A comedy sketch show that ran on
BBC2 from
1989 to
1993. It was originally a parody of
satellite TV, which was still novel in 1989, particularly
Rupert Murdoch's
Sky TV, the title being an obvious pun. It starred and was written by
Angus Deayton,
Geoffrey Perkins and
Philip Pope, and was essentially a television version of the same team's long-running radio show '
Radio Active', using some of the same material. The satellite TV angle was very quickly forgotten, and by the time of the
1993 episode 'The Making Of David Chizzlenut', which won the silver rose at the
Montreaux comedy awards the following year, KYTV was simply a parody of television in general. The team thenceforth went their separate ways.
Along with The Mary Whitehouse Experience, KYTV bridged the gap between 1980s television sketch comedy (Not the Nine O'Clock News in particular, although it never approached the same level of critical acclaim) and the late 1990s Armando Ianucci generation. Both The Mary Whitehouse Experience and KYTV were popular at the time, but are essentially forgotten nowadays, as they are never repeated - the former was too much of its time, whilst KYTV was thoroughly steamrollered, obliterated, smashed into the ground, spat on, made to look foolish, eaten, crushed, mangled, skewed, skewered, hurt and stamped on by The Day Today, first broadcast in 1994. Whereas KYTV was a gently amusing poke at television's conventions, The Day Today was a genuinely subverse work of collective genius.
KYTV thus belongs in the same drawer as 'Newman & Baddiel in Pieces', 'Punt & Dennis', 'S&M', any of the other Whose Line is it Anyway spin-offs, anything with Tony Slattery, Phil Cool, Jonathan Ross' early television shows, Vic Reeves' Big Night Out and many others as a component of the late-80s/early-90s comedy landscape. It is hard to overstate the extent to which The Day Today and its ilk have rendered KYTV and its ilk irrelevant and dated.