Have I Got News For YUSU

Have I Got News For YUSU
Genre:	Comedy
Broadcast:	March 2003
Producer(s):	Jonathan Bufton

One of the election night fillers in 2003 was a rip-off of Have I Got News For You, produced by Jonathan Bufton. Four YUSU sabbs agreed to take part and some old Games Disaster red set boards were covered in newspaper headlines to mimick the set of HIGNFY (largely originating from a massive pile of Guardians building up in Jonathan's campus room). The coffee bar - made for Elections 2003 - also made its on-screen debut here.

The campus folklore webpages and the online archive of York Vision were raided to find stories, and the show faithfully followed the format of the original BBC version, thanks to some amazingly accurate graphics made by Kevin Bowman. It also marked one of the first appearances of James Gallagher on YSTV, as host. The script was a group effort from many of YSTV's active members of the period.

One particular problem was the "news footage" round at the start of the show, as Bulletin (again) did not feature many VTs at this point. To rectify this Jonathan ventured up to the science park one morning to film Prince Philip opening a new building, ostensibly for YSTV's news output - perhaps the university wouldn't have issued the press pass so readily if they'd known it was to crow-bar in some references to his infamous dodgy comments!

On the day of recording one particular sabb didn't turn up to the studio, so a search party was sent out to find him. Eventually he was dragged in from Goodricke bar, somewhat worse for wear...

In the Freshers' Week booklet produced in September 2003 Have I Got News For YUSU was used as an example of how a programme grew from an idea to reality. The text can be read here.

Amazingly, despite being four years old and incredibly out of date in terms of the references and guests, it is still shown on YSTV from time to time to this day.