ITN - Classic Presentation

Well, C4 were providing plurality with all the independent production companies making programmes for it. C4 did request an editor for Channel 4 News from outside ITN, though, and hence Derrick Mercer from the Sunday Times was the first editor, but he didn't particularly enjoy it and the programme wasn't very good, so he left quite early on. ITN suggested as his replacement Stewart Purvis who was already at ITN, but they convinced C4 that he was independent-minded enough to make it suitably different to ITV, and it was a million times better.



Yes! They used to show the early series which featured one story spread across five five minute episodes (as opposed to the later series which were a single half hour story). I vividly remember that on Good Friday there wasn't a C4 Daily but they needed to show the final part of that week's story, so they showed it once, at 6am, and I got up specifically to watch it. Although as we have established, I was a stupid kid who liked getting up at 6am anyway.



In the sixties, perhaps. Certainly wasn't in the eighties, given the BBC were showing continuous live pictures.

Particularly for a party conference which would have already been packed with cameras, journalists and OB units from all the major broadcasters. Well, apart from TV-am.



Were you allowed to get up at 6AM, or did you have to be discrete and hope you didn't wake your parents up? Was a chore for me because I lived (well, live, as I'm still in the same house a quarter of a century later) in a house with an open staircase, so I couldn't even shut a door to block out the light and noise from the TV. So more often than not they'd be down the stairs sending me back to bed.

International Times launched the Saturday after the Channel 4 Daily, airing at 7.30am (if memory serves), between Comic Book and Trans World Sport. It was a review of the week's world news, and again if memory serves, it only lasted about 6 months, maybe a little more.

It would usually be anchored by one of the Channel 4 Daily World News anchors. It was quite interesting, but ultimately it was really on at the wrong time of day, and it just never did anything really.

I liked the programme, but with CBBC on BBC1, the Open University on BBC2 and TV-am's kids shows, it was always facing an uphill struggle.

Though don't forget the graphics on The Day Today were produced by ITN's graphic design division (eventually they spun out to become Jump) It's entirely possible that in-house designs (and the people and thinking behind the requests) informed their work on The Day Today. Even more so if they were responsible for them.

(EDIT : As I see Markymark also pointed out)

Well, I don't want to boast or anything but I had a telly in my own bedroom from when I was eight so I had all kinds of opportunity. I was far more excited to be able to watch more telly first thing in the morning than last thing at night. That said, I remember my dad once coming into my bedroom and telling me to go to sleep because somehow I'd imagined it was the morning and turned the telly on in my sleep when it was in fact midnight. I remember telling him I couldn't find any cartoons.

I didn't watch all the telly in my bedroom, mind. I remember when The 8.15 From Manchester was on I got in a routine of going into the living room, throwing out the previous week's Radio Times and making my own breakfast, all so I could be in front of the telly when it started. Must have made a right racket.

This thread has taken an odd turn, I think.

Yes !

Although, I can remember creeping down to the living room at 08:20 on a Saturday morning, to watch LWT's
start up, before creeping back up to my bedroom at 08:30 once Sesame St started !

That was the thing about ITV start ups, they were great, it was the first actual programme of the morning that was such a let down after the build up !

ITN did bid for the original breakfast franchise. Embarrassingly for them their bid was based around a programme anchored by Anna Ford. At this point Ford had already agreed to join Peter Jay's bid, however she did so behind the backs of ITN.

The Channel 4 Daily titles with the multiple globes and the presenters turning around did immediately strike me as very The Day Today with the presenters turning in a very Barbara Wintergreen-esque fashion. In fact the whole Channel 4 Daily programme does seem to me to have had a degree of influence on the production team. The different segments from different sets is pretty much the whole The Day Today format and the sets on page 4 have some similarity to the pilot episode set.

Of course it wasn't the only programme that influenced the production team, Chris Morris's area of the set is clearly influenced by Trevor MacDonald's News at Ten desk of the time; the BBC News brand of the time also featured glossy globes and sweeping pans of the studio; and Newsnight had desks placed as far away from each other as possible much like The Day Today set.

Oh for goodness sake, "On The Hour" hadn't even been created yet when The Channel 4 Daily came out, that wasn't until 1991. Chris Morris was still producing "No Known Cure" for BBC Radio Bristol, and "The Chris Morris Show" for BBC GLR at the time. Armando Iannucci was still at BBC Radio Scotland producing "No' The Archie McPherson Show".

Anybody can look back and see similarities. But the inspirations for The Day Today, are not likely to have included The Channel 4 Daily, at least not directly.

The content may not - but it is entirely possible the same designers worked on both sets of titles... (And may have found some of their 'serious news' commissions slightly OTT...)

That's possible. If you look back at late 80s/early 90s titles, there was a lot of 'flying around' of some kind or another. Whether the camera was flying into Big Ben as in News At Ten, or programme logos were, as in the 540 and the weekend news, or indeed flying in towards the earth, as in the ITN World News. Even the BBC's One O'Clock News had some flying around the clock face in there. Even TSW and Spotlight had flying elements in their titles

Compare that with the titles BBC News was using in 1993. Not a lot of moving elements, except the camera itself. Channel 4 News wasn't using a lot of moving elements in their titles. Even ITN cut that out from the Lunchtime News, and the Early Evening News. News At Ten's open was all about camera movement, no other flying elements.

You have to look to satellite television, to Sky News and CNN to find the flying elements in 1993.

I don't know why this doesn't mean Morris and Iannucci can't have seen it at the time and remembered it when they came to do The Day Today. It's also maybe the case that the C4 Daily was on the showreel of the designers when they were pitching to do the graphics. Alright, so maybe they didn't, but it's certainly not beyond the realms of the imagination. Certainly not enough to baldly suggest it had absolutely nothing to do with it.

It's like arguing The Beatles can't have inspired The Rutles, because they were ten years apart.