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Perhaps inevitably – given the radical nature of the programme itself and the delicate balance of power within it – there was only one series of The Day Today. But by the end of it, the genie was well and truly out of the botde. Subsequently, old boys and girls of the New School of Linguistic Exactitude swarmed out into the world like graduation day celebrants in an American teen movie, carrying the lessons they’d learned securely in their knapsacks.

For Ianucci, the huge extent of his managerial and catalytic achievements in the course of this three-year period have hobbled some of his later endeavours with a rather disabling sense of self-regard. Furthermore, his decision to venture in front of the camera in the patchy but occasionally revelatory satirical vehicle Friday [then Saturday] Night Armistice is not entirely vindicated (if only because the collective screen presence of the remorselessly untelegenic trio of Iannucci, Schneider and one-time Lee and Herring bit player turned Alan Partridge co-writer Peter Baynham underlines a little too clearly the innate truth behind the programme’s admittedly prophetic style-is-triumphing-over-substance message).

On the upside, his poorly received solo venture The Armando Iannucci Show does contain – in an extended sketch about impoverished Africans getting together to raise money for the British showbiz establishment – perhaps the most devilishly effective reversal of conventional comedic pieties ever seen on TV. And there’s always Alan Partridge to keep him busy.

For MacKichan and Front, life is considerably more difficult. Eleven years with a woman prime minister do not seem to have brought any notable extension of employment possibilities to the distaff component of groundbreaking TV topical revue ensembles. As with That Was The Week That Was’s Eleanor Bron and Not the Nine O’Clock News’s Pamela Stephenson before them, opportunity does not knock as loudly as it might have, and while MacKichan can sometimes⁵⁶ be seen presenting teaching-baby-to-swim segments on This Morning, or taking the female supporting role in comedies about vets who don’t really like animals, Front struggles even harder to get out of the background.⁵⁷

Stewart Lee and Richard Herring shoehorn their penchant for cerebral juvenilia into a classic odd-couple double act. The chainsmoking Lee ruthlessly exploits the sort of dangerous good looks most university-common-room existentialists can only dream about, while his comedy partner – a self-confessed ‘small, fat, middle-class white bloke from Cheddar in Somerset’ – struggles to come to terms with the fact that though he may idolize Ice-T, Ice-T’s dad was not a caravan-owning headmaster called Keith.

The roots of their comedy lie in gentle mockery – ‘Today in Somerset electricity arouses only suspicion, not fear’ – but a high degree of self-awareness is another vital ingredient. ‘You’ve misunderstood the art of simile, haven’t you?’ they chide each other gleefully: ‘What you’ve done is mix up being like something, with being what it actually is.’

It is in one of Lee’s solo routines that the work of the School of Linguistic Exactitude finds arguably its most complete expression. Billing himself as ‘the third most theoretically rigorous comedian in Britain’ (heaven knows who numbers one and two are), he analyses the body language of a picture postcard featuring two kittens and a dog playing the piano. ‘Perhaps’, he surmises, ‘that kitten had a much more formal musical training.’

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the On The Hour barricades, the Coogan-Marber relationship finds another vehicle for self-exploration (as if Knowing Me, Knowing You was not sufficient outlet) in the form of Paul and Pauline, a.k.a The Sacred Calfs. It is a measure of Marber’s moderating influence on Coogan’s occasional cheeseball tendencies that when the duo first met, the latter was already doing a Paul Calf-type character, but at that stage he was called ‘Duncan Disorderly’.

Leading psychoanalysts have inevitably looked to Coogan’s childhood for the roots of the meticulously observed Mancunian brother and sister – he the hard-drinking, student-phobic City fan, she the indomitable slapper – who would eventually become Alan Partridge’s main rivals in his character pantheon. Coogan himself has done nothing to dissuade them: ‘Do you remember those football colouring books?’ he asks in 1995. ‘I remember colouring in George Best and Bobby Charlton and then getting to the Manchester City players and putting lipstick and earrings on them to make them look like girls.’

