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Remarkably for the work of an ensemble with so little experience of the medium, The Day Today – the exquisitely realized small-screen version of On The Hour which finally reaches BBC2 screens in January 1994 – manages to create a televisual language every bit as perfectly adapted to its target as the radio prototype had been. Iannucci, Morris, Coogan, Marber et al. inflate the familiar visual and verbal tics of the TV newsroom into such magnificently grotesque shapes that they hang in the air above every subsequent ‘legitimate’ broadcast in the manner of gigantic barrage balloons.

Morris’s all-powerful studio overlord presides like some puffed-up Paxmanesque nabob over a sumptuous array of courtiers. As well as Coogan’s marvellous roving sports buffoon, there’s Doon MacKichan’s doyenne of the money markets, Collaterlie Sisters, Schneider’s physically mutable weatherman, Marber’s hapless political correspondent, Peter O’Hanraha’Hanrahan (forever struggling to come to terms with the intricacies of the European Union in the face of Morris’s withering scepticism) and Rebecca Front’s intimidatingly eco-friendly Rosie May, purveyor of that archetypal 1990s informa-hybrid, ‘Enviro-mation’.

It’s the success with which these individual embodiments are cradled within an appropriate stylistic whole that makes The Day Today so devastating. The caffeine-crazed fast-cutting, the invasive close-ups, the ransacked sock-drawer of different film stocks, the priapic graphics; this is the infrastructure of televisual deceit, and to watch it being taken apart piece by piece is at once utterly liberating and a little scary.

But what are the consequences of this act of premeditated destruction? In Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy, his not terribly provocatively entitled memoir of half a lifetime’s television watching, Guardian journalist Stuart Jeffries asserts that The Day Today ‘blew up the TV news and the fragments descended into exactly the same place as before the explosion’. But this is very far from being the truth.

If anyone has any doubts about the way the surreal extrapolations of The Day Today feed back into the mainstream of official news-gathering, there’s a 1995 BBC Learning Zone documentary about TV current affairs which can swiftly dispel them. Footage of arrogant young trainees learning to parcel up their partial interpretations of the world into easily digestible one-minute packages is smoothly intercut with The Day Today’s Rebecca Front analysing the cosmetic rituals of her inspired US reporter, Barbara Wintergreen (‘Your make-up is so thick that you can’t really move your head’). When you factor in a series of anonymous talking heads saying things like ‘the editing is the way you apply the grammar’ in such a way as to leave it unclear whether they’re talking about The Day Today or the actual news (of course the answer is they’re talking about both), it’s hard to believe that the whole programme isn’t a prank devised by Chris Morris himself. Nor is this the end of the overlap between The Day Today’s fiction and TV actuality’s fact.

A whole host of those – from Alan Titchmarsh to Richard Made-ley—who might have been expected to look to their laurels in the wake of Partridge et al.’s brutally well-observed mockery, instead respond by moving in the opposite direction and absorbing it into their day-to-day demeanour.

The idea of an object of satire embracing the more baroque extremities of their own comedic portrayal did not make its début in the nineties. Three decades earlier, in the wake of Peter Cook’s celebrated impression of Harold Macmillan (a tacit relaxation of previously stringent rules regarding the representation of living persons having made the satirically motivated impersonation a much less perilous business than it was in The Goon Show’s day), it was maintained by many that the prime minister began to behave more and more like Cook’s take-off and less and less like his actual self. In this context, the apparent severity of Peter Cook’s oft-quoted response to finding out that Macmillan was in the audience as he performed at his Establishment Club actually cut both ways.

Cook’s apparently rather discourteous (in-character) proclamation – ‘There is nothing I like better than to wander over to Soho and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant, young satirists with a stupid great grin spread all over my face’ – was an admission of defeat as much as a display of aggression. If the prime minister would actually cross town to hear Cook’s impression of him, that didn’t say much for the amount of pain it caused him.

Accordingly, when the home secretary Henry Brooke – the subject of some of the programme’s most savage attacks – wanted to get That Was The Week That Was taken off the air, Macmillan argued against this precipitate course on the shrewd grounds that it was probably better to be satirized than ignored. In his appreciation of how crucial an attribute being seen to be able to take a joke would become in British public life, the supposedly out-of-step-with-the-times Macmillan actually seems to have been quite a forward-thinker.⁵⁵

As anyone who has ever laughed at a cruel remark made at their own expense knows, a show of imperviousness to such slights does not guarantee a diminution of their impact. Often – for example, in the poignant and disturbing case of Sammy Davis Jr – it will have quite the opposite effect. While The Day Today’s well-aimed barbs initially seem to bounce straight off the gnarly hide of the British body politic, some of them find their target, causing strange and unforeseen infections of the blood.

Far from confirming the inability of satirical endeavour to affect the way people think, The Day Today’s calculated inhumanity seems to impact upon not only the way world events are presented to us, but also the actual nature of the events themselves. For instance, Tony Blair and George Bush’s campaign to mobilize support for a multilateral attack on Iraq in 2002-3 seems to reflect the long-term influence of The Day Today ‘War Special’ (in which Chris Morris’s demonic anchorman systematically orchestrates the beginning of a global conflict with the help of some snappy editing and a series of provocative effects) at a policy level.

It would be a misunderstanding of the true nature of satire to think that its success or otherwise is measured by the achievement of meaningful change. (As Peter Cook was fond of pointing out, the art form was defined in the cabaret clubs of Weimar Berlin, ‘and see how they stopped the Nazis’.) But even if it was, inspiring the leaders of the Western military-industrial complex to new heights of bellicosity would probably not be the kind of meaningful change those responsible had in mind.