It was appalling. My ears rang with disbelief when they cut away to a reporter who reported that there was no news to report, because nothing much had happened today.

I think I first encountered that particular staple of new parody in 1979 when some nine-year old kids from my local cub pack performed a hilarious sideways review of the weeks events.

Next week: the Bank of Europe has lost the Euro!

"I think I first encountered that particular staple of new parody in 1979 when some nine-year old kids from my local cub pack performed a hilarious sideways review of the weeks events."

It was also performed by John Simpson and the BBC news team as a Comic Relief sketch in the late 80s. To no comic effect whatsoever.

Was that the garbage on last night at about 11.30?
I started watching it as I'd been attracted by the sound of the audience laughter when flicking through channels, it took me about 10 minutes to turn it off having given it far too much benefit of the doubt.

I saw the end of it, thought some of the edits were poor (the cher joke seemed poorly inserted for example) but... the comedy seemed poor.

Mind, I wasn't a fan of the radio series either.

I'm very interested by a recurring opinion prevalent among the lot of you that IMHO is a little misjudged. Your blanket response to news-based comedy programmes is basically, 'when will they stop trying to be Chris Morris?'.

My experience is that anyone involved in *any* kind of news-format satire tries everything they can to *not* be accused of ripping off On The Hour, The Day Today and Brass Eye. (Iain Lee's personal performance style excepted, and even then he dilutes it with a stab at Hugh Laurie. He wants to be edgy but nice. That's never going to work.) The fundamental problem is that Morris parodied the format of the news and its reporters by emulating them so exactly. So when someone on The Way It Is pretends to be a news reporter, by definition he cannot escape 'doing a Chris Morris'. It's just that Morris was 'doing a Michael Burke' or 'a John Sergeant' or 'a Jeremy Bowen'.

When the guy doing the report on the NHS came on, as the first words came out of his mouth, my immediate reaction was, 'too Chris Morris'. Perhaps I just find myself too obssessed with comedy to not judge people in a knee-jerk way. I don't know. Of course, in the end the reporter did use weird phrases, odd grammar and the piece was called 'Wherefore Art Thou?'. So I suppose my first reaction was right.

Hmm. Kind of turned my finger round and poked myself in the eye there. But my point is, that was only a three minute part of the whole episode. The rest of it seemed a lot more Morris-free to me. Which is not to say it was terribly good, because it wasn't. There were moments -- the cut to Curry's particularly made me honk out a short burp of laughter -- and there were bits that as you say were obvious, puerile and Route 1 such as the 'There's No News' report (which didn't fit into the rest of the programme in which there clearly was).

The Way It Is wasn't appalling. And to compare it to Morris seems to me a little simple. It's target isn't The News or even really news. It's just a load of jokes with an occasional attempt at satire and, as someone else has mentioned, comparison to KYTV is much more appropriate than The Day Today.

By the way, it seems obvious to me that none of you can be comedians. Many of you have seem to have been up before midday.

>The Way It Is wasn't appalling.

I've noticed that comedy writers tend to be a bit more lenient on other writers' shows than a lot of the audience are, probably as a kind of protective instinct about their own work. That's fair enough, and it's no criticism of One Day Soon (is that a Chinese name, by the way?); however, from a non-writer's perspective, with no agenda of my own, it's safe to say that the show was a bucket of old pigs' tits.

Perhaps I would be inclined to be less harsh if I hadn't already seen my schoolmates performing almost word-for-word versions of these fake news reports at the age of 15. The writing, the performance... Jesus. I think the Day Today comparison is unjustified - kind of like whingeing that your local U-15 football side aren't playing like Man United - but TWIT (ahem) can't even hold a candle to KYTV, which was a little patchy, and rendered instantly irrelevant when The Day Today was shown, but was still infinitely funnier than anything we saw last night.

