Disgusting Bliss (14 page)

Right up to transmission, Morris and Iannucci debated whether or not they should do interviews to promote the programme, remaining unenthusiastic about the whole process. An unusually defensive Morris told
Time Out
just before the broadcast, ‘We haven’t got jokes that are just lines and it would be difficult to describe a lot of the characters in a sentence without blowing what happens on screen.’ He didn’t even seem entirely convinced the programme would work. ‘There’s a chance that people might find it all very clever but not at all amusing,’ he said, adding with a little more confidence, ‘I think we’ve got enough in there that’s funny as well.’
³⁹
Then the reviews came in and suggested that there might indeed be just enough to be thought of as funny.

‘For once the waterfall of publicity preceding a new series is justified,’ said Christopher Dunkley in the
Financial Times
,
⁴⁰
setting the tone for much of the reaction. Even Victor Lewis-Smith was impressed: ‘Unlike
KYTV
(which entirely lost its focus when it moved from radio), the team have successfully reassembled their current affairs parody in purely televisual terms, synthesizing elements of
Newsnight
,
Sky News
and US rolling news networks into a glorious fusion of inanity and insanity. On it went at breakneck speed, with not one weak link nor dud performance anywhere. Avoiding the obvious newsroom jokes and packing every second full of acute observation and sharp parody, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci and the rest of the team have produced a brilliantly original show. Their radio origins reveal themselves continually in their distinguished use of sound. Current affairs broadcasting has taken itself far too seriously for far too long, regarding itself as beyond reproach, and it’s high time that its pretensions were exposed.’ He praised ‘opening graphics so slick they put the genuine
Newsnight
titles to shame’.
⁴¹

Talkback paid close attention to the reviews. Ratings didn’t need to match the coverage as long as the reaction was good.
The Day Today
got between 2 and 2.7 million viewers, hardly a huge share, but all of those who saw it took it to their hearts in the way that fans had with
On the Hour
. Budding comedians were influenced by its approach, which, like some legendary rock gig that everyone later claims they were at, also helped to make its impact and reputation much bigger than its audience. Its originality and verve made everything else look dated. Journalist Hunter Davies thought the show was ‘brilliant’ and made the week’s other offerings, such as
Wish You Were Here?
,
Holiday
and
Law and Disorder
(a new Penelope Keith show) look ‘limp and laborious’ by comparison – probably not the hardest thing for
The Day Today
to achieve, but a reminder of how unlike anything else the show was at the time.

The programme’s newsreading targets were less fulsome in their praise. Only Michael Buerk admitted that it had been accurate. ‘I’d love to say it was totally wide of the mark . . . but it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘Bits of it were absolutely sublime. I was weeping with laughter at times. After a while, you wonder whether you oughtn’t to be changing yourself to fit in better with their image of you, which was strange . . . After that
999
parody they did of me, I’ve burnt my trenchcoat.’
⁴²

Martyn Lewis was more typical, saying only he’d been out at a dinner during transmission. Alastair Stewart dismissed the show out of hand: ‘The most charitable thing I can think of was that the graphics were very good. The whole thing had all the symptoms of an elongated two-minute sketch.’
⁴³

Jeremy Paxman said he had missed it because he was doing the real thing on
Newsnight
, but years later the show – or rather the excesses of news production it exposed – caught up with him. It was in 2007, when major broadcasters suffered a meltdown in public trust after a string of scandals involving everything from TV phone-in competitions being fiddled to footage being misleadingly edited, that Paxman gave the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival. His speech acknowledged that the all-consuming needs of news turned the media into what former Prime Minister Tony Blair called ‘feral beasts’. But it sounded rather like he was describing an edition of
The Day Today
from thirteen years before: ‘The problem is that all news programmes need to make noise,’ he said. ‘The need has got worse, the more crowded the market has become. We clamour for viewers’ attention and a sort of expectation inflation sets in. So the pavement-standers in Downing Street or wherever must pretend to omniscience, even though they’ve spent so long on the end of a live-link that they’ve had no chance to discover anything much beyond where the nearest loo might be.’ News, he said, ‘doesn’t really exist until there’s a reporter there in flak jacket . . . The crisis of confidence in television reflects the crisis of trust in politics: the old “we know best” culture – in which producers affected a patrician concern to enlighten the poor dumb creatures who were their viewers – won’t wash any more.’
⁴⁴

