The Day Today at 25: how the news satire could have been made for 2019 “This is the neeeewwwws!!”

When The Day Today was first broadcast on 19 January 1994, its rambunctious, attention-demanding presentation and news items on ‘bomb dogs’, the theft of the pound and wild horses running amok on the London Underground was obvious satire.

But revisiting Chris Morris‘ sharp-as-a-tack spoof today, the lines somehow blur.

In this age of fake news and powerful PR, it’s increasingly difficult to judge what’s real and what’s not.

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As headlines around the world continue to resemble the Chris Morris/Armando Iannucci comedy, it’s as though The Day Today could easily have been written for 2019. The mid-90s cult hit now seems like a bizarre premonition of this most unpredictable and baffling of news cycles we find ourselves in.

‘The headlines tonight…’

If you didn’t catch The Day Today the first time around (maybe you’d been hit by a shaft of frozen urine from an overhead plane), then you missed out on one of the finest comedy creations of the past 30 years.

A news programming parody, it featured everything you’d expect from a typical newscast, plus a few extras like “environmation” reporter Rosie May (“My milk is green, come drink me”) and French philosopher Jacques-‘Jacques’ Liverot.

Its presentation was noisy, a pitch-perfect takedown of the aesthetic of 24-hour rolling news coverage, years before the concept would really gain ground (BBC News 24 didn’t launch until 1997).

The opening credits blared on for a few bars too many, with spinning graphics that were overblown to the point of nauseating, while Morris’ stern anchor held the show together, barking at the viewer from the off (“Those are the headlines. Happy now?!”).

He’d then dole out ridiculous stories on everything from an emergency currency based on the Queen’s eggs, to Colonel Gadaffi kidnapping Crete and towing it to a secret location.

In recent years, those absurd headlines have almost paled in comparison to the nonsensical news we now see on a daily basis.

As proof of The Day Today’s seemingly cyclical relevancy, a quick search on Twitter reveals a wealth of real news shared by users that could easily have been dreamt up by the minds of Morris and Iannucci.

We now live in a world where Toto’s ‘Africa’ plays on an infinite loop in the Namibian desert, the Dutch public are being reminded not to lie down on bombs, and the British army is advertising for “selfie addicts“.

In the age of social media, rolling news coverage and websites on the hunt for clicks, the news can be found anywhere, and more often than not it’s the bizarre that rises to the top of our feeds.

It’s this kind of absurdity that Morris would take to the (illogical) extreme in the tabloid-baiting Panorama parody Brass Eye, which he made for Channel 4 in 1997.

But it’s not just obscure stories. Even newspaper front pages have come to resemble the script of The Day Today for some time now.

Who could forget the pre-EU referendum Thames flotilla in 2016? ‘Nigel Farage and Bob Geldof clash in Battle of the Thames‘ as a headline could have been lifted from any of The Day Today’s episodes.

And of course, on the other side of the pond, the ongoing Trump farce could all just be one big Morris-authored nightmare.

In the last few months alone, the Commander-in-Chief has laid on a banquet of ‘hamberders’ at the White House, ranked highly on Google when users search ‘idiot’, and skipped official duties to “avoid disrupting traffic.”

‘It’s OK. It’s fine’

Chris Morris as a newsreader and interrogator could also be useful in today’s age of spin and media-trained politicians – although most of the time his ire is aimed at his own colleagues.

When inept reporter Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan blunders his way through another piece of reportage with unverified facts and outright lies (“Did you speak to the German finance minister about the new deal this afternoon?” “No…”), Morris’ anchor picks him up on it, catching him out with German phrases.

When the bumbling correspondent “loses the news” and has an interviewee walk away from his questions, he’s given an even more unflinching dressing down.

With BBC bulldog Jeremy Paxman now in a semi-retirement known as University Challenge, some of today’s TV news anchors could take inspiration from Morris’ antagonistic schtick.

Making a woman cry over the paltry sum of charity money raised by her jam festival might be taking things a step too far, however.

And when one episode ends with a Jerusalem-soundtracked emergency broadcast held in reserve for times of crisis, depicting Great Britain in all its glory, the amusingly reassuring message of “everything’s alright, it’s OK” could have easily been written for our current political chaos.

It’s unlikely a real version would include the image of children willingly offering lighters to a man unable to light his cigarette (such compassion), or two men halting their fist-fight for the Union Jack (“conflicts will always perish in the brotherhood of flags”). Or is it?

Now, more than ever before, Britain needs The Day Today to tell us that "Everything's alright, it's okay" pic.twitter.com/eKFRgkSIl6 — CuriousBritishTelly (@CuriousUkTelly) January 13, 2019

Perhaps, in the near future, Sky News will be rolling out similar video packages in the event of a no-deal Brexit?

One thing’s for sure: were The Day Today to ever make a return, it’s unlikely even Morris and Iannucci could dream up the absurdity needed for the audience to distinguish between real-life and satire.

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