The Day Today is a British comedy television show that parodies television news and current affairs programmes, broadcast from 19 January to 23 February 1994 on BBC2. It was created by Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris and is an adaptation of the radio programme On the Hour, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 9 August 1991 and 28 May 1992 and was also written by Morris, Iannucci, Steven Wells, Andrew Glover, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, David Quantick, and the cast. For The Day Today, Peter Baynham joined the writing team, and Lee and Herring were replaced by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews. The principal cast of On the Hour was retained for The Day Today.
The Day Today is composed of six half-hour episodes and a selection of shorter five-minute slots recorded as promotional trailers for the longer episodes. The series won many awards including Morris winning the 1994 British Comedy Award for Best Newcomer. All six episodes are available on BBC DVD, having previously been issued on VHS.
Format
Each episode is presented as a mock news programme, and the episodes rely on a combination of ludicrous fictitious news stories, covered with a serious, quasi-professional attitude. Each episode revolves around one or two major stories, which are pursued throughout the programme, along with a host of other stories usually only briefly referred to. In addition, the programme dips into other channels from time to time, presents clips of fictitious upcoming BBC programmes, and conducts street interviews with members of the public, in a segment titled Speak Your Brains.
The programme frequently comments on other programmes, most often a spoof soap opera called The Bureau, set in a 24-hour bureau de change, incorporating clichéd soap opera-style plots, which apparently produces and airs 2,000 episodes between the first and third episodes of The Day Today and becomes a hit in Italy. The programme also contains clips from a spoof documentary series called The Pool, featuring a public swimming pool and its neurotic staff, Morris' character explaining that The Day Today has funded a documentary on every public building in the country. The final episode features reports from the fictitious documentary The Office, which follows office workers as they go on a retreat with an efficiency expert. Other non-news segments of the programme include the occasional "physical cartoons" of current events set in the studio. Morris frequently parodies entirely separate channels, including RokTV (spoofing MTV); reporting on the fictitious and psychotically violent African-American rapper Fur-Q; and Genutainment, a segment which reports on a sheepdog averting a helicopter disaster in a parody of the real-life rescue show 999.
The programme occasionally features producer Armando Iannucci and writer Peter Baynham, the latter playing Gay Desk reporter Colin Poppshed, among other characters. John Thomson, Graham Linehan, Tony Haase and Minnie Driver also appear. Michael Alexander St John provides the voiceover stings, as he did in On the Hour.
Much of the programme's humour derives from its bombastic style of reporting, and its unnecessarily elaborate graphics. The theme tune is deliberately overdramatic and self-important within the opening sequence of each episode is lengthy and complex, a parody of the overuse of computer-generated credit sequences on news programmes (as the graphics throughout were developed and designed by ITN). One episode presents false adverts featuring depictions of The Day Today being broadcast in bizarre locations; the night sky over Paris, the sides of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the "International Hackenbacker Building" in Chicago, and the handles of 400 million petrol pumps across the globe; this is a parody of CNN International's promotions advertising the hotels in which the channel could be seen. Morris presents aggressively, often arguing with reporters and insulting guests on-air, and at one stage provoking a war between Australia and Hong Kong.
The programme frequently lambasts Conservative government politicians in office at the time of the programme's production. Those repeatedly lampooned by the series include John Major, Michael Heseltine (who had his picture swapped with an old Bosnian woman), Chris Patten, Douglas Hurd, Virginia Bottomley, and Michael Portillo, in addition to US President Bill Clinton. Labour politician Paul Boateng also appears briefly in an interview about the fictitious musician 'Herman the Tosser'.