Would the industry have saved itself some heartache by paying closer attention when
The Day Today
first went out? As Armando Iannucci observed at the time, ‘People who work in TV news will think it is a joke against the person working next to them, not against themselves.’
⁴⁵
He might have been a bit too cynical. Craig Oliver, then a journalist and later editor of the BBC’s
Six
and
Ten O’Clock News
, remembers that, egos aside, there was a certain amount of self-awareness created after the show. Newsroom colleagues noted the way the show had hit what he calls ‘some of the occasional inherent pomposity and tendency to make the banal seem profound’. Like many in the industry, he still spots
The Day Today
moments in real news, citing a report about a massacre in America one Christmas in which the journalist says that people who ‘should have been hearing “Jingle Bells” were instead hearing the jingle of shells’.

The majority of
The Day Today
’s audience were positive about the programme. About forty viewers complained each week, few of which Chris Morris took seriously. An exception concerned RokTV in which a skeleton swings from a rope with Morris’s voiceover brightly explaining to a pastiche of Joy Division that he was the band’s late singer Ian Curtis and he always watched the show. Curtis’s widow Deborah wrote in to say their teenage daughter had been upset by the sketch. She had become a fan of the series and had convinced her mother to watch that episode with her. Morris was genuinely mortified and wrote a letter of apology.

It was a rare lapse for a show which had worked so well that even its makers thought they wouldn’t be able to repeat it. And that they didn’t really want to try. ‘If you work really hard on something, there then comes that thought, God, do you want to do it all again?’ says Armando Iannucci now. ‘What would be achieved by doing it again? Would we just do more parody of the news? It’s very much a slash-and-burn process.’ He was relieved it had all gone well, though he had only vague memories of the show going out at the time, his son having been born the night after the first episode.

In the end there was only ever that one series and it was the last time they worked together as a group until they reunited for the DVD ten years later. ‘Once you can operate the levers with 80 per cent degree of efficiency, then there’s no point in doing it,’ Chris Morris later observed. ‘You should only do it if you think you’re going to fail, otherwise the whole thing becomes depressingly routine.’
⁴⁶

The Day Today
seemed to mark the last expression of a particularly creative and productive partnership – Morris and Iannucci – before the pair split to pursue their own projects, but it’s not a description of events that either of them would recognize. ‘We never really planned a big gap,’ Iannucci explains now. ‘We keep involving each other in our work and talk a lot about doing something together.’ If they did become more peripheral features in one another’s careers, it was because the likes of Alan Partridge and
Brass Eye
were so demanding that they could devour whole years of their lives at a gulp. But they haven’t given up on the idea of another major collaboration. ‘We meet regularly to think about something,’ says Iannucci today, in a quick email sent in the smallest of gaps between promoting one project and starting production of another, adding distractedly, ‘Don’t know what yet . . .’

All in the core team had ended their association on good terms, and the various writers and performers would continue to work together in different permutations. Even Steven Wells, possibly the least involved in comedy in later years, did collaborate on one intriguing curio – never broadcast – with David Quantick and Chris Morris in the form of a radio play about a lighthouse and its crazy keeper. The lost piece, only dimly recalled now by its creators, featured seagulls attacking people in the water and a variety of characters annoying the keeper, who is made fun of by everyone, even dolphins – as everything in the piece has a voice. ‘Chris tended to specialize in creatures of the sea,’ says Quantick. ‘He wrote the seagulls and the dolphins.’ And he gave the gulls the kind of sarcastic, contemptuous voices their real-life cawing and crying suggest. The BBC turned it down at script stage.

