He and Morris set out to find an independent production company that would let them work on the show on their own terms. Hat Trick, one of the biggest comedy producers, were one of the first they tried. They were welcoming but ‘not quite right’, says Iannucci. ‘Didn’t quite feel that we’d be completely left to do it the way we wanted to do.’
Talkback looked much more their kind of place. It had been founded by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones while they were doing Not the Nine o’Clock News at the start of the 1980s, and when Morris and Iannucci arrived it was still a relatively small but inventive company. They put the creative goals of their producers first and worked back to make sure they could be realistically achieved. The company was headed by Peter Fincham, a Cambridge graduate and former musician who had joined Talkback in 1985 yet retained his enthusiasm for the creative aspects of the shows he oversaw. ‘It was a really good camaraderie. I think Peter’s very good at leaving people alone,’ explains Nick Canner, a veteran of the company who was assigned to The Day Today production team. ‘People liked to work at Talkback because it’s not like there’s a David O. Selznick figure sending memos every day, saying, “I think that could’ve been funnier.” Peter was very much a sort of hands-off figure: “You’re a talented person – be talented!”’ And somehow the Talkback ‘vibes’, adds Armando Iannucci, were right. They’d found an easy-going centre of excellence where talent was given space to thrive. By convention, companies controlling the entertainment business make impossible, soul-destroying demands of their stars – The Day Today creators would turn that truism around.
It was also the start of a long relationship between Morris and Talkback, which tailored their working practices to individual creative temperament. They realized he didn’t need the safety net of a tight production contract – and that he wouldn’t be constrained even if he had one – so there was never a formal agreement between them. They gave him an office away from their headquarters and the time to develop his ideas.
With production secured, the pilot of the new show was completed in January 1993, a year before the full series went out on the BBC. Iannucci and Morris reinvented everything, even the title. That they brought such a fine level of observation to both radio and then TV news journalism did make it seem as if they had it in for news as a concept, but Iannucci maintains it was not a vendetta. ‘You do these things partly out of affection as well,’ says Iannucci now. ‘It was not saying, “All telly is bad and unless we change our habits British broadcasting is going to go down the pan.”’ Iannucci simply often found inspiration in politics and the media, though he had been the subject of enough interviews in which minor comments ended up being a sensational headline to feel a natural suspicion towards the media.
‘You can see how artificial the process is,’ he says. ‘It’s not that simple telling of reality. You realize how edited the news is.’ As part of their research, he and Morris took a mini news-editing course organized by the BBC newsroom. The pair were given a story from the ongoing Bosnian War with four main pieces of information, which they had to set to rushes from BBC coverage of the conflict in the form of a two-minute piece with voiceover. As their allotted two hours came to a close, they realized they were without obvious footage to illustrate one of the key points of the package and they had to leave it out. It gave them a clear idea of how much news had to do with presentation and deadline. In the spring of 1994 Morris would write in his review of a war reporter’s memoirs, ‘Basically, news is glorified gossip. It is not the truth that makes a story news, but its entertainment value.’34
He and Iannucci were given a tour of the newsroom that same day by staff who expected to be quizzed by the comedians on what funny things happen in the studio, only to find themselves questioned closely on the technical aspects of making programmes and learning about how the designers and directors of the news did their jobs, an in-depth approach to research which Morris would always retain. Charlie Brooker, co-creator of Nathan Barley, remembers at least a full hour devoted to deciding the font that would most believably be used by Sugar Ape, the style bible for which journalist Dan Ashcroft writes.
For the writing of The Day Today, the idea had been to bring along the same people from the radio. Stewart Lee and Richard Herring were still concerned about how they might retain ownership of ideas that they co-created, but for a while it looked as if the dispute might be resolved. The pilot went ahead without them, but when a new front in the wrangling opened over a trivial sum for the commercial release of On the Hour, ‘it was then beginning to stop things from happening,’ says Iannucci. He refused the request and went through every tape in one long session, removing everything credited to the duo.
‘God, I remember that night,’ shudders Carol Smith, Armando’s PA. ‘I remember leaving him hunched over an editing block in the office and coming in the next morning and he was still there. And I said to him, “Oh, for God’s sake! You’re not still here?” And he slept on the floor in my office.’ It was the end of any hopes that the pair might be in The Day Today. ‘It wasn’t personal,’ says Herring now, ‘and in the end I think it was the right thing for us. I think we would have got comfortable with The Day Today and we wouldn’t have done our own stuff. I think it worked out for the best. But at the time I was really gutted. We might have ended up working on the various spin-off projects involving Coogan and Chris Morris.’ Even without the benefit of being part of the transfer, they got their own television shows, Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard, Not Judy, on BBC2, for which they acquired a devoted though small cult following. The BBC never really got wholeheartedly behind their material, and there was a sense of regret that ran throughout the team and into Talkback itself, where Sally Debonnaire, head of production, thought it was one of the major lost opportunities in comedy of that time.
