Broken News
| Broken News | |
|---|---|
| Genre | News satire |
| Created by | John Morton, Tony Roche |
| Directed by | John Morton |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 6 (list of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Jon Plowman |
| Producer(s) | Paul Schlesinger |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC Two |
| Original release | 31 October – 6 December 2005 |
| External links | |
| Website | |
Broken News is a comedy programme shown on BBC Two in late 2005. The show poked fun at the world of 24-hour rolling news channels. The title of the show is a play on the phrase "breaking news". It had six thirty-minute episodes. Having previously worked on programmes such as People Like Us and The Sunday Format, the show's production team worked closely with writer and director John Morton.
The show jump cut between its various spoof TV channels, which covered both the central story and other stories that would be of interest to their audience. A large part of the comedy came from observations about the nature of news presentation rather than the stories themselves.
The programme centred on Britain's addiction to 24-hour news channels. Each week, Broken News looked at a fictitious news story such as "Tomato Flu" or "The End of the Rain". Its massive cast of 145 actors played newsreaders and reporters on different networks.
It was released on DVD Region 2 on 12 June 2006.
The programme featured mainly the following fictitious networks:
Other smaller networks include:
Occasional separate weather reports are thrown in, with graphic and presentation styles similar to those found on many television channels in the UK. They are often cut together in such a way that the resulting sentences are complete nonsense. The weather reports vary from almost useless ("There's going to be a lot of air tomorrow") to over-useful ("The northern Tajikistan province of Gorno-Badakhshan has experienced no weather for over four months now.") and gives pointless figures similar to the pollen, pollution and sun indices used by BBC and ITV weather stations ("There is a warning of high altitude for people living on mountains in the Pennines and Yorkshire Dales").
Some have accused the show of being too close in style, presentation, writing and humour to the groundbreaking news satire The Day Today, first broadcast in 1994. Broken News has been attacked as "The Day Today for idiots. A show with nothing to say, full of...sub-Chris Morris newspeak and malapropism-humour shorn of all originality. The Day Today had a reason to exist - this didn't." However, co-creator John Morton said in The Guardian "I hope after the first 10 minutes of our show you realise that it's a different animal from The Day Today. The target has changed because we've got this Tower of Babel of news. Plus we're sillier and more harmless."
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