Three days later, HBO aired the second-season finale of its half-hour satire "Silicon Valley".
The third instalment of the half-hour satire attracted 900,000 viewers and a 4% share last night between 9pm and 9.30pm.
Alongside Chris Morris, Partridge graduated to 24-hour news satire The Day Today and then spoof chatshow Knowing Me, Knowing You.
Set in the period from the mid-eighties to the aughts, it's a three-hour-long satire of loathsome financial activity and extravagant debauchery, and it's meant to epitomize everything that has gone wrong with money culture.
Mehmet Ali Alabora, a Turkish actor and the host of a half-hour political satire show (a rarity for Turkish television), tweeted (in Turkish), "It's not just about Gezi Park friend, haven't you understood?
Alastair Campbell, reviewing "In the Loop" for the Guardian, argued that "what worked as a series of half-hour TV satires did not work as a much longer film.
The headline could have been crafted by Armando Iannucci for On the Hour, the 1992 satire that mocked rolling news almost before it had been invented.
In that time he has gifted the public with thousands of hours of incisive satire that brought the country's most powerful down to earth.
An outspoken conservative, Mr. Surnow left "24" in 2008; he also created a short-lived satire, "The ½ Hour News Hour," for the Fox News Channel.
What remains is a diverting hour of affectionate media satire, from an era when Alan Partridge and TV Burp were but a twinkle in their commissioning editors' eyes.
Joel Surnow is an avowed conservative, whose other projects have included The Half-Hour News Hour, a short-lived satire show on the Fox network that was explicitly designed as a riposte to the leftish humour of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.