The rest of the principal cast and crew were caught between feeling sympathy for the two and knowing that they had to get on with The Day Today. It put them all in a difficult position. ‘It’s something I chose not to follow too closely,’ says David Schneider. ‘I was friends with them all, really.’ Iannucci was particularly apologetic. Everyone was trying to make their way, and the splits were partly a result of the immense pressure under which they all operated. ‘You forget that everyone at the time was much younger and much more nervous and kind of energized,’ says Iannucci. He remained on good terms with Herring and Lee, any residual bad feeling evaporating after the shared experience of an unsettling flight the three took from London to Glasgow. They hit turbulence, and Lee, who was sitting next to Iannucci, took the opportunity to say The Day Today episode wasn’t worth bearing grudges over and, when they eventually landed safely, they all agreed they wouldn’t have liked to have plunged screaming to the ground with an argument over writing credits still unresolved.
The greater demands of television meant that a far larger team needed to be recruited, including a director, though Morris and Iannucci had such a strong idea of how the show had to look that they were in some respects almost directing themselves. They would be involved in every shot, in Iannucci’s words ‘hovering around’.
Morris’s GLR collaborator Robert Katz joined as a film researcher. ‘I was an archive researcher at LWT when The Day Today started,’ explains Katz, ‘and Chris knew that and very punctiliously didn’t interview me for the job. He left it to Armando and the charming late Susie Gautier-Smith [The Day Today programme associate who died in October 1996]. Armando’s interview question was, “How would you illustrate a whale trapped in Harrods with footage?”’
New writers included Welsh comedian Peter Baynham, the most notable arrival as far as Chris Morris was concerned. The two would go on to become good friends, and Baynham would become his key co-writer as well as a performer in many of his shows, but to begin with Morris was not even convinced Iannucci was right in thinking they needed any new writers at all. Rapid-talking Baynham had long performed his material live but had come to Iannucci’s attention through his wo
rk on numerous BBC programmes. He was like countless writers in having come up through shows such as The News Huddlines and Week Ending, though probably far fewer comics had also served, as he had, in the merchant navy and he was certainly unique among all in quitting the programme to write a sitcom based on his seagoing experiences. He was sufficiently convinced of his idea’s potential to turn down an offer of work from Iannucci when the latter took over Week Ending. Two dead-end, nautically themed pilot episodes later and Baynham was amused and horrified in equal measure on hearing On the Hour. It sounded like the future. ‘I thought I’d missed my opportunity. Bloody hell,’ he says now, still sick at the memory. ‘I scraped by for the next few months and as it happens I got a call anyway.’ By then a script associate writing gags for Friday Night with Wogan, Baynham stayed up all night before the first meeting, excitedly thinking of ideas. He arrived to find a team who were all very comfortable with one another.
‘Looking back, I was very glad not to know that at the time,’ says Baynham. ‘I went to this afternoon meeting and I threw in some idea about an infestation of horses on the London Underground and Chris laughed. It’s an over-simplification, but that felt like it changed things.’
The other contributors were future Father Ted creators Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews. They met at Hot Press magazine in Dublin, where Mathews was an art director and Linehan was a film reviewer. When Linehan moved to London to write for Select, Mathews followed to share a tiny flat in Bounds Green. They had no television – just a radio with patchy reception – but within a week they had tuned in to an episode of On the Hour and fell in love with it immediately. Listening to On the Hour brought back that intense feeling they had last experienced as kids discovering new bands for the first time. Linehan even listened to the show lying on the floor, just as he used to do with music when he was a teenager. It was after they got some sketches taken by Talkback that they got to meet the team. They were just a little bit in awe when their heroes appeared at the same company to start work on The Day Today, but not enough not to swiftly engineer an invitation to the writers’ meetings, where they were terrified that they wouldn’t measure up and didn’t contribute a huge amount of material.
The pilot proved to be a clash of two cultures. Producers and a cast who were making their first steps in television and yet knew exactly what they wanted to achieve met established television folk who were used to doing the job in a certain way. The demanding process was made that much more complicated because of the straight approach required for the humour. Props were supplied by specialists in comedies when the show called for something more like a drama production approach. When the show needed a report from an American network, they wanted to use US-style recording equipment to capture the fuzzier broadcast quality. It all meant that everyone had to learn new ways of working. ‘We were learning how to do telly and then how to undo telly for the programme,’ says Iannucci. But the resulting programme was a success, very close to how the series would look. The cast, despite their relative youth, believably inhabited the shape their voices suggested on the radio. Character improvements required for the series were cosmetic. There was Morris’s naturally curly hair, which bobbed around on his head in a way that was mesmerizingly independent of his own movements. When he had it slicked back for the series and adopted a more sober suited look, he would be sleeker and more menacing. Yet they all had an air of gravitas about them in the pilot that carried the inevitable moments of uncertainty in the performances. A few of the cast worried, needlessly, that Iannucci might prefer older performers, but they looked right in their television suits.
