This Is Yesterday

Because fact into doubt won’t go

My Mother was a huge influence on me and my TV habits and tastes. She would let me stay up and watch things that she thought I might like or buy videos unprompted to broaden my horizons. Friday nights were Monty Python nights when they were repeated in the early 90s, and she bought things like copies of The Young Ones on VHS.

But when she got me to stay up and watch The Day Today it felt like staying up to watch something properly adult. It was something that was just relentlessly silly but with no laugh track and not much slapstick humour it was also disconcerting. I vividly remember from the original broadcast Chris Morris’ brutal spoof of MTV. I’d never seen MTV, and wasn’t aware of the finer details but it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. Morris playing all the characters for one, the ridiculously OTT rap of FurQ (also surprisingly catchy), it was just such an onslaught of a parody of different styles condensed into a few minutes.

That four minute sketch is an anomaly, because there isn’t really anything else quite like it in The Day Today. It’s a collaborative show (seeing Chris Morris as part of an ensemble is really quite joyous), and Armando Iannucci’s sense of humour is just as influential on the series – my next strongest memory of seeing the show go out live was the famous sequence in ‘The Pool’ pseudo-documentary where Steve Coogan’s security guard weakly tries to defend the fact that someone died while he was on duty which has Iannucci’s fingerprints (and voice) all over it.

Overall the show has great consistency. (There’s some awful bits that slipped through though – the low point of the series for me is the yoof TV guide on how to bury your Dad, unfunny and including an awkward performance from Graham Linehan, now better known as deranged TERF Glinner). But I think that quality control is what made it so rewatchable when I was a teenager and I rediscovered it and would watch it again with fresh eyes. This time obviously I knew all about politics and all about how the world worked, so I got more of the jokes. And there’s a lot of little background events that really reward repeat watches if you’re a comedy geek.

It was made as a satire on the self-importance that news presentation has – the overblown graphics, the obsession with reporting events ‘as they happen’, creating ‘moments’, navel gazing analysis… Watching it now it seems like watching a very good parody of Fox News, Chris Morris’ dictatorial anchor only differing from his bombastic modern counterparts in that he is obviously highly intelligent. 

And it’s the mockery – intelligent, informed mockery – of everything in sight that really stuck with me and had a long lasting effect on my idea of what the purpose of comedy was. Everyone learns that comedy rarely changes things, and the targets of satire are often its biggest fans – politicians would get an ego boost if someone had gone to the expense of making a Spitting Image puppet of them, and wasn’t long before real news programmes were copying the ridiculous overblown graphics of The Day Today itself. But what comedy can do is give you the secret weapon of being able to laugh in someone’s face when they’re being obviously ridiculous. Mankind’s obsession with trying to daily predict the weather has been ever present, and are the ludicrous weather forecasts (“it’ll feel a bit like being woken up in the night by strange men shining powerful torches into your eyes”) that much different to our ancestors rummaging through animal entrails? The age old obsession with war, which is so much more exciting and visually entertaining to watch live on air than a peace treaty being agreed?

And the business news, which is televised every day, which makes sense to a minority of people despite our society depending on these numbers making sense to someone somewhere… we can laugh in the face of our financial custodians when we have Collatolle Sister’s Financial Report (“In summary then – oh no. Chris?”). Watching this now it’s even more biting. People are struggling to live day to day, relying on food banks, having energy companies charging prices no one can afford (forcibly installing prepaid meters isn’t so far removed from the clamping the homeless sketch, morally speaking.) It’s no coincidence that when Liz Truss tanked the British economy in 2022 The Day Today clip about the pound going missing briefly went viral.

Probably the biggest issue I’ve had to deal with in my life overall is having epilepsy followed by mental health issues and I’d say that more than any other comedy series The Day Today grave me the tools to laugh in the face of the serious things in life as best as possible, even if the laugh is occasionally a slightly disturbing one. It let the child me mock the adults for taking the adult world seriously, but that feeling lasted for adult me too. How dare us adults take ourselves so seriously?