Martyn Lewis was more typical, saying only he’d been out at a dinner during transmission. Alastair Stewart dismissed the show out of hand: ‘The most charitable thing I can think of was that the graphics were very good. The whole thing had all the symptoms of an elongated two-minute sketch.’43
Jeremy Paxman said he had missed it because he was doing the real thing on Newsnight, but years later the show – or rather the excesses of news production it exposed – caught up with him. It was in 2007, when major broadcasters suffered a meltdown in public trust after a string of scandals involving everything from TV phone-in competitions being fiddled to footage being misleadingly edited, that Paxman gave the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh television festival. His speech acknowledged that the all-consuming needs of news turned the media into what former Prime Minister Tony Blair called ‘feral beasts’. But it sounded rather like he was describing an edition of The Day Today from thirteen years before: ‘The problem is that all news programmes need to make noise,’ he said. ‘The need has got worse, the more crowded the market has become. We clamour for viewers’ attention and a sort of expectation inflation sets in. So the pavement-standers in Downing Street or wherever must pretend to omniscience, even though they’ve spent so long on the end of a live-link that they’ve had no chance to discover anything much beyond where the nearest loo might be.’ News, he said, ‘doesn’t really exist until there’s a reporter there in flak jacket … The crisis of confidence in television reflects the crisis of trust in politics: the old “we know best” culture – in which producers affected a patrician concern to enlighten the poor dumb creatures who were their viewers – won’t wash any more.’44
Would the industry have saved itself some heartache by paying closer attention when The Day Today first went out? As Armando Iannucci observed at the time, ‘People who work in TV news will think it is a joke against the person working next to them, not against themselves.’45 He might have been a bit too cynical. Craig Oliver, then a journalist and later editor of the BBC’s Six and Ten O’Clock News, remembers that, egos aside, there was a certain amount of self-awareness created after the show. Newsroom colleagues noted the way the show had hit what he calls ‘some of the occasional inherent pomposity and tendency to make the banal seem profound’. Like many in the industry, he still spots The Day Today moments in real news, citing a report about a massacre in America one Christmas in which the journalist says that people who ‘should have been hearing “Jingle Bells” were instead hearing the jingle of shells’.
The majority of The Day Today’s audience were positive about the programme. About forty viewers complained each week, few of which Chris Morris took seriously. An exception concerned RokTV in which a skeleton swings from a rope with Morris’s voiceover brightly explaining to a pastiche of Joy Division that he was the band’s late singer Ian Curtis and he always watched the show. Curtis’s widow Deborah wrote in to say their teenage daughter had been upset by the sketch. She had become a fan of the series and had convinced her mother to watch that episode with her. Morris was genuinely mortified and wrote a letter of apology.
It was a rare lapse for a show which had worked so well that even its makers thought they wouldn’t be able to repeat it. And that they didn’t really want to try. ‘If you work really hard on something, there then comes that thought, God, do you want to do it all again?’ says Armando Iannucci now. ‘What would be achieved by doing it again? Would we just do more parody of the news? It’s very much a slash-and-burn process.’ He was relieved it had all gone well, though he had only vague memories of the show going out at the time, his son having been born the night after the first episode.
