen.

@@jeffreymeehan3116 in socialist countries the art world be censored

Reportedly, Maggie Thatcher loved it.

What arts?

massively profitable sporting franchises getting multimillion stadiums on the taxpayer's dime

You have arts?

It's from a later episode, but: "ALL governments are ALWAYS being criticized for not giving enough to the arts."

Neither should get funding

Would you say it was...Barbarism?

Culture is what people consume. Mona Lisa is just a nice portrait. Made for sale.

Based on what I've read about white tie attire, he may need every second he can get...

I've never understood the argument of repatriation. In most cases the objects wouldn't currently exist if the British museum hadn't valued it's worth, helped understand it's story and how it fits into cultural heritage and been a damn good caretaker.