Broken News

This is much better than some of the IMDb reviewers have claimed. Its parody of the reporting styles of news channels is spot-on. I particularly like "Look Out East". I presume many of those responsible for the main channels and programmes must have seen this show. That being so, it's a mystery to me that they nevertheless carry on in the same hackneyed and repetitious manner. I can only conclude that they simply cannot do any better. What a depressing state of affairs.

The show has its faults. Ironically, it is itself needlessly repetitious. The writers seem to have had the same problem as the channels they lampoon: too much time to fill and too little material to fill it. There is a series of six programmes, but to see two of them (any two will do) is probably enough. The rest is just more of the same.

Also, the guy doing the Hollywood news is way, way, way over the top and out of kilter with the carefully measured performances of everyone else.

Having been house bound with a remote, Freeview television and more channels being seeming to be added daily with nothing new at all to see, this expressed my my exasperation with TV today. I had not had so much fun in ages.

One hopes that media types rightly cringe at the wicked accuracy with which they were targeted. More TV airtime has left programmers with a very large amount of time to fill with very little worthwhile, Anbody forced to watch "fast breaking news" for any length of time will appreciate the banality portrayed in this show.

I am not sure however, that the joke is sustainable beyond its run - it is effectively a one-gag trick. But for a limited run - I think this is a worthy and very funny parody of the lamentable TV we are spoon fed.

Enjoy

The writing in incredibly witty. Its observations on news presentation are embarrassingly true to life and humour is used to good effect. Worth watching for these reasons alone but the roles played by many superb actors, Benedict Cumberbatch among them, raise its quality to a high level.

A number of reviewers here feel that "Broken News" is somehow a shallow rip-off of Chris Morris's work on "Brass Eye" and "The Day Today". I couldn't disagree more.

There's no bigger fan than me when it comes to Chris Morris's brilliantly scabrous spoof news work from the 80s and 90s, but come on folks! Just because a new generation of writers and performers wants to explore a similar strand of comedy/satire, that doesn't make them rip-off merchants. Nobody's pretending that they're the first people to have ploughed this particular comic furrow (and actually, neither was Chris Morris: he was very much following in the footsteps of arch prankster Victor Lewis-Smith). I'm sure the writers of "Broken News" would be the first to acknowledge the debt they owe to such pioneers.

In fact, what the BN team have created is something deliciously sophisticated and different. Unlike Morris, whose news parody tended toward an exaggerated, cartoonish style, BN's chief strength is in subtlety of detail: it looks and sounds so utterly (and hilariously) like the real thing!

Anyone who enjoyed "Broken News" as much as I did should also check out the same team's BBC radio show, "The Sunday Format", which uses similar techniques to parody the content of British Sunday newspaper supplements. Brilliant stuff.

This blatant "Day Today" rip off promised a new, cutting edge BBC comedy. It's nothing of the sort, rather a tepid satire on the banality of television news but without the biting humour and insight that Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci provided for "The Day Today" and "Brass Eye".

Where does "Broken News" fail where the older shows succeed? 1) It's made itself a one trick pony: In episode one it shows the headless chicken style of modern TV news reporting, where no actual information is reported and presenters just love the sound of their own voice. Fine, after half an hour we get the joke. Then it's repeated week after week. Same joke, same premise. The show doesn't progress, introduce new elements or play around in its own rigid format. The American news desk will always be the same, the "Look Out East" crew will have suggestive banter in the same manner and Standing News was great as a one off joke, but it's repeated again and again.

2) The cast. It must have seemed like a great idea in the planning stages to have quality dramatic actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Pip Torrens and Claudia Christian in a satire/sub-sketch comedy show but these things are best done by comedy actors...even a team of them. There's no chemistry between the cast, which is huge (what a waste of money) and what made "The Day Today" and "Brass Eye" so good was the caricature like characters created by a smaller but gifted comedy group. Can any of the "Broken News" characters stand out like Alan Partridge, or Peter O'Hanrahahanrahan, or Austen Tasseltine or Ted Maul? The cast are playing it too serious, too real and the result is a flat comedy.

3) Blatantly stealing from "The Day Today". We're not just talking about the concept, but the actual material as well. Frozen urine, death penalty reports by glamorous American journalists, nonsensical captions, fake football team names, overwrought graphics...all done on "The Day Today" and done much better.

The BBC comedy department is at one of its lowest points at the moment. It's overly dependent on "Little Britain" and Ricky Gervais to keep it afloat for one thing. It thinks by re-hashing old comedy concepts such as "My Family" and "Broken News" it will count on getting viewers who have put much better equivalent shows out of their memories and it is fiercely loyal to character based sketch shows which can spin out episode after episode of 8 characters and their stock catchphrases. This is hardly a recipe for growth and surprise.