The pilot came in well over budget and rumours spread in the comedy industry that the team were somehow favourites of the BBC. In reality, though it was the higher end of the usual sketch show allowance, it wasn’t excessive. It was just what they did with it that gave it its look. And they required a particularly flexible production crew who could interpret the very specific needs of the scripts. In the run-up to recording the main show, outside segments for which were shot in June and July 1993 and the studio work in October, those on the production side who hadn’t adjusted to the new way of working were unsentimentally ditched. Among the replacements was production manager Alison MacPhail, or Ali, who came from the Jonathan Ross show Saturday Zoo, a programme she had found depressing and messy. She was disillusioned and close to leaving television altogether, but The Day Today proved to be exactly what she needed. She soon established a fearsome reputation for being able to get hold of anything for the show, no matter how mad or unlikely. She was impressive, funny, massively capable and, in not caring much whether she stayed in television, she was never in awe of the job or of the bright crowd she was working with. Seconded to Iannucci, it probably also helped that she was a fellow Scot. She didn’t find it so easy to get on with Morris at first. He seemed removed and quiet, which she marked down as arrogance. She felt as if she were being tested. The uneasy initial period culminated in a bad-tempered exchange over nothing much, and she felt her honest and down-to-earth response won his respect. They established a bond that would see her continue to work with him right through to Brass Eye.
Morris and Iannucci themselves had surprisingly few arguments, given that they were in one another’s company to the exclusion of any social life: ‘It was probably eighteen months of solid fretting, hoping it wouldn’t be a disaster,’ says Iannucci. They worked jointly most of the time, though Iannucci, with the rest of the team, naturally leaned more towards the detail of performance and script while Morris immersed himself in the feel of the shows they were targeting and the technical aspects of production. Both were driven, but Iannucci tended to be less volatile than Morris, who could be quite maddening in his perfectionism. At one point in The Day Today production, convinced that he wasn’t going to be able to realize the show in the way he wanted, he walked out after a row with Sally Debonnaire. He was back within a day and the details were soon forgotten. Longtime colleagues suspected his infrequent explosions were a way of giving himself time to think about how to solve specific problems.
One thing was clear to everyone at Talkback – both men pushed things as far as they could; it was part of the job for those who worked with them to work out what was up for negotiation and what was ring-fenced. One of their most demanding concepts was also on screen for the briefest time, a Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews contribution about police dealing with noisy neighbours by releasing a tiger into the offenders’ house. The production team put a huge amount of research into the realities of using a live tiger. It was risky and expensive, something that might have been dropped for an easier laugh. But the tiger, Talkback decided, would be something that the audience would remember and talk about. So the item was included in return for cutting back on some postproduction work.
‘The sketch that really sums The Day Today up is the tiger,’ confirms Nick Canner. ‘You would not believe the amount of work it took.’ Few locations in London would deal with the risk of a live tiger – and when a council bottled out they ended up in Surrey in an army barracks. It took an entire day to film. One trained animal handler was hired to look after the tiger, while another looked after a gun that would be used in case the handler and his charge were to have a serious disagreement. The tiger was kept in a cage, with a second alongside in case it escaped from the first, but the results of such extra effort in The Day Today were so distinctive that everyone was willingly behind it.
The restriction of doing everything on camera meant there was less opportunity for improvising lines, but they kept the working process as close as possible to the open approach of the radio series. ‘My memory is coming in with ideas which I’d been up all night thinking of,’ says Peter Baynham. ‘It was almost playing, coming up with the stupid headlines and the newspaper things.’ Agrees Andrew Glover: ‘I just thought that was the most fun you could have.’ One of the few things that he worked on with Iannucci was suitable names for horses in Alan’s sports reports. The o
riginal list of names was typed up and survives as an example of how even such a relatively minor element was reworked, the many names including Novelty Bobble, Different Types of Algebra, Astonishing Bomb Queen, Three Legs and I’m Yours, Back to the Drawing Board Lord Palmerston and Pah.
Anything that didn’t work perfectly was ruthlessly excised. There was the time that Steve Coogan recorded a sports commentary and was improvising on Partridge being distracted from the sports action by advertising hoardings. He pointed out one for a computer he boasted he had bought. By coincidence the next ad happened to be for a credit card, ‘and I used that to buy it,’ he added. It was such a neat coincidence that he corpsed but, despite several additional takes, couldn’t quite get it to sound as natural again and it was dropped.
Morris was more often around in the writing and improvisation phase than he had been in the radio show, partly because he couldn’t work on his television material alone as he had on the radio. He would greet the cast with frequently bizarre concepts and start recording their responses. ‘You had to be bold and just start talking, jump in without a net,’ recalls Doon Mackichan. She and Rebecca Front say they felt it was ‘liberating’ to work on the range of roles they took in The Day Today. They could look completely silly in the report about the American condemned prisoner who elected to be executed on the toilet in homage to the way Elvis Presley died and then follow that by doing a comparatively straight report to camera. Rosie May’s environment reports transferred from On the Hour with very little difference in style except for Front sporting a wispy new-age beard. ‘Rosie May came fairly fully formed and scripted,’ says Front. ‘Barbara [Wintergreen, US correspondent], too, was scripted, but I knew how to play her from watching far too much CNN in hotel rooms … I’m a bit of a news junkie. I can claim credit for her trademark sign-off smirk, though, which started with me mugging at Armando when I thought we’d cut but we were still shooting.’
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