The way the characters actually develop (Paul having made his TV début on a show Coogan recorded for Granada with John Thomson and Caroline Aherne) is defined by Jonathan Ross’s Saturday Zoo, where Coogan, Marber and soon to be Fast Show luminary Simon Day are employed to be ‘sketch actors’. Having had a sketch cut in the first week, ‘because it was crap’, and seen Marber summarily fired (though retained by him in a vague directorial capacity) Coogan decides to go ‘for his big gun’.

‘There was no intention of having Paul Calf on Saturday Zoo at first,’ Marber remembers. ‘Steve was saving him for his own special.’ After a few weeks, when the rough-as-dogs-and-proud-of-it Calf is obviously going down a storm, his shy and retiring sister Pauline follows him into the spotlight. However happy – ‘disturbingly sexy’ even, in Marber’s words – he ultimately looks as Pauline Calf, Coogan still ‘takes some persuading’ that this is the right direction for him to move in on TV. ‘It’ll work,’ Marber remembers himself arguing. ‘You can be a woman.’

With her dirty laugh and all-consuming desire to have sex with Patrick Swayze, Pauline is a comic creation so exuberant that she positively juts out of the screen. ‘Tits first,’ she counsels potential suitors, ‘I’m not a slag.’

The relationship between her gruffly genial philistine of a brother and his slightly pretentious but basically well-meaning student friend Roland – played, with a suitably apologetic air, by Marber – is such an inch-perfect representation of the class-based complexities of the Coogan-Marber friendship (with both parties moved one rung down the social ladder) that when Pauline and Roland tie the knot, well, it’s almost too perfect.

One of the most significant if rarely remembered segments of The Day Today (in fact, with hindsight you might say that it sets the pattern for most of the next decade’s most popular and influential shows) is ‘The Bureau’, a pioneering docusoap-style minidrama set in the emotionally overheated surroundings of a tiny bureau de change. Paul and Pauline Calf pick up this prophetic marker and their subsequent starring vehicles – a Video Diary and the aforementioned Wedding Video respectively—prove to be the ideal means for Coogan and co-writers Marber and Henry Normal to explore the nascent phenomenon of reality TV.⁵⁸

Even in its formative Video Diary stage, what people will one day call Factual Entertainment Programming is already having an invigorating effect on the schedules. Watching someone you don’t know moaning about the day they’ve had for a couple of minutes before Newsnight can be informative as well as therapeutic. And even if sometimes it’s neither, well, maybe the tedium is the message.

As if appreciating this, Coogan and co.’s use of the video-diary format is all the more deft for not being explicitly satirical. They opt instead to exploit the medium’s huge potential for richness of character development and well-observed detail (Paul Calf’s diagonally striped sheet and duvet set springs to mind) to reflect the way the ever-increasing likelihood of seeing our lives replayed on the small screen might change the way we live them.

Last but definitely not least among The Day Today diaspora, how does Chris Morris, the Dark Lord Sauron of the On The Hour saga, fare out on his own in the world? Having already emphasized the self-contained nature of his contribution by letting the surviving cast members make Knowing Me, Knowing You without him, it’s no surprise that he continues to plough his own furrow with singular intensity.

The development of what tomorrow’s media-studies students will no doubt refer to as The Chris Morris Method – cloaking oneself in the robes of broadcasting authority, then leading unwitting accomplices into a nightmare world of absurdist humiliation – continues at breakneck pace.

‘The first thing you do is try and decontextualize everything so you make nonsense,’ observes the usually reclusive Morris in the aforementioned Independent on Sunday interview. ‘But then I just started thinking it would be a bit more of a challenge to get people to talk this rubbish without actually editing…The risk of somebody just saying “You’re talking bollocks” is huge…but it really gets your adrenalin going.’

