....It is better not to see them being made.' So said sausage-eater-in-chief, Otto von Bismarck. This was before the Yes Minister campaign to save the Great British Sausage from being re-branded by Eurocrats as the "emulsified high-fat offal tube":

Yes Minister is offally relevant today, especially with the tripe that is currently in Government. Co-creator Anthony Jay explains why in The Telegraph. (Does he read this site?)

We discovered that the further you delved into the realities of government, the funnier it all became. Who could invent a plot in which a schizophrenic clambered over the walls of Buckingham Palace, climbed into the Queen’s bedroom, and cadged a cigarette off her? Impossible – until Michael Fagan did exactly that in 1982.

And even when it turned out that the British television audience got the joke, we didn’t expect it to go any further. Well, possibly to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who had similar political systems, but that was about it.

Except that it wasn’t. In the end, 80 different countries took it, some such as Holland and India translating the scripts and producing their own versions. We even found, from Peter Ustinov, that Samizdat copies were circulating rapidly (and illegally) in Soviet Russia.

So when we learned this week that the BBC had done a deal with the Ukraine to produce translations of all five series of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, we reacted with pleasure rather than astonishment. Even so, it is still a question why such a national – even parochial – programme should appeal to audiences living in so many different cultures and under such different political systems.

Part of the answer lies in the small amount we were paid – £1,200 a script, less agent’s commission, divided between the two of us. It was worth more 30 years ago, obviously, but in view of the time it took us to research and write each script it certainly did not constitute a living wage. So we could not give up our day jobs. We had to get together to write whenever we could, which might be many months before the scheduled transmission date. That ruled out any possibility of topical jokes; the humour had to come from the permanent tensions and conflicts between ministers and civil servants, between politics and government.

We had to get down to basics, to the classic actors’ studio question: “What’s my motivation?” There are two answers: the expressed, publicly acceptable motivation, and the real motivation. The minister’s declared motivation is to serve the voters, to satisfy their hopes and aspirations, at whatever personal sacrifice. His real motivation is to get promoted, to get re-elected, to burnish his own and the government’s image.

The civil servant’s declared motivation is to carry out the wishes of the government efficiently, economically and impartially, working conscientiously and tirelessly to turn ministers’ policies into just, beneficial and workable laws. Their real motivation is to raise their personal status, to enhance the importance of their department, to avoid blame, to gain credit, to minimise work, to resist change, and to retire with an index-linked pension, a knighthood and the chairmanship of a couple of quangos and a seat on the board of a blue-chip company.

It seems that this wider divergence between appearance and reality is not just a British – or even Western-democratic – phenomenon. Gogol wrote The Government Inspector in the 1830s and it exploits this joke – in local rather than national government – in exactly the same way, to the delight of modern audiences.