BBC's 'The Day Today' DVD - strangest extra ever? (1 Viewer)

[Will*B]

Just a quick post regarding the BBC's upcoming R2 2-disc set of the brilliant 'The Day Today'.

On the 3rd episode, the viewer can switch to Angle 2, which contains what looks like two people sitting watching the show, trying to describe what's going on. It's certainly NOT audio-description, and it's certainly NOT a commentary.

Does anyone have ANY idea what it actually is?! Any help would be appreciated!

 

[JulianK]

A waste of bitrate?

 

[andrew markworthy]

Definitely not!

A large part of The Day Today's humour is the mocking of the medium (the ridiculous graphics, the insincere levels of concern or levity in the voices, etc). This is just another example: a 'commentary' with seemingly a novel feature (you can see the commentators) that is utterly useless because concern for novelty and visual appeal has been put before actual content. If you've seen the Brass Eye disc (Brass Eye was made by the same team after TDT, but perversely, appeared on DVD first) there's an audio commentary by what sounds like a group of winos.

I got the discs yesterday and although I haven't seen/heard the commentary I've watched the rest of it and the extras disc. Pristine transfer and the extras (including the pilot episode never before released) are wonderful. Pride of place, however, must go to the documentary. If you've not seen TDT before, or you never quite understood its humour, this is the place to start. One of the most useful things in it are the clips showing trainee TV reporters and presenters at the BBC being taught how to put together film and commentary. The current obsession for soundbites of news and graphics rather rather than straightforward facts and intelligent analysis is well to the fore here, and you can see that TDT was horribly prescient about the dumbing down of the media.