I’m Sorry, Prime Minister — A Lecture Wearing the Skin of Yes Minister Just seen I’m Sorry, Prime Minister in London. I left genuinely disappointed. It felt less like Yes Minister and more like being lectured at for two hours. The original series remains timeless because it trusted the audience. Every character was flawed, intelligent, self-interested, occasionally right, and occasionally ridiculous. The satire emerged naturally from bureaucracy, politics, ego, and institutional behaviour. This adaptation was painfully unsubtle. Much of the script revolved around lecturing the audience on fashionable contemporary orthodoxies, with Sophie repeatedly framed as the morally superior character correcting the older “pale, male and stale” figures around her. The deeper craftsmanship of the original — subtlety, balance, layered dialogue, and believable political manoeuvring — was largely absent. Instead, much of the writing felt clumsy, crass, tedious, and intellectually insulting. Avoid.

Slow moving, depressing and nothing like the well known tv series. Bernard is dead, Hacket has accidents in the toilet, Sir Humphrey and Hacket dynamic is wrong way round and the placing of an Oxford grad as a care worker to make a point about failed government policies just one of many political statements that are made in place of any genuine good writing.

The fact that the two main characters are a former PM and senior civil servant (let alone that we knew and loved) is for the most part irrelevant. The play is best summarised thus: Two old codgers saying things like 'the empire was a good thing' or saying 'why does a University reading list need a trigger warning, and a young female lecturing them about why they can't say such things; about how slavery is bad; why an academic text should have trigger warnings. There is a meandering stale part about Brexit too. Because the enlightened bright young thing is lecturing the old people on stage, it feels rather as if she is lecturing the audience as well. The talk in the loo queue during the interval was "this wasn't what I was expecting". There was not an ounce of satire and few jokes. The only relief was when Sir Humphrey launched into one of his locquacious speeches. I know I haven't mentioned the plot.....There wasn't really one. Avoid. Sadly.

If you were a fan of Yes, Prime Minister don't waste your money. This has an extremely poor, unfunny dialogue that went nowhere. If you don't enjoy the first act leave at the interval, the second act is worse. I kept on waiting for something amusing to happen, it didn't.