I thought, my children would enjoy Yes, Minister, especially my daughter who works in a bureaucratic position. All of my children have large vocabularies; they are My children. It may take a minute to parse what Sir Humphrey is spinning, but they won’t be at a loss over the face-value meaning of the words. I asked them. One demurred; she has to work tonight and isn’t very interested. But the others agreed to watch with me this evening at their home. I will, of course, bring chocolate with me; I always do and they always appreciate it.

I checked Amazon Prime, thinking, what if there’s some glitch in the internet? I’d better download the episodes so they’ll be on my computer regardless. Amazon has an app set up for the purpose; you download shows you own and they play them in their proprietary app. That way there’s no question of what format the video is in, no messing about with codecs or getting your own computer to properly read the file. I paused to read reviews of their app in the Google Play Store, where apps are distributed. The reviews were terrible. (In this context anything less than four stars out of five is deplorable and should be avoided.) The reviews talked about low resolution playback when they had bought a higher resolution format; that means it looked blurry. Reviewers said the app glitched, froze up, refused to respond, stopped mid-video, forced a restart of their device and then didn’t work at all. Now, people use this app on lots of computers; a few problems are not unheard of. But when there are enough bad reviews to pull the average down, you know it’s a problem. We’re paying for good service and we’d better get it.

Plus, I own these videos; I should be able to download them and play them in whatever appropriate player I happen to own, whether through their app or not. I searched for full episodes online, and found the Internet Archive had them available free. Someone felt they were historically significant, as well as hysterically funny, and had them uploaded there. The Archive had four different formats available; I watched one episode in browser to make sure they were full unaltered episodes. Then I chose a format and started the download. The first format didn’t work. I didn’t have whatever it was I needed to read the files. So I downloaded a different format. It took over an hour and a half to download the files. There were 37 files, I think. I let my computer run all night and in the morning I fired up the computer’s internal player.

All four seasons were there, including the Christmas special that segues into Yes, Prime Minister, the follow-up series. I watched an entire episode, no problems. It worked. The only thing it cost me, besides having a device capable of playing it, which I would need anyway, was time to search and download it. You might argue that if it’s still in copyright (it probably is), getting it from the archive or from any other non-paid site is piracy. Well yes, there’s that. But when pirates give better service, quicker, more reliable access, consistently, and greedy “legitimate” channels make it as difficult as possible, with lots of strings and hooks, what do you do?

Yes, Minister.