But whether they went on to comedy, drama or journalism, all those who had been involved with
On the Hour
and
The Day Today
thought of the experience as formative. Patrick Marber sums it up: ‘We all found our feet collectively as a group and all supported each other. It gave us all as individuals a lot of confidence to go out and make our own way in the world. It certainly gave me confidence to do that. I learned that your best work is done when you’re not doing it for the audience, when you’re not trying to please someone, when you’re just trying to be true to the thing that you’ve invented. I learned that from Armando and Chris . . . I don’t think I ever got that when I was a stand-up. It was very much, Well, if it works for the audience, that’s good enough. But actually I realized that if you mine a more idiosyncratic and personal theme, then you might find something you didn’t realize was there and you might find that others really enjoy because of the integrity.’ And for their increasing base of fans, the quality of
On the Hour
and
The Day Today
meant that whatever else any of them did would be met with high expectations.

AS
KNOWING ME, KNOWING YOU
WAS BEING PREPARED FOR television after
The Day Today
, a fax was sent from the Talkback production office to competitors Hat Trick: ‘Most of your shows are shit.’

It was on non-headed paper and intended to be anonymous, but the fax machine automatically included the company number in the date stamp. And then the number was misdialled – so it never got to the opposition. As an exuberant, if ultimately fruitless, release of energy, though, the fax gave an accurate impression of the mental state of those who sent it. That was what being cooped up in a room with Alan Partridge for weeks did for you. Like Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan himself, Patrick Marber was going a little strange at the time he scribbled the message. Iannucci says, ‘It was one of those stupid things that people sometimes do when they’re drunk, but this was more like tired.’ News of the abortive stunt soon got around the rest of the team. ‘Even when it was hubris, arrogance, wrong,’ says Dave Schneider, ‘I still admired that swashbuckling thing. The fact of sending it had that sense of, “Step aside, we’ve arrived.”’ It was also an acknowledgement of the pressures of expectation that came with success. ‘We didn’t realize that these things would have as high a profile as maybe they somehow acquired,’ admits Iannucci.

To be part of
The Day Today
was to be part of the hottest group of comics around, or rather loose affiliation, as they still denied being a group. Chris Morris had been named Top TV Newcomer in the Comedy Awards of 1994, the same year that Steve Coogan was Top Male Performer and Best TV Personality, and Armando Iannucci was the only person ever to get a Special Award for Comedy. Almost anything they came up with would have been seriously considered for a series. Talkback was where it was all happening in the early 1990s. You could walk past its offices in Percy Street, between Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street, and, as one of Morris’s colleagues did, witness Patrick Marber leaning out of the Partridge writing room to inform passers by in his best Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan, ‘We are the satirists of doom!’

Chris Morris’s response to the success had been to move in precisely the opposite direction to all the noise. To the casual viewer of
The Day Today
it would seem as if the main presenter of the show had just disappeared – only those who shared his first love, radio, knew different. He did a series of interviews with Peter Cook that slipped out at the beginning of 1994 late in the evening on Radio 3, and later that year he took a slot on Radio 1 at 9 p.m. on Wednesdays. But the relative anonymity that all of that afforded him was crucial in later providing freedom to interview celebrities for
Brass Eye
without being noticed
.
And when that series was eventually transmitted three years later in 1997, its impact on those who had forgotten all about him would be that much greater for seeming to have come out of nowhere.

Morris and Iannucci had been such a tight team that it was only as they began to work on their own projects that it became possible to tell them apart. Iannucci’s projects over the following years were characterized by reaching out to a much larger audience as if, as David Quantick archly observed, Morris played John Lennon to Iannucci’s Paul McCartney. But it was always an arbitrary line – there was light-heartedness and outright silliness in Morris’s humour, and Iannucci frequently displayed what his later producer Adam Tandy called an ‘iron whimsy’, as cruel as his colleague’s but maybe more deceptively charming. And with Iannucci as producer, Partridge on television demonstrated that the attitude and the very detailed way of working that characterized
The Day Today
could make a mainstream hit without being bland.