Andrew Gillman is the director you are not meant to notice. On The Day Today he made a spoof bulletin look exactly like the real thing, and the comedy depends on it; he has spent most of his career serving other people's jokes.
Fi1m perspective
The wall of screens behind the desk on The Day Today (1994) is lit in the same blue as the real news. The globes in the titles swoop, the drums and brass come in, the captions and tickers go past before you can check them, and the man reading the bulletin is Chris Morris. Andrew Gillman directs all of it dead straight. Nothing in the frame winks. That is the whole method: build the bulletin properly, then let Morris and Armando Iannucci fill it with lunacy. We still sit up every time those globes come in over the state-funeral brass, and we have watched that sequence more often than we can defend, because at no point does it admit it is a joke.
He could build it because he had built the real thing. Gillman began in the film library at the news agency Visnews, moved into assistant editing on commercials, and then made items for magazine programmes such as Network 7 and 01 for London. When he went for The Day Today, his pitch was that the programme's different broadcast formats were styles he had already shot: news, documentary, magazine. He has since said the thing he is proudest of is "the range of visual language textures", and on this evidence he is right to be.
The rest of his career is a director standing just behind a performer. Ruby Wax got him into comedy; then came The World of Lee Evans (1995), That Peter Kay Thing (1998–2000), which launched Kay on television, Terri McIntyre (2003), Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive (2007) and Moving Wallpaper (2008). We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to a view on them. What is consistent is his own account of the job: turn up, read the situation fast, deliver the polished item, and leave the ideas to the people whose names are in the title.
The caveat with a director whose virtue is not being seen is that his work is hard to weigh. Our review of The Day Today gives the studio to Dennis De Groot and Jo Sutherland, the cutting to Steve Gandolfi and David Fairhead, the music to Morris and Jonathan Whitehead, and gives Gillman one clause. That is roughly the credit he seems to want. It is also worth saying that the programme is slightly slower whenever it leaves the desk, and location work is the sort he says he is quickest at; speed of shooting and speed on screen are not the same thing.
He has lately moved towards producing, with Chuck Chuck Baby (2024), and teaches at the National Film School. If the lesson is that a parody is only as good as the thing it copies, and that somebody has to build that thing properly first, he is the right person to teach it.
Biography
Andrew Gillman is a British television director and producer. He directed all six episodes of the 1994 BBC comedy series The Day Today, a satirical news programme created by Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris.
His other directing credits include That Peter Kay Thing (2000), The World of Lee Evans (1995), Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive (2007) and Moving Wallpaper (2008). He has also worked as a producer, including on the 2024 feature film Chuck Chuck Baby.
