Broken News

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.

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.

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.

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

What some of the people commenting on this series don't seem to understand is that this is not a sketch show.

The fact that none of the characters are particularly memorable, the fact that the news stories are not particularly surreal and the fact that each "channel" starts to feel repetitive even before the end of the episode are all deliberate.

As with "People like us", John Morton is able to avoid focusing on the superficial humour (the "jokes") at the expense of the deep humour (satire).

And that is all there. The bad grammar, the lack of scientific knowledge and basic research of the average journalist, the milking of non-events to fill hours of airtime, the patronising xenophobia of some US networks, the obsession with "live" coverage for the sake of it, the overly dramatic music, the distortion of facts so the reporter can end his story with a "witty" catchphrase or cliché. It's all there.

There are also plenty of jokes and nonsense, but I suspect most of those are just there so you won't mistake the show for a real news network. It's their way of saying "unlike the 'real' news networks, we are still sane enough to realise that this whole thing is ludicrous".

Some of the references will only make sense to people working in the field, but anyone who has spent 10 minutes zapping between different "news" networks will be able to relate.

Be warned, though: there are no pauses to let you laugh and no punchlines telling you when to laugh (a lot of people can't seem to understand humour without the latter). If you laugh, you miss something. In fact, even if you don't laugh, it's hard not to miss something (another obvious reference to the information overload - or "noise" - in modern news broadcasts).

To be watched with a progressively widening mental grin.