While Morris’s quest for new stimuli to his adrenal gland will lead him down ever more dangerous pathways – not least shouting ‘Christ’s fat cock’ at Cliff Richard and announcing the death of a still very much alive Michael Heseltine on his understandably short-lived Radio 1 show – his most significant moment prior to the protracted unveiling of Brass Eye in 1996-7 comes in a much more low-key setting. The five ten-minute interviews Morris records with an ailing Peter Cook under the rather off-putting title of Why Bother? sidle on to the Radio 4 airwaves with a minimum of fuss in 1994, but they contain some of the finest work either man has ever produced.

These almost entirely improvised encounters between Morris (in his cocksure interviewer guise) and Cook’s patrician alter ego Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling work brilliantly on several different levels: as a clash of comedy titans, a passing on of the baton and a strangely touching farewell. ‘The next time we’ll want to interview you,’ Morris snarls with a superficial abruptness which stomps off around the houses and comes back as tender regret, ‘you’ll probably be dead.’

There’s often an edge of sadism to the Chris Morris Method: ‘If somebody knows there’s something awful going on but doesn’t know how to escape and is constricted from doing so by good manners,’ he has been heard to exult, ‘it degenerates into a siege, whereby you fling ghastly suggestion after ghastly suggestion at them.’ When Morris is pitted against a worthy adversary such as Cook, however, real fireworks can result. Listening to this sublimely well-matched pairing discuss the discovery of a fossilized nine-month-old Christ, it is sometimes hard to believe what you are hearing.

As Streeb-Greebling dissembles magisterially in response to Morris’s increasingly malign sallies – ‘I’ve been distorted, I’ve been misrepresented and I’ve been quoted accurately, which is worst of all’ – deeper historical connections between the generations begin to reveal themselves. Literally minutes of innocent amusement can be had from assigning each of On The Hour’s leading lights to a suitable counterpart from the early sixties satire boom. (Morris is Cook, Coogan is Dudley Moore, Marber is Jonathan Miller, Iannucci is David Frost and…Oh dear Lord, please make it stop.)

Still more intriguingly, the overweening arrogance of Morris’s preening media archetype actually has its roots in Cook and co.’s pioneering experiment with irreverence. That supercilious, know-it-all demeanour – you might call it the all-seeing sneer – so prevalent in the British media of the late twentieth century, from the Guardian’s ‘Pass Notes’ column to Kirsty Wark’s attitude to the arts, was originally defined by that first wave of bold young satirists, tweaking the nose of the early sixties powers that were.

Who was notorious That Was The Week That Was provocateur Bernard Levin (being rude to diplomats or addressing an audience of farmers as ‘peasants’), if not the spiritual father of Morris’s Day Today anchorman? And once the traditions of social and political deference which so deadened British cultural life prior to the sixties had been broken down, what was to stop those who had achieved that goal becoming a new ruling class, every bit as entrenched and invulnerable as their predecessors?

By a choice irony, the satirists themselves were among the first to notice this happening. Especially when pop’s unwashed hordes – The Beatles, David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, people who hadn’t even been to university – barged rudely through behind them, widening the modest breach they’d made in the walls of public propriety into a yawning chasm, and treading on quite a few elegantly shod toes in the process. In his impassioned 1969 tract The Neophiliacs, Private Eye founder Christopher Booker fulminated loud and long against ‘this new aristocracy’ of ‘photographers, dress-designers and Beat Musicians’, which was a bit like a former member of The Clash writing a book about the pernicious impact of Two Tone.

Whether the graduates of the New School of Linguistic Exactitude will ever have cause to make similarly curmudgeonly expressions of regret about those who follow in their wake, only time will tell. One thing that is certain is that the Cook-Frost generation had to stretch their own canvases. Away from the rarefied world of groundbreaking BBC satire, the comedians of the nineties work in a white space of pretty much unrestricted magnitude. And liberty on such a grand scale can sometimes be its own limitation.