In the end there was only ever that one series and it was the last time they worked together as a group until they reunited for the DVD ten years later. ‘Once you can operate the levers with 80 per cent degree of efficiency, then there’s no point in doing it,’ Chris Morris later observed. ‘You should only do it if you think you’re going to fail, otherwise the whole thing becomes depressingly routine.’46
The Day Today seemed to mark the last expression of a particularly creative and productive partnership – Morris and Iannucci – before the pair split to pursue their own projects, but it’s not a description of events that either of them would recognize. ‘We never really planned a big gap,’ Iannucci explains now. ‘We keep involving each other in our work and talk a lot about doing something together.’ If they did become more peripheral features in one another’s careers, it was because the likes of Alan Partridge and Brass Eye were so demanding that they could devour whole years of their lives at a gulp. But they haven’t given up on the idea of another major collaboration. ‘We meet regularly to think about something,’ says Iannucci today, in a quick email sent in the smallest of gaps between promoting one project and starting production of another, adding distractedly, ‘Don’t know what yet …’
All in the core team had ended their association on good terms, and the various writers and performers would continue to work together in different permutations. Even Steven Wells, possibly the least involved in comedy in later years, did collaborate on one intriguing curio – never broadcast – with David Quantick and Chris Morris in the form of a radio play about a lighthouse and its crazy keeper. The lost piece, only dimly recalled now by its creators, featured seagulls attacking people in the water and a variety of characters annoying the keeper, who is made fun of by everyone, even dolphins – as everything in the piece has a voice. ‘Chris tended to specialize in creatures of the sea,’ says Quantick. ‘He wrote the seagulls and the dolphins.’ And he gave the gulls the kind of sarcastic, contemptuous voices their real-life cawing and crying suggest. The BBC turned it down at script stage.
But whether they went on to comedy, drama or journalism, all those who had been involved with On the Hour and The Day Today thought of the experience as formative. Patrick Marber sums it up: ‘We all found our feet collectively as a group and all supported each other. It gave us all as individuals a lot of confidence to go out and make our own way in the world. It certainly gave me confidence to do that. I learned that your best work is done when you’re not doing it for the audience, when you’re not trying to please someone, when you’re just trying to be true to the thing that you’ve invented. I learned that from Armando and Chris … I don’t think I ever got that when I was a stand-up. It was very much, Well, if it works for the audience, that’s good enough. But actually I realized that if you mine a more idiosyncratic and personal theme, then you might find something you didn’t realize was there and you might find that others really enjoy because of the integrity.’ And for their increasing base of fans, the quality of On the Hour and The Day Today meant that whatever else any of them did would be met with high expectations.
6
PUTTING A SPINE IN A BAP
AS KNOWING ME, KNOWING YOU WAS BEING PREPARED FOR television after The Day Today, a fax was sent from the Talkback production office to competitors Hat Trick: ‘Most of your shows are shit.’
It was on non-headed paper and intended to be anonymous, but the fax machine automatically included the company number in the date stamp. And then the number was misdialled – so it never got to the opposition. As an exuberant, if ultimately fruitless, release of energy, though, the fax gave an accurate impression of the mental state of those who sent it. That was what being cooped up in a room with Alan Partridge for weeks did for you. Like Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan himself, Patrick Marber was going a little strange at the time he scribbled the message. Iannucci says, ‘It was one of those stupid things that people sometimes do when they’re drunk, but this was more like tired.’ News of the abortive stunt soon got around the rest of the team. ‘Even when it was hubris, arrogance, wrong,’ says Dave Schneider, ‘I still admired that swashbuckling thing. The fact of sending it had that sense of, “Step aside, we’ve arrived.”’ It was also an acknowledgement of the pressures of expectation that came with success. ‘We didn’t realize tha
t these things would have as high a profile as maybe they somehow acquired,’ admits Iannucci.
To be part of The Day Today was to be part of the hottest group of comics around, or rather loose affiliation, as they still denied being a group. Chris Morris had been named Top TV Newcomer in the Comedy Awards of 1994, the same year that Steve Coogan was Top Male Performer and Best TV Personality, and Armando Iannucci was the only person ever to get a Special Award for Comedy. Almost anything they came up with would have been seriously considered for a series. Talkback was where it was all happening in the early 1990s. You could walk past its offices in Percy Street, between Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street, and, as one of Morris’s colleagues did, witness Patrick Marber leaning out of the Partridge writing room to inform passers by in his best Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan, ‘We are the satirists of doom!’
