Few revolutions are fronted by 50-year-old men sporting a grey velour V-neck and a half-hearted combover. But when consummate broadcaster Frank Bough took to the screen 40 years ago, a new age of television began. “It’s 6.30 on Monday, January 17, 1983,” declared Bough, “and you’re watching Britain’s first ever regular, early morning television programme.”
The BBC’s Breakfast Time, helmed by Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross, was Europe’s first breakfast show, 31 years after NBC’s Today launched in the US. Previously, morning TV had been restricted to Open University and schools programming – or nothing at all.
Breakfast Time was the most ambitious TV project since the creation of BBC Two in 1964. The very concept was controversial, with Ross addressing the elephant in the room in the opening moments. “Some people hold the view that TV in the morning is decadent and sinful. It’s not!”
Not everyone agreed. “There is no earthly reason why anyone of any intelligence would want to watch it,” sniffed the Spectator magazine, while Cambridge University held a debate on whether it marked the end of civilisation.
But most critics were impressed, and the show’s opening episode, featuring comedian Harry Secombe and the Labour leader Michael Foot, was well received by an estimated 2 million viewers.
With its comfy sofas, pots of coffee and sweater-clad presenters, the programme’s informality was at odds with the BBC’s patrician reputation. Anyone expecting an early morning version of Newsnight instead encountered an astrology section, or the Green Goddess Diana Moran’s keep fit routine. A pre-Messianic David Icke read the sports headlines.
Two weeks later, TV-am launched a rival breakfast service on ITV, amid colossal fanfare. Boasting the Famous Five presenting team of David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon and Robert Kee, TV-am believed its star power would outshine Bough and co.
It didn’t. TV-am’s chair Peter Jay had instilled a “mission to explain” the news. Michael Parkinson later said: “I thought it was cobblers. I never understood it … gibberish nonsense.”
Greg Dyke, a future director general of the BBC, recalls: “They’d spent so much time doing all this razzmatazz that went with the Famous Five, but no one had done any work on the show.”
Parkinson’s recollections were