It’s hard to overstate the shock of the new that accompanied first exposure to The Day Today in January 1994. News parodies had existed before. But none even remotely as acute or as painstakingly assembled as this. Somehow, creators Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci had delivered not just ham-fisted political satire cobbled on to a few throwaway punchlines but a whole parallel TV world with its own hierarchies, visual and verbal grammar and inexorable internal logic. A world in which statements such as “Headmaster suspended for using big-faced child as satellite dish” and “Bouncing elephantiasis woman destroys central Portsmouth” could be delivered to camera with an entirely straight face.
The key to the impression given by The Day Today of arriving, out of the blue and fully formed was, of course, that it was nothing of the sort. The show was almost half a decade in gestation. Morris had spent several years learning (and twisting, for his own mischievous ends) the craft of radio presentation. In 1991, he and Iannucci launched On the Hour, a devastatingly accomplished spoof of radio news magazines. A TV version was an obvious next step.
But The Day Today wasn’t just a straight transfer; it was a quantum leap. Oddly, the key to the show’s success wasn’t the ludicrousness but the credibility. The tone and manner of Morris’s pompous anchor was immaculate – Jeremy Paxman with the bombast turned up to 11. The graphics and music were calibrated to edge just far enough into the realms of absurdity. The attention to detail bordered on the ridiculous – a 10-second snippet reporting a police initiative to release tigers into the houses of noisy party hosts involved a long, gruelling and expensive shoot with a real animal and its professional handler.
Unusually, it was a news satire that poked barely any fun at the individuals making the news. No party political points were being made here. Instead, it was the kind of satire that would be recognised by media scientist Marshall McLuhan. As McLuhan famously proclaimed: “the medium is the message”. Much of The Day Today’s comedy was found in its subversion of form rather than its manipulation of content.
Take episode one’s Jam Festival segment. What might happen if the adversarial demeanour of a journalistic attack-dog like Paxman was brought to bear on a light-hearted “And Finally …” news package? Awful and hilarious things, obviously, leading to the breakdown of a kindly middle-aged woman on national television. The theory was potentially dry; the reality was uproarious. This was the key to The Day Today’s enduring brilliance. It had a brain the size of Saturn but even if you weren’t a media studies graduate, it was irresistible viewing.
Central to the show’s universal appeal were some traditional and timeless comedy values. Character was crucial. Performance was everything. Many of the recurring segments are miniature comic masterpieces in themselves: the reporting misadventures of Patrick Marber’s Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan; the magnificently incomprehensible business updates of Collaterlie Sisters (Doon Mackichan) and, of course, the early, stumbling steps of sports reporter Alan Partridge. It seems fitting that the most convincingly sustained comedy character in the history of British television made his small screen bow here – each of these characters felt carefully constructed, as if they could all have a diverting backstory.
One series of The Day Today was enough. This was a cast and crew that couldn’t be contained for long within the bounds of a single show. Unlike Morris’s next TV project Brass Eye, The Day Today never came back for seconds. Instead it sowed the seeds that enabled multiple careers to blossom. Even the writing team, which included Graham Linehan, Arthur Mathews and David Quantick, feels like a list of 90s comedy heavyweights.
Still, there was one very slight return. Search the easter eggs on the DVD release and you’ll find that a few of the major players couldn’t quite resist an encore. There’s a wonderful rambling excerpt of a conversation between Morris’s anchor and Partridge, during which Alan’s conspiracy theories concerning the death of Princess Diana are explored. And better still, a report by Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan, ostensibly from the World Trade Centre, on 11 September 2001. Both are pointed and hilarious; object lessons in comedy construction. The Day Today was Fake News, years ahead of its time. But unlike most Fake News, the moral intentions were unimpeachable and the quality of the forgery impeccable.
