Where some have a scale of cheese and tomato to express emotional distress, I have a BBC scale. Rather shit days require a dose of 'Red Dwarf,' which never fails to bring me back to simpler times. Times when Doc Martens were the coolest footwear possible, my friend Clare's penguin-shaped Mr Flibble eraser made her the coolest person ever, and the only people worth talking to were those who knew the entire back catalogue of the Doug Anthony All Stars by heart. Flat Sunday nights need the high seas homoeroticism of the original Captain Tight Pants Horatio Hornblower. But for the kind of PMS that sees me sobbing hysterically on the phone to my mother over 'The Tyra Banks Show,' however, I need the big guns. I need nothing less than 'Yes Minister.'

The thing about 'Yes Minister' is that, to put it politely, it's a touch dated. There's Jim Hacker poorly chromakeyed into his chauffeured car, matinee idol waves atop the kind of sagging, pale face that would never make it onto TV today, and there's Humphrey beside him chewing through his lines with breathless, over-articulated determination, and there's the, well, the other one, the underling who's always smirking a little. You get the sense that 20 yeas ago these gentlemen would have just killed at law revue and 'Yes Minister' is their nostalgic way of reliving the glory.

Of course, my parents loved 'Yes Minister,' and I loved watching it with them, pretending as though I knew why it was funny. Now that I'm grown up I can acknowledge that it often isn't, but there's a seven year old part of me that doesn't care. Finding 'Yes Minister' funny is part of my mental image of what makes a grown-up grown-up, along with picking up dry cleaning, wearing sensible shoes to work that make restrained clipping noises on the tiles, and being boring and tired at night.

Anyway, all that aside, if you're feeling a touch on the hormonal side perhaps you should get the stiff upper lip of Jim Hacker into you. Well, not literally, of course. What about this politically sensitive scene where the good Minister finds himself in some Middle Eastern country where no alcohol is served and his wife has to be made an honorary man before she can attend some official function? Of course, being plummily upper class and British, they have to be on the piss at all times, and so smirkingly keep calling each other into the quaintly named 'communications room' to take urgent calls from a Mr Haig and a Mr John Walker. Please also note the Middle Eastern dignitaries, who look like a collection of accountants at a Lawrence of Arabia theme party. This is middle class, polite comedy at its finest, people.