Anyway, down to business.
BROKEN NEWS
BBC Two, 10pm, Mondays
Fricking heck. I'm going to cut to the chase here, folks. Despite being written by John "wrote and directed People Like Us" Morton and Tony "wrote World of Pub, writes for The Thick of It" Roche, Broken News is quite possibly the limpest half-hour of faux-comedy ever broadcast on BBC Two. And BBC Two once broadcast Double Take.
If you're not familiar with what Broken News is, it's essentially The Day Today, but with all the funny bits replaced with items where you might think "hey, I can see how that sort of might be funny. Only it isn't". Example: you know bird flu? The big story of bird (or 'avian') flu that is going on at the moment? Well, what if they replaced the word 'bird' with, say, 'tomato'. Tomato flu. And then they ran with it. For ages. Well, it's that, for half-an-hour. For six weeks. Guh.
It's as if the writers lost the scripts on the way to filming (possibly Tony Roche left them in a taxi in an excellent Hugh Abbott-y manner), and hurredly did a Google for "British websites trying to 'be' The Onion", printing out any results before the cast walked in. And we all know how poor British websites trying to 'be' The Onion are, hey kids? If there was time, they'd have scribbled a few bits they've remembered from The Day Today ("frozen slab of urine") or Barry Welsh Is Coming ("Look Out East" not being quite as funny as "Look Out Wales", though) into the margins.
Quite often you'll hear people complaining that "American TV can knock out quality shows in 26-part seasons, and British telly can barely stretch to a six-week run without relying on tedious catch-phrase comedy where the actual jokes are the same. Every. Single. Week", and nowhere is this more true than in the case of Broken News. While the BN team can barely fill a single half-hour without 78% of the audience wondering if they wouldn't be better off watching the real local news on ITV instead, America's top news parody, Fox News, is now in it's ninth year of 24-hour transmission. Man, I love that crazy Bill O'Reilly character.
What? Oh.
3 .:
Bang on. It looked terrible from the trails, and the first two minutes of the first show did nothing to convince me otherwise. The worst kind of tripe. Doubly depressing when you look at the kind of people involved in making it, as you mention.
I actually gave up on it after ten soul-destroying minutes*. I only gave it another chance because if I'm going to cobble together a TV blog, I'd better give it a whole half-hour. It was actually painful to watch.
(* and I've been able to watch entire episodes of Bo Selecta before now.)
Broken News makes me cry. Seriously. BBC comedy sucks.
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