And while we're at it - the inexplicable Tony Lamb again. (I have banged on about him before but that was when I thought he was called Dave...) What the fuck? Whatever he does, he's not entertaining, or different, or funny, or interesting, or indeed even in character; he's just... *there*. I wouldn't mind so much but he currently seems to be the most employed man in comedy, and I'm struggling to understand why. He doesn't even make enough of an impression to warrant active dislike - he's more like your colleague who thinks he can do impressions and keeps barking them at people during office do's while everyone mutters "ha ha, Tony" or just pointedly ignores him while they get on with their conversations. Or am I missing something? Is he in fact a comedy god?

Fair enough.

His name is DAVE Lamb by the way. Unless you're thinking of someone else. So to avoid confusion, he was the one who did the shouting war reporter from Eritrea.

He was OK on 'People Like Us'

Haven't watched it yet..
taped it last night...
probably shouldn't watch it now, after whats been said, but will anyway...
Might like it.. who knows?
It might be full of comedic spunk ((C)Kinder Suprise)

>Any views?

Oh blimey, this is going to take ages...

Basically, I agree with This's comments [can I call you This? Suppose I'd better...] about the excess Morrisisms -- as any lurking writers who are reading this will know, I've been on about this practically since the radio series started. The show's moved some distance from its On The Hourish roots, but not far enough for comfort. And that title sequence with the globe was *definitely* an error of judgment. I'm surprised the Richard/Lolly friction thing wasn't built up, since there was some nice stuff brought in there in the later radio shows and it helped to make the whole thing more distinctive.

In fact, quite a few things -- eg the opening headlines and the Jackie Trent bit -- compared badly with the usual radio standard. The fact it really was a poor week for news can't have helped here (didn't the first Armistice series begin the week John Major resigned? Jammy sods). It's a pity they didn't have that TB/Debenham's story to play with.

>Take the 'Cher prices' line. A pretty funny joke, as far as I could see...

Hmm... no, this was one of the bits that worked, for me.

>Also, the 'Disaster For England' joke was stolen from Punt and Dennis.

Why do you always go for the out-front accusations? It's hardly earth-shatteringly unlikely that somebody else developed the joke independently. But no, there wasn't much there that hadn't been tried in some form or another before... the 'Matt Black' gag (reporter repeats what the presenter's just said) was used in a slightly different form in OTH, and the 'Nick Lips' bits -- which were definitely funny, and which were put together in a way that suggests someone knows what they're doing -- nonetheless call to mind the image of a hapless early-90s individual, possibly even Griff Rhys Jones, standing shame-facedly outside a branch of Tie Rack...

But was it any good? I found it really difficult to tell. My judgment was affected by knowing what was going to happen next most of the time, and by the 'KYTV effect' suffered in any radio-to-TV transfer: (a) "but I *know* what the characters look like and these people look completely different!"; (b) "but they're all wearing wigs!"; (c) whenever Simon said "And now here's a report from..." with some incredible name, I just thought "No it's not, it's Dave Lamb! Come on, everyone knows what Dave Lamb looks like!" I think I'll shut up.

Except to say: it was certainly far, far better than the 11OCS...

Quick in-joke for the benefit of the L&H fans:

(a) "You just did all your old material off the radio!"
(b) "Why didn't you do the Pauli Heikilo bit? That bit's really funny!"

I'm with Mogwai on this one. TDT/OTH comparisons are totally off the scale.

>Except to say: it was certainly far, far better than the 11OCS...

That's a bit more like it, as a comparison, though I doubt there's much to choose between them. I think this rubbish would probably have been improved by a few bender/darkie gags - that's how bad it was.

All right then, it's DAVE Lamb. That'll teach me to take the Corpses' word for it...

>That's a bit more like it, as a comparison, though I doubt there's much to choose between them.

There's a basic difference. TWII comes across as a less arrogant and... well, basically less nasty show than the 11OCS. Hence, when it doesn't deliver, it's not so crushingly embarrassing...

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