The Day Today (1994)

The 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 news satire that came after it. Because it mocks the grammar of a bulletin rather than the stories of the week, almost nothing has dated. Watch it once for the jokes, then watch a real news channel and notice how much of it now looks like a quotation.