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The Men From The Ministry

English radio comedy, broadcast from 1962-77 and 1980.

Written by John Graham and Edward Taylor, produced by Edward Taylor, and starring Wilfrid Hyde-White (series 1 and 2), Deryck Guyler (series 3 to 14) and Richard Murdoch (series 1 to 14); with Norma Ronald as Mildred (series 1 to 14).

This is a gently satirical comedy about the British civil service, set in a (fictional) government ministry in Whitehall called the 'General Assistance Department', that supplies help to any government department which is overloaded.

The stars of the show are Number One (initially Mr Hamilton-Jones, played by Wilfrid Hyde-White; later Mr Derek Lennox-Brown, played by Deryck Guyler) and Number Two (Mr Richard Lamb, played by Richard Murdoch). They are assisted by secretary Mildred (played by Norma Ronald), and perpetually at odds with their boss, Sir Gregory Pitkin (played latterly by Ronald Baddiley).

Deryck Guyer took over the lead in the show when Wilfrid Hyde-White was unavailable for the recording of the third series, due to filming commitments in Hollywood. The name of Guyler's character, Mr Lennox-Brown, came about because in real life he was married to one of the sisters in a music-hall act called The Lennox Three.

This collection comprises all the editions of the show which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 7, plus some rare editions from the 1980 series which was broadcast only on BBC World Service (so has never been heard in the UK, apart from one edition which was broadcast in 1990 as a tribute to Richard Murdoch, following his death earlier that year).

There are many recordings from this show floating about the internet in poor quality, but none of those are included here: these recordings are top-quality only.


The files listed in the column VBR MP3 are not in fact variable bit rate files. This is a column for files which do not fall into any of the Archive's standard bitrate categories. Most of these on this page are 80 Kbps, at a sample rate of 48 kHz.


This audio is part of the collection: Old Time Radio

Keywords: Old Time Radio; OTR; Comedy; The Men From The Ministry

Individual Files

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Reviewer: DrSativa - - October 30, 2009
Subject: good stuff
Plenty of good gentle humour, decent quality files too.
(VLC plays everything and is FREE)

Reviewer: XMinusOne - - March 29, 2009
Subject: The purpose of comments...
The purpose of comments isn't to rip other members because they don't have the latest software; many people don't have all availble software, let alone the latest editions of all available software. There's no reason to not have some civility on this thread.

If we can't offer "suggestions" or "advice", then let's talk about the shows that have been uploaded for everyone's use.

Reviewer: Shadows_Girl - - March 29, 2009
Subject: Men From The Ministry
They play just dandy on Real Player (which, just as it says) plays ANYTHING. When are you cheap barstards gonna part with a couple of shekels and get a DECENT media player"

BTW They also play in Windows Media Player 11 which is free---update your stuff once in awhile will you, please?

Reviewer: Ed 999 - - November 1, 2007
Subject: The Men from the Ministry
Probably because they are MPEG 1.0 layer 2 files.

They play okay in Winamp 5 (any version from v 5.0 onward), in Media Player Classic, and in Windows Media Player v6.4.

Reviewer: lewagner - - October 27, 2007
Subject: MS MPEG-1(50) codec
For some strange reason windows Media will not play these programs. Creative Media will play them but not on an MP3.

Any suggestions?