Fact me till I fart, it's The Day Today, the most outrageously satirical show ever to feature a man called Chris Morris--until Brass Eye, that is. Both savage and surreal, The Day Today heaps great steaming mounds of abuse and scorn upon our self-appointed moral guardians, upon pompous pundits, puerile newspaper headline-writers and vacuous, self-important TV presenters. And they all richly deserve it.

First broadcast in 1994, the show's format is Newsnight-meets-Crimewatch in Hell. A ridiculously protracted title sequence and melodramatic headline announcements introduce Morris' demented, Jeremy Paxman-a-like anchorman, who simpers to the viewers while castigating on-air his useless reporter Peter O'Hanraha'hanrahan. The vacant Collatallie Sisters turns financial news into a Dadaist nightmare of meaningless statistics, graphically illustrated by the currency cat or the finance arse; while American journo Barbara Wintergreen's reports from Death Row are just scary and absurd enough to be completely believable. Also making his TV debut here is Steve Coogan's legendary sports caster Alan Partridge, with his appalling sports reporting, his cringe-inducing misunderstandings and his sheer blunt-headed stupidity (many of the same team, sans Morris, would reunite the following year for Knowing Me, Knowing You). Sketches such as the spoof soap "The Bureau" and the spoof docu-soap "The Pool" also betray the writing skills of Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, creators of Father Ted.

On the DVD: The Day Today arrives as a two-disc set with all six episodes on the first disc. The second disc has a handful of fairly brief but still enjoyable extras: here you will find "Mini News" features in full and the complete versions of "The Pool" and "The Office" documentaries--the latter now looking like a brilliant premonition of the more famous Ricky Gervais vehicle. There's a rather dull Open University programme about the craft of TV journalism which uses extracts from The Day Today and is truthfully entitled "Po-Faced Analysis". Best of all is the complete original Pilot episode, plus a marvellous post-programme update in which Morris telephones a befuddled American McDonald's employee as if he was a crewmember of a sunken US submarine. Picture and sound quality are standard for a BBC show from the early 1990s. In summary: dispassionate. --Mark Walker

I don't want to go into any detail. Basically, this is the This Is Spinal Tap of TV. Absolutely bang on satire, but never in a clever-clever way, always in a hilarious, gloriously silly way. If you can watch the news after this and not laugh then either you have no sense of humour or the story is something really horrific.

I hate Sebastian Coe!

This is one of those things you don't need to think about, just buy.

The humour travels round with you it's so darn good.

I can't go on holiday without thinking 'This is a high clarrrss bureau de chawnge!' at least once, or see the weather forecast in the lift without thinking 'Breezes', or listen to Phil Collins without thinking 'Ahpumpedherfulloflead, becauseshewasan....Uuuuuzi luvvvah.'

I remember when this was originally shown on television and how I laughed at the silly news stories. Alan Partridge is even here presenting his sports news (his horse racing commentary is so funny I soiled myself). The Day Today is just brilliant and is a fine addition to any DVD collection. It is as is the case with comedy not going to be to everyones taste but I suspect the majority will find this a very amusing DVD indeed.

I loved this programme when it was on and when I bought this DVD I was shocked to find I still loved it. The bullied vicar, and rogue dentists still had me laughing out loud.

As for one of the hidden extras I only discovered it as I got called away from the DVD just as I put it in and when I came back it was to hear Chris Morris on the phone with Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan who was supposed to be in New York on 11 September for a meeting in a 'tower'. If you recall how inept Peter was you can imagine how the conversation goes.

All in all a great buy.

Like Brasseye? Want to see the roots of it's anarchic behaviour?
Like Alan Partridge? Want to the see the roots of his character?
Like The Office? Want to see where Gervais got his inspiration for it?

Etc etc, this series is responsible for so much of modern UK comedy and is itself, genius. Like Brasseye, the humour here is random, random, random. The characters are top notch and the dialogue/article names are perfectly chaotic. Horses in the underground, bomb dogs, a mobile bureau de change, currency cat, gay weather, I could go on.

It's not that offensive, and from what I can remember there's not that much swearing in it, but it is damn funny.