YMMV / The Men from the Ministry

• Accidental Innuendo: "Fair Exchange" has this little moment:
  Sir Gregory: In a few bungling minutes you've made our currency worthless!
  Lennox-Brown: What... what are you going to do, Sir Gregory?
  Sir Gregory: You for a start!
• Bizarro Episode:
  • "The Day the Martians Came". Two Little Green Men land on England, hijinx ensue, and... that's it. No All Just a Dream, no "Scooby-Doo" Hoax or anything like that, and the landing is never referred to again at all (admittedly in a series that pretty much runs on Negative Continuity). Note that this is the only episode where something explicitly supernatural happens.
  • There's another episode written exclusively for the Finnish version that's weirder than the most, even if it was All Just a Dream: The duo finds a Mermaid, who knows all about One and Two because she listens to ''The Men From the Ministry'', and all three then praise the show. She demands the duo to show her London, or she'll tell everyone about their past screwups. (It's not explained how she could do this if the show exists In-Universe, since otherwise, everyone would know about them, although her radio could be from Finland.)
• Designated Hero: Mildred comes off like this in the episode "Thoroughly Modern Ministry". There's an attempt to modernize the ministry, which includes replacing the incompetent porter Mathews. He is fired and replaced by the duo, after which Mildred starts calling them cold-hearted, despite the fact that the two are just doing their jobs and it likely would improve the ministry's reputation. She then gives Mathews the ways to cancel his replacement's appearance, despite the fact that this would get Lennox-Brown and Lamb in serious trouble, and considering that their boss has literally threatened to murder them, this comes off as hypocritical from her. Nobody ever calls her out on this.
• Fair for Its Day: The Finnish dub's awkward Asian accents mentioned under Values Dissonance somewhat date the translation to the 1970-2000 period most episodes were recorded in, as while commonplace then, the accent would be seen as a bit more offensive these days.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: As mentioned on the main page, the show managed to stay constantly on the airwaves for 30 years in Finland.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the episode "Horse Play", a doll bought for Mildred is described by Lamb as looking like "A cross between Jimmy Savile and Mrs. Thatcher".
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In one episode, Mildred mentions she was harassed at the cafeteria by someone named "Swift" from another office. This was long before the office would be led by one Sir Clive Swift, to whom harassing female employees wouldn't be Out of Character. It's very likely they aren't meant to be the same person, but given how Sir Clive got his position through Nepotism you can easily pretend they are.
• Ho Yay: In "Health and Deficiency", Mildred tries to find Lamb a spouse and talks to Crawley about it, but he misunderstands that she wants him to marry Lamb. He's unsure about it and his only stated concern is that Lamb might snore.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: While Sir Gregory is a Bad Boss to the core, his underlings are also the most incompetent people of Whitehall, and often his anger is more than justified.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Since the show is 100% audio, it uses stereotypical accents so people could tell what ethnicity the characters were. In most cases, it works just fine and arguably adds to the charm, but the Asian Speekee Engrish accent used for Asian characters is rather cringe-worthy today.
  • The amount of flamboyantly Camp Gay characters in the original BBC run can also be rather appalling. Luckily the Finnish version tones down almost all of them.
• Values Resonance: While the show does show its age at points, it's not exactly outdated either.
  • Sir Gregory's affairs with younger staff are usually treated as at least somewhat predatory, especially since he tends to target women much dumber than he is. Adultery in general is frowned upon by most characters.
  • The show likes to play with stereotypes. The episode "Moderately Important Person" involves an Arab prince who is clearly built up as a sexist who wants to add April to the list of his many wives - but by the end, he has voluntarily given full control of his country to one of his wives, who wants to add Hamilton-Jones to her list of husbands. Accidentally or not, the episode also contrasts the prince's polyamorous marriage by making the married Hamilton-Jones interested in one of the prince's wives.

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