Chris Morris’s response to the success had been to move in precisely the opposite direction to all the noise. To the casual viewer of The Day Today it would seem as if the main presenter of the show had just disappeared – only those who shared his first love, radio, knew different. He did a series of interviews with Peter Cook that slipped out at the beginning of 1994 late in the evening on Radio 3, and later that year he took a slot on Radio 1 at 9 p.m. on Wednesdays. But the relative anonymity that all of that afforded him was crucial in later providing freedom to interview celebrities for Brass Eye without being noticed. And when that series was eventually transmitted three years later in 1997, its impact on those who had forgotten all about him would be that much greater for seeming to have come out of nowhere.
Morris and Iannucci had been such a tight team that it was only as they began to work on their own projects that it became possible to tell them apart. Iannucci’s projects over the following years were characterized by reaching out to a much larger audience as if, as David Quantick archly observed, Morris played John Lennon to Iannucci’s Paul McCartney. But it was always an arbitrary line – there was light-heartedness and outright silliness in Morris’s humour, and Iannucci frequently displayed what his later producer Adam Tandy called an ‘iron whimsy’, as cruel as his colleague’s but maybe more deceptively charming. And with Iannucci as producer, Partridge on television demonstrated that the attitude and the very detailed way of working that characterized The Day Today could make a mainstream hit without being bland.
The potential for the character’s development had been obvious in The Day Today, which Lynne Truss observed was ‘the making of Coogan, whose genius as the banal, dim and vainglorious Partridge is unmissable’.47 Iannucci looks back on Knowing Me …, or rather the period of making it, with mixed feelings. Everything had been done at such a pace. The radio version of Knowing Me … was done at the same time as The Day Today pilot. And then the TV version followed straight on. ‘I’m not entirely happy with it,’ he says now.
Patrick Marber revealed, ‘We wrote each of the television shows in blocks of six days, working day and night, living on takeaways, thinking we were going to explode. We had agreed a production schedule that was murderously difficult for us. We thought we were going to write the whole series in advance of making it, and of course we pissed about and didn’t, so then we had to write it between shows. The whole series was an essay crisis.’48 Morris turned up to the production one day with a large cake for everyone.
As with the schedule of the radio series, the real sense of imminent disaster only added to the sense that Alan himself could fall apart at any moment – which he did at the end of the Christmas special. It was that spectacular character disintegration over the series which made the show more than a chat-show spoof. The team had always thought of Knowing Me, Knowing You as a sitcom in the sense that Alan’s character was revealed during the run.
Iannucci played with the sitcom format again when Alan returned in painfully reduced circumstances without his chat show in I’m Alan Partridge. Looking to develop the emotional resonance in the show, Iannucci checked out The Day Today contributors Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, who were making their own hit show with Father Ted and were rather flattered at the attention. ‘I remember being surprised that he would ask us about anything,’ says Mathews.
Having visited their set, Iannucci enclosed I’m Alan Partridge in four walls so the audience could only watch what was going on through monitors, explaining that the audience were to be ‘eavesdropping on something they weren’t meant to see’.49 Which was, in essence, Alan going down an emotional plughole, subsisting in his Norwich motel. It was all pretty grim stuff. Iannucci remembers looking at the characters and thinking, They’re just a big bunch of losers, who’ve all gravitated towards each other and they’re all keeping each other afloat.’ Only the live audience kept the show from unbearable bleakness. Within the closed set they used hand-held cameras: ‘You could see how cramped Alan’s bedroom was because we could go right around him,’ said Iannucci, ‘but at the same time Steve could take the rhythm of his performance from the laughs that he was hearing.’50
Like so much of the best work of productions led by him and by Morris, the shows had a fluid, organic quality that refreshed the sitcom format. Both of them would amass huge amounts of material in the course of making programmes and threw out scenes that had taken months to develop if something funnier or a better direction was discovered in late rehearsals. The Partridge writers slowly teased out the plot and occasionally came up with ‘Alanisms’ on a range of topics which Iannucci compiled into what became a thick file. Actors would frequently arrive to find writers still working on the script for that day, but Iannucci and his team were good at handling chaos and Steve Coogan was always very sure of what would work for his character, so that somehow it came together. I’m Alan Partridge marked the height of popularity for the character.
