- The Pilot Show
The pilot show of arguably the greatest comedy series of the nineties should by rights be branded, bacon-like, with the words 'find of the century'. The mere idea of there being more of The Day Today stashed away unseen should be enough to send any self-respecting comedy fan into salivation-overdrive.
It is therefore rather sobering to discover that, despite the series' overwhelming and well-earned aloofness over practically everything that's been created in the name of comedy since those six weeks in '94, its pilot programme is... well, it's just a pilot programme. No great shakes really. A bit rough around the edges, slightly lacking in gestation, hit and miss, etc.
A fair retrospective review is of course difficult. It's far too easy to point out the bits that don't work when you're so familiar with the successful end-result. Adding to which, this is The Day Today, a show where everything clicks together so well that you tend to expect even the doodles in the margin to be mathematically symmetrical. Essentially what we're reviewing here is a learning curve. An excellent yet slightly awkward halfway house between a perfect radio show and a perfect TV series.
The problems with the show could probably be summed up thus: it's On The Hour with pictures. And, nice though the pictures are, the team were still discovering that transferring radio comedy to TV often needs a rethink beyond that. New boy Peter Baynham admitted at the time that it 'didn't work', and posited, as an analogy, that if for instance they'd ever done the tortoise-smashing sketch from the Radio 1 Chris Morris Music Show as a television sketch it would simply come across as feckless and unpleasant rather than funny (something which has seemingly never occurred to the League Of Gentlemen team). Conversely, word-heavy sketches which work fine in sound-only often need more than just the sight of a presenter's face to convey them successfully for a visual medium.
Where the pilot succeeds, however, it succeeds big time. The age-old cliché that 'the pictures are always so much better on the radio because it allows the audience's imagination to paint them' was tackled head-on with the insert sketches. These remain the selling point of the show, perfectly realised, boasting a trademark attention to minute visual detail, and most were eventually reused in the main series or 'Mini News' promos, albeit often with a nip and tuck to tighten them up.
Even the less successfully executed of these, for instance the full version of the Alan Partridge 'Tennis Ace' chat (which comes across as little more than an industry in-joke about interview nodding shots) still yielded useable lines when suitably re-edited. The 'War' routine meanwhile, despite being cut to ribbons, reassembled, and given a massive great boot up the bum between pilot and series still remains jaw-dropping viewing in its early incarnation.
By contrast the in-the-studio sections are less defined and highlight the team's biggest creative rethink over the show. Partridge is fine (and still wearing the Pringle jumper of those early publicity shots at this stage). Collatalie Sisters isn't too removed from her series incarnation. But Chris Morris as anchorman has remarkably little 'presence'. For On The Hour he's a single voice (the listener's attention focusing on him alone). In the series he's very much in-your-face, conveying an unchallengable authority over everything that's going on around him. In the pilot however he just sort of... sits there, with his big curly mop of hair, coming across as a 14-year-old boy who's been allowed to do comedy for the day. The unhinged series-Morris gives the impression that he could leap out of the screen at any given moment and throttle you with a newsfeed. The pilot-Morris looks like he may threaten to do so, but is too far away from the screen to pose any real threat. Aggravating all this is a studio set somewhat more akin to a cosy KYTV sketch than the foreboding end result, and even the camerawork - which so beautifully compliments the links with chaotic studio-sweeps and crash-zooms - is played traditionally straight here.
Every Day Today fan (and Morris wannabe) should be afforded a peek at this show as a perfect reminder that the team refused to accept second best. The forthcoming DVD would of course be the obvious opportunity. Realistically however it's doubtful that the pilot will ever be released to the masses in its entirety. Not enough time has gone by yet for the creative team to allow the audience to see the cracks of their finest project and we may have to wait for them all to grow long beards before they get misty-eyed about the bits that didn't quite fit.
However it would be artistically criminal if certain sections at least were overlooked for inclusion as extras. The 'Debate 2000' sequences, in which The Cast seemingly improvise arguments for the sake of argument - Marber in particular giving a marvellous early outing for 'Jacque "Jacques" Liverot' - are particularly fine (and since the three sections which appear in the pilot are obviously isolated from a much longer session, perhaps a new, longer, feature could be assembled from the rushes specially for release). Other bits which could feasibly be accommodated include a fantastic clip of a muddled Suzanne Charlton weather report (over which Morris provides a jolly barbed running commentary - "Ooh! Bollocks alert!"); a neat vox pop interview with a member of the public christened 'Minster For War'; an unused bit of Partridge covering a 100 Meters sprint, and Rebecca Front teaching a child to play Barry Manilow's 'Bermuda Triangle' on the piano.
And there's bound to be more, locked away in the vaults somewhere.
For the following transcripts we've highlighted everything onscreen which didn't feature in the main series or its accompanying 'Mini News' trailers.) As mentioned above, most of the insert sequences were eventually re-used in the series. Pretty much all of the in-the-studio linking material was reshot, although much of the script will look familiar (if slightly more word-heavy). We've also added footnotes here and there.
Have fun.
Hidden Archive: The Day Today - Pilot
