Items18The creator’s order
  1. 1The Day Today (1994)The Day Today (1994) 8.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired 19 Jan 1994The target is the self-importance of television news itself: the swooshing graphics, the anchor who treats every bulletin as a war, the reporters who cannot tell a story from a sound effect. Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci made one series of seven episodes for BBC2 in 1994, and it explains most…0
  2. 2Brass Eye (1997)Brass Eye (1997) 8.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired 29 Jan 1997Where The Day Today mocked the bulletin, Brass Eye goes after the campaigning documentary and the moral panic it feeds on. Chris Morris moved to Channel 4 in 1997 and persuaded real celebrities to read out warnings about invented threats, most famously Cake, a made-up drug that ended up being…0
  3. 3Drop the Dead Donkey (1990)Drop the Dead Donkey (1990) 8.0/10 on IMDbFirst aired 9 Aug 1990A newsroom sitcom about what happens when a serious outfit is bought by a proprietor who wants tabloid numbers. GlobeLink News is the newsroom, Sir Royston Merchant is the new owner, and the staff spend six series on Channel 4, from 1990 to 1998, being pushed towards sensational reporting while…0
  4. 4Frontline (1994)Frontline (1994) 8.7/10 on IMDbFirst aired 9 May 1994The best comedy ever made about a commercial current affairs programme, and a useful corrective to anyone who thinks the genre's tricks are new. Rob Sitch plays Mike Moore, a self-centred, dim-witted anchor who never notices how he is being steered, while the producers around him chase…0
  5. 5The Colbert Report (2005)The Colbert Report (2005) 8.4/10 on IMDbFirst aired 17 Oct 2005Stephen Colbert spent nine years on Comedy Central playing a blustering conservative cable news pundit drawn largely from Bill O'Reilly, and the joke was never just the opinions. It was the format: the self-regard, the catchphrase segments, the certainty that feeling something was as good as…0
  6. 6The Larry Sanders Show (1992)The Larry Sanders Show (1992) 8.5/10 on IMDbFirst aired 15 Aug 1992Not a talk show but a merciless sitcom about one, and the clearest look television has taken at its own back office. Garry Shandling drew on his own experience of hosting to play Larry Sanders, a paranoid and insecure late-night host, with an obsequious sidekick in Hank Kingsley and a fiercely…0
  7. 7Cunk on... (2018)Cunk on... (2018) 7.9/10 on TMDBFirst aired 3 Apr 2018Philomena Cunk is the presenter of the landmark documentary taken to its logical end: the walk-and-talk to camera, the portentous music, the expert nodding through a question that makes no sense. Diane Morgan plays her, Charlie Brooker created her, and the real joke is that the historians she…0
  8. 8This Time with Alan Partridge (2019)This Time with Alan Partridge (2019) 8.0/10 on IMDbFirst aired 25 Feb 2019The evening magazine show gets the treatment it has always deserved: consumer affairs, current affairs, viewer interaction, a highbrow interview and a great deal of lightweight froth, all on one sofa. Alan Partridge is the stand-in co-host who wants the job permanently, and the comedy lives in the…0
  9. 9The Newsroom (1996)The Newsroom (1996) 8.0/10 on IMDbFirst aired 21 Oct 1996The Canadian one, from 1996, and not to be confused with Aaron Sorkin's earnest 2012 drama of the same name. Ken Finkleman writes and stars as George Findlay, the news director of a station modelled on the CBC, a petty, self-serving, image-obsessed manager far more interested in office politics and…0
  10. 10W1A (2014)W1A (2014) 7.8/10 on IMDbFirst aired 19 Mar 2014The BBC satirising the BBC, and doing it with alarming accuracy about management rather than programmes. Hugh Bonneville's Ian Fletcher arrives as Head of Values, surrounded by brand consultants, meetings about meetings and a vocabulary that means nothing while sounding like strategy. A spin-off…0