Over the course of producing The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You, Iannucci himself had felt an increasing urge to escape from the shadows. Steve Coogan and Chris Morris were such strong presences that much of the audience might well have thought the shows were all theirs: ‘Some of it’s inevitable anyway,’ Iannucci says, ‘and some of it at the time you get worked up about and then years later you think, I don’t know what all that fuss was about. I can remember really genuinely feeling, I hope I don’t get overlooked in all this given that I’ve spent the last eighteen months of my life devoted to it.’
In March 1994 he told the Sunday Times: ‘I never set out to be a producer and I’d like to get out of it, really. I’m going to take maybe a year away from producing to concentrate on writing. Producing takes time. It can lead to me being frustrated because I feel that I’m not giving a hundred per cent to each project and it can also make the people I’m working with feel frustrated, so I’m trying to pare it down, not do two things at once.’51 But it would always be hard to get away from something he was so suited for. He finally got to return to presenting with 1995’s Saturday Night Armistice: ‘I have an ego. I do like performing. I like hearing my voice,’ Iannucci told The Times.52 The show also featured old friends Peter Baynham and Dave Schneider, with writers including Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews suggesting ideas that Iannucci developed. The show was recorded the night before broadcast to get in topical news as well as pranks and more personal material.
‘There are more traditional satirists like Rory Bremner who look at politics, and their agenda is set by the Daily Telegraph, the Independent or the Sun,’ said Iannucci. ‘We wanted to look at stuff beyond that – your day-to-day life, what it is like working in offices, the lottery phenomenon – things that are more the stuff of conversation at that time.’53 The show moved to a Friday night for its second and third series, but the formula remained the same. The series producer was Sarah Smith, an old friend of Iannucci’s from back when she’d been president of the Oxford Revue and her Small and Intimate female double act had performed with Iannucci and Andrew Glover’s A Pair of Shorts. She moved into production, working in regional theatre for three years before joining BBC light entertain
ment, working with Iannucci again and later coming into Chris Morris’s orbit.
‘We were all part of the same gang, really,’ says Smith. ‘We were nicking each other’s writers. I worked with Pete and Rich and Stew and so did Armando. We were across the corridor from one another.’ She was also a master of detail and would regularly pull a couple of all-nighters just to edit everything together. When Friday Night Armistice took on politics, they hit New Labour as much as the Right, managing to attract complaints from both main parties, to Iannucci’s pride. But although it took on current affairs, the show was always played with much less intensity than The Day Today. ‘I think Chris thought it was rubbish, but there you go,’ confesses Smith. ‘I don’t think he liked it very much. He saw it as much more lightweight. The whole idea of Armistice was to dress the political stuff up in a light entertainment format, and that was a deliberate decision. It was for an audience and had all sorts of different material, and I think Chris was more purist. That’s just a difference of taste.’
Iannucci was not overconfident about his own abilities in front of the cameras: ‘I am not comfortable in the limelight. It takes a bit of getting used to,’ he said. ‘But it makes a nice change working on television and hearing the reaction of a studio audience. I like my privacy. I enjoy performing, but I don’t like the idea of becoming famous. I don’t like what comes with it. I am the least cool person. I have only been to a few celebrity parties and left early because I was tired.’54 But even he found himself in the tabloids in time, though it was for nothing more scandalous than being called the funniest man in Britain. In 1996 the Mirror made the rather weak observation that his ‘name conjures up a wacky vision of a sharp-suited ice-cream seller’, though readers were doubtless reassured to learn that, in reality, ‘It belongs to a sharp-witted Glaswegian Italian who flogs laughter’.55
Disgusting Bliss Page 11