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.

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.

It was just plain rubbish! There was something missing from it, it had the sureness I usually like, some talented actors, it looked very realistic, but I just didn't like it! It is naturally going to be compared to The Day Today, which was far superior. I guess that worked by taking news programmes, and multiplying their existing elements by 100, instead of just using the same format as a regular news broadcast, but adding strange stories. TDT also had those fantastic names, and the complete lunacy of the finance news. Just go and buy The Day Today DVD, it's a great set with brilliant extras. I can't see any signs of this show improving on it in any way, which is a shame, as it looked really good in the trailers. But I guess the clips shown there were just the best of a bad bunch. I wanted to like this, but shall probably never watch it again.

It is perhaps inevitable that Broken News will be compared to The Day Today. Although The Day Today is probably the funnier of the two shows, I don't feel that this means Broken News should be written off as a waste of time. Both shows may be satirising the same subject, but they choose different ways to do it. Broken News perhaps stays closer to the real thing while The Day Today chooses to get a bit more surreal with the stories they report. Despite the similarity between the two shows, I don't get the feeling that Broken News is trying to copy The Day Today.

The back of the DVD box says the show satirises "the on-screen world of rolling news where there's too much airtime and not enough news to go around". That's a pretty accurate summary of the show and some of it is cringingly familiar. The recognisability of it makes it even funnier, especially when you then go back and watch the real news and see those things happening there. Some of the parody is actually pretty close to reality.

The show holds up to repeat viewing quite well. Many of the jokes are quite subtle and it's easy for them to slip past you the first time. There are also the ticker-tape messages scrolling across the bottom of the screen which you tend not to read the first time you watch an episode. I found these particularly funny in the "hijack" episode (which is also my favourite episode).

The large cast did help to lend an air of reality to the whole thing and virtually all of them were convincing. Having real Americans playing the American newscasters was also a nice touch which could have easily been overlooked.

My only complaint was that the same jokes did get used in several episodes. In some cases this worked well, but in other cases I did feel like hitting fast-forward. However, the "channel hopping" format of the show actually works in its favour here as it helps segments appear longer than they really are without drawing a joke out for too long.

If the BBC commission a second series, I hope they add more writers. I think there's certainly scope for more, although the stories would probably be more surreal in order to avoid going over too much of the same material from the first series.

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.