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The Best...breakfast TV show |
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In its heyday, The Big Breakfast was always going to be a tough act to follow. This loud, brash, unruly light entertainment show somehow made the journey from one's bed to the office less traumatic by adhering to a simple formula: being a visual blitz for the sleep-deadened masses.
Unless you happen to be one of those annoying "morning" people who radiate the kind of daybreak ebullience it takes the rest of us half a bottle of wine to achieve, then the very least we expect from a morning TV show is that it wakes us up in the least taxing way possible.
At this ungodly hour, before caffeine has worked its magic, we are like dazed children, mesmerised by anything shiny or fluffy waved in our direction. The Big Breakfast in its juvenile zest tuned into this perfectly. Recall, if you will:
One Lump or Two: a blindfolded swimmer being telephonically directed to a floating sugar cube by a viewer to win a prize
Streaky Bacon: a member of the public being encouraged to "streak" down their local street in return for a butcher's supply of rashers
On the Bed: a novel way of interviewing - Paula Yates draped over various guests in a faintly pornographic manner, supine on a silk duvet
Compare this with BBC Breakfast. If anything is going to put you to sleep faster than a mug of Horlicks and a hot bath, it's two people making polite stilted conversation on a sofa. Watching Breakfast is a bit like eating muesli; you know it's probably good for you but it tastes a bit crap.
At least GMTV is an improvement in the not-putting-you-to-sleep stakes. In a sense it is much like a sugar rush; if Breakfast is the equivalent of muesli then GMTV has to be a pop tart. It's a bit like a celluloid version of Heat magazine with an unashamed gender bias; you feel guilty watching it, but at this time of day the lure of this season's craze for Ugg boots somehow outweighs the current state of affairs in the Middle East conflict.
If the fluffiness of GMTV is too much to bear then The Wright Stuff is always another option, if you feel like being pummelled about the head with current affairs chit-chat. This call-in show gave viewers the licence to air their dubious views on whatever topic is in the headlines ("Disabled Babies: Doctors Decide?") while a panel of guests - usually made up of tabloid columnists - presided over said topic espousing even more dubious views.
The downside of watching The Wright Stuff is that you can easily incur the syndrome "Breakfast TV Rage", whereby you go to work with clenched fists muttering about the state of the world and people in it.
If, like me, none of the above really appeals then you tend to end up channel surfing between all three and feeling slightly queasy as a result. Let's face it: breakfast TV's just gone a bit downhill since The Big Breakfast. Bring back the days when we ran late for work, waiting for the ad break to finish so we could find out the answer to the Question about the Clip. Everybody: "Don't phone, it's just for fun!"
Kate Coffey
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