I’m a bit late to this but, last week The Day Today turned 25. This was a remarkably prescient parody of TV news and current affairs programmes of the time. There were only six episodes, the first of which was transmitted on 19th January 1994.

Jude Rogers in the New Statesman sums it up best:

The Day Today distilled the news’ budding obsession with outrageous visuals. Jeremy Vine on Election Night. Alan Partridge getting caught up in his multi-pronged SoccerMeter mirrors. Doon MacKichan pulling gore-splattered percentages out of a dummy’s intestines, to show the NHS’ decline, was this idea’s natural endpoint.

Then the team skewered news theme tunes. “TV was getting obsessed with the potential of computer graphics, and how music could underpin them,” remembers co-composer Jonathan Whitehead. The theme they made together is the show’s spirit in a perfect 25-second blast, beginning with the sound of a bomb (a graphic of a globe exploding alongside it) before string swoops and percussive stabs make it even more histrionic. “News was all about appearing complicated, important and serious. So we thought
we’d see how far we could go.”

And this is all the excuse I need to post this clip of WAR in which Chris Morris’ Paxmanesque anchor starts out with a segment on a trade agreement and manages to start a war.