A number of reviewers here feel that "Broken News" is somehow a shallow rip-off of Chris Morris's work on "Brass Eye" and "The Day Today". I couldn't disagree more.
There's no bigger fan than me when it comes to Chris Morris's brilliantly scabrous spoof news work from the 80s and 90s, but come on folks! Just because a new generation of writers and performers wants to explore a similar strand of comedy/satire, that doesn't make them rip-off merchants. Nobody's pretending that they're the first people to have ploughed this particular comic furrow (and actually, neither was Chris Morris: he was very much following in the footsteps of arch prankster Victor Lewis-Smith). I'm sure the writers of "Broken News" would be the first to acknowledge the debt they owe to such pioneers.
In fact, what the BN team have created is something deliciously sophisticated and different. Unlike Morris, whose news parody tended toward an exaggerated, cartoonish style, BN's chief strength is in subtlety of detail: it looks and sounds so utterly (and hilariously) like the real thing!
Anyone who enjoyed "Broken News" as much as I did should also check out the same team's BBC radio show, "The Sunday Format", which uses similar techniques to parody the content of British Sunday newspaper supplements. Brilliant stuff.
