Here's a good question: what is the most subversive TV programme ever broadcast in Britain? I would say there are only two possible answers to this question: Brass Eye and The Day Today. The 'Eye probably shades it, being so perfect, so extreme, that no-one, not even Chris Morris himself, could take it any further. But TDT was the most devastatingly accurate demolition of its target (specifically, pompous, pseudo-authoritative TV news, and more generally the trend towards lowest-common-denominator tabloid TV). Most British satire simply isn't worthy of the name - either it's pseudo-"anarchic" outrage-by-numbers (we're talking The 11 O'clock Show, the equivalent of those losers who were still punks in 1985) or bumblingly ineffectual Daily Telegraph gentility (Rory Bremner - Who Else?). By contrast, TDT jumped in, bit the hand that fed it up with a rare ferocity, and ensured we could never take television news seriously again.
TDT's brilliance came at least partly from its apparently authoritative, po-faced presentation. The humour remained unacknowledged and more importantly (and rarely for a comedy series) untelegraphed. In the anchorman role, Morris identified all the vocal tics and physical mannerisms of many news presenters, but above all Jeremy Paxman, Michael Buerk and the ludicrously self-important Alistair Stewart of ITN and Carlton. Morris said at the time "When London Tonight came out, we thought 'Fuck this parody business'", and a contemporary Channel 4 critique of news programmes put clips of London Tonight and TDT next to each other to make much the same point. TDT's greatest asset was its obsessive attention to detail, coupled with an inbuilt desire to subvert the certainties of both the present and the past. So for example, the mock-up of a hanging on live television in 1953 both satirized the conventions of early TV and showed our cosy vision of the somehow innocent '50s up for the nonsense that it is. It ended with the former musical director of Play Away and presenter of Music Time, Jonathan Cohen, transported back in time, his name, along with those of George Clinton and Malcolm Muggeridge, incongruously written in credits in the early BBC style. Similarly, our vision of George Formby was changed forever when he appeared singing Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, and it became impossible to take seriously the "What it was like in the war" school of documentary when 80-year-old women related their experiences of hibernating to help the war effort and eating their own houses when food became scarce.
Out-of-context quotes of politicians, usually a whimsical irrelevance, were honed to perfection (Morris: "Why can't I be king? - asks Patten" Chris Patten: "What would be unreasonable about that proposal?"). And then there was the word "cunts" uttered by an anonymous Tory whip only slightly masked by an explosion during the Bombdogs incident. The Zen-like Businews of Doon Mackichan's Collatallie Sisters with her stream of consciousness authentic-sounding nonsense, the Enviromation of Rebecca Front's bearded Rosie May ("My milk is green. Come drink me."), Valerie Sinatra in the Mile-High Travel Tower and a plethora of mock headlines ("And where now for man raised by puffins?") all had that rarest of qualities: popular surrealism.
It's also worth noting that the jokes have often been turned back on us. Fur Q (this supposedly hard-as-nails gangsta rapper) sampling the chorus of Phil Collins' Easy Lover became reality with Puff Daddy et al (thankfully now fading) whilst his death threat to Mark Goodier was, to a certain extent, in anticipation of the shooting of Tim Westwood. The "jam in the sky" of air traffic over London came perilously close to the truth recently when more than 100 planes flew over Tower Bridge in an hour. The stupendously dull proto-docusoap about St Lamb's Swimming Pool in Acton, a big laugh in 1994, became, within four years, the apparent blueprint for at least half of all peak-time TV. Alan Partridge's "Eat my goal!" has since entered the common vernacular and another "joke", the co-opting of grunge as Nirvana appeared to advertise PantySmile (the Comfy Pal who says "never mind") reached its conclusion two months later with the death of Kurt Cobain, following the assimilation of grunge into the mainstream.
TDT is at its mightiest when engaging in parody, and getting everything 100% right. Morris's one-man pastiche of MTV (renamed RokTV) was, of course, one of its most exact and brilliant efforts; the clumsy Euro-English of Harfynn Teuport and mannered Ameri-English of Sukie Bapswent are painfully familiar to anyone who's ever watched the real thing. There was also something frighteningly accurate about the staggeringly patronizing "Sorted!" yoof video still using Splodgenessabounds's Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please 14 years after it was a hit. The celebrated pastiches of CNN (renamed CBN) and a certain type of American TV reporter (Barbara Wintergreen) aren't too far from the truth, either. Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge, for all his subsequent ubiquity, is for me one of the less interesting aspects of TDT, because he's ultimately a fairly straightforward parody of a certain type of personality who still exists, but is nowhere near as dominant as they were in the '70s and early '80s. However, his insistent hounding of a non-league footballer who missed a penalty against Liverpool ("remove the stench of defeat") is hardly distinguishable from Gary Newbon's 1993 interview with a Birmingham City player who had done likewise against Aston Villa ("Let's face it, John, you bottled it. If you look at the monitor up there you'll be able to see it."). And then there's the film supposedly "held in reserve for moments of national crisis", shown when John Major duffed up the Queen. It's barely distinguishable from a genuine promotional video produced by the British Tourist Authority in 1994, the cover of which talked in all seriousness about "a way of life that has hardly changed for centuries". The contrast between the shut-up-be-happy complacency of the end of the TDT film ("It's all right. It's all right. It's fine.") and the twisted darkness of the actual '90s Britain which the programme dissects spoke of a real, genuine anger. Whilst it may have sent up the stereotypical Cantona-esque French pseudo-intellectual with Patrick Marber's Jacques "Jacques" Liverot, the real rage, you felt was aimed at Little England, and its complacent, cliché-spouting Tory politicians.
The last two episodes were even harsher in their Establishment-baiting; Malcolm Rifkind "pulling the legs off live dogs and shooting foreign policemen", police clamping the homeless, "Clinton welcomed home after machine-gunning 400 buffalo", and that alleged Princess Margaret quote about the culling of disabled members of the Royal staff. The high point was, of course, "the war on the Australio-Hong Kong border" - the most complete and devastating annihilation of the manipulative modern TV process I've ever seen. It's impossible to listen to Ottawan's Hands Up (Give Me Your Heart) in the same spirit again. And again, most of what was predicted to happen to TV has come true: witness ITV trailing something about "Teenage Mothers", trailing the news (something which was still unknown in Britain when TDT gave us their "Mini-News") and informing us that film of World War II in colour contains "graphic footage of a public execution", all within the space of two minutes.
Sadly it would seem that perhaps the transition from satire to reality has since softened some of the satirists. Five years on, Armando Iannucci is to be found parodying Alistair Campbell for the toothless, time-warped Daily Telegraph (whose geriatric pseudo-satire was identified best by David Schneider's "physical cartoonist" Brant). But Chris Morris (really the driving force behind The Day Today, above everyone else) is still there, still pushing every barrier there is. He may push them harder in the future, and it's entirely possible that he'll do so to even greater effect.
Everything in The Day Today rings absolutely true, and that is the rarest quality of all.
