Yes Minister - Season 1 (1980)

The Minister wants to give citizens access to their files on a new national database, but Sir Humphrey is at his obfuscating best. Accused by his political advisor and his wife of being a mouthpiece for the civil service, Hacker decides that he is going to get his way on this one. Taking the advice of his predecessor, now an Opposition MP, he successfully anticipates all of Sir Humphrey's roadblocks but, in the end, uses the civil servants' own tactics to get his way.

The Minister's frustrations with the civil service continue when Sir Humphrey, at his bureaucratic best, doesn't quite deliver the policy paper the Minister is seeking. Hacker wants to announce a cut of 200,000 civil servants and so decides to write the paper himself. He takes it a step further when he announces the planned cuts during a TV interview. The whole thing blows up in his face when the Prime Minister decides that the first cut will be Hacker's own Department. Suddenly, he and Sir Humphrey are on the same side fighting to keep their jobs.

Once again, the Minister, Jim Hacker and the permanent Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, clash over the Minister's role in running the Department. The Minister instructs his senior civil servant to keep nothing from him and he is promptly flooded with everything under the sun. For Sir Humphrey, the Minister's meeting with constituents concerned about saving a local den of badgers is exactly the kind of work he should be doing. When he learns that Hacker's daughter will stage a nude protest over her father's decision on the badgers, Appleby must come to the rescue.

The Minister goes on the BBC to extol the virtues of a public-private partnership project but when he learns that the private firm involved may soon go bankrupt, it is up to Sir Humphrey to see exactly what can be done to salvage the situation. He approaches a banker, Sir Desmond Glazer, who also happens to be interested in a part-time government appointment. The Minister's political advisor however is advising that all such Ministerial patronage appointments be abolished.