The humour championed by Not The Nine O'Clock News seems cruelly banal in hindsight - news footage reedited with funny noises, news stills with funny captions, comedy pop songs, observational stuff about digital watches and punk trousers and what happens when TV talk shows go wrong. All the comic verities that the latest generation has either slyly adopted or loudly opposed. And yet, before Not The Nine O'Clock News, what were the verities? Not these.
The show gave young comics a go. Mel Smith was a disaffected theatre director from the Young Vic. Griff Rhys Jones was a radio producer with a sideline in ensemble comedy, Pamela Stephenson an actress who is best remembered here for her role in Stand Up Virgin Soldiers. Rowan Atkinson had had some success in a Radio 3 series whilst still at college and then in a pilot for LWT and, of course, as an honorary Python in The Secret Policeman's Ball. Yet they were all young and comparatively untried. This is an ethic now, but was a very new and dangerous principle then.
"I don't know when people of that age had last been let loose with complete freedom on television," the creator of Not The Nine O'Clock News, John Lloyd, says. "And if you get the right bunch of people like that, you can storm the Bastille because you have nothing to lose." The notion that the role of some comedy was to test the boundaries of an ever-shifting public taste might be run of the mill now, but in 1979 it, too, was new and untried.
Of course, it is clear that some, if not all, of these talents, would have found another way into television. But it is undeniable that the experience of making 27 shows, employing nearly 120 writers (among them Richard Curtis, Andy Hamilton, Guy Jenkins and David Renwick) and enjoying audiences of up to 15 million had two spectacular impacts - on the careers of those involved, and on the whole nature of television comedy that followed.
And yet the programme still sits uneasily in the canon. Sure, it's got the future Mr Bean in it, but its reputation as topical satire means that it can't be timeless. It is time-specific satire opposed to the timeless surrealism of its big older brother, Python, and its reputation suffers as a result.
But when watching all 27 episodes again, what strikes you is just how strange and complex and strong the material is. From the intense naturalism of Gerald the Gorilla to the strangeness of Atkinson as a man who wants to buy seven toilets for his bathroom "in case of blockage". And then there were the Stephenson impersonations, turning Angela Rippon's Mugabe into a word with 12 syllables. This doesn't seem like a show that deserves the label "topical satire".
"The mark of a good comedy programme is that when you stop watching it and you go out into the street, things seem subtly different, you see things you didn't see before," says Lloyd. Not The Nine O'Clock News did this. It changed the way we saw the news, disrupted the way we viewed television formats and changed our opinion of television itself.
The story of how the show became a success is an object lesson for anyone contemplating a similar effort. Once it had been commissioned, theatre actors Christopher Godwin, Jonathan Hyde and Willoughby Goddard were cast, together with John Gorman from The Scaffold and Rowan Atkinson.
The notion of a female lead had always been an issue which the Not The Nine O'Clock News team wanted to tackle. The Pythons had been heavily criticised for turning out female characters that were either Terry Jones as a granny or Carol Cleveland as a scantily-dressed young woman. Contact was made with Victoria Wood, Alison Steadman and even Susan George before a chance meeting with Pamela Stephenson amidst the tweed morass of a BBC radio producers' party. She turned the job down, but when the ITV strike of 1979 caused her costume drama to be abandoned, she signed up for the show.
The new cast met at a lunch in a restaurant on Shepherds Bush Green. John Lloyd has fond memories of the motley crew. "Now, at this lunch there were me and Sean who are BBC producers. No oil paintings, but reasonably straightforward. Rowan Atkinson, an intensely shy electronics engineer with this strange rubbery face, Mel Smith, this portly, balding man with incredibly long girly hair, Chris Langham - later to join the Muppets and leave the way open for Griff Rhys Jones to become the fourth member - and Pamela Stephenson. Everyone thought, what is she doing here, she's obviously the producer's fuck. But far from it - she was an accomplished actress."
What Hardie describes as the "car crash" of personalities and styles made for an embarrassing lunch, but it soon occurred to him and Lloyd that it would make for electricity on television. "Amazingly, within three or four weeks everybody was fantastically close friends and had a great deal of respect and lots of fun. So, what made the initial lunch so awful is what made the show such a success. All of these very different traditions and types rubbing against each other."
Each week the mountain of scripts in the rehearsal room would be added to, shot, edited against the clock on the day of transmission and shown to an audience that was initially lukewarm but soon grew to love the show - and give BBC2 audiences of eight to 10 million at its peak. Figures that would truly be salivated about now.
And from it all came the remarkable future careers and the foundations of independent comedy production. The results of that are the television comedy world we now inhabit.
The Not the Nine O'Clock News Story is on BBC2 at 10 p.m. tonight. Gerard Barry is its producer.