This news story is meant to be about the remote possibility that classic British sitcom 'Yes Minister' might be remade for American audiences.  We are supposed to write about how one of our favourite sitcoms of the 1980's, starring Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne, is to be reconstructed for U.S. viewers.  But we're not going to write about it.  Why?  Because we're bloody sick of it.

At present, every few days the BBC makes a press announcement that one of the big American television networks might have possibly expressed a remote interest in remaking one of the BBC's sitcoms.  Now, we ask ourselves, when taking the idea of a classic sitcom, changing the name, the setting, all the characters, all the storylines and the style of comedy, in what way is it the same show?  We have recently reported on the BBC sitcom 'Coupling' which was remade for an American audience and produced a series so terrible that it had to be abruptly pulled from the schedules mid-season.  We then reported that there are talks about a U.S. remake of The Office.  Presumably this will not be written by Gervais and Merchant, will not contain the excellently flawed cast of slough-based characters, and probably won't be set in an office.

No doubt 'Yes Minister' will be modified so that it is no-longer a clever political satire wreathed in the politics of the corridors of Whitehall and the subtleties of the friction between ministerial office and the civil service. Instead it will likely be set in a branch of Burger King and will have a plot which cleverly intertwines the day-to-day doldrums of an overly-well rounded white American Middle-class family with the reused jokes from season five-through-seven of The Cosby Show.  But it will still be Yes Minister.

Listen BBC.  Let the Americans keep sending us episodes of Friends, The Simpsons and Family Guy, and we will send them Fawlty Towers and The Fast Show, and no-one will need to modify anything, and we can stop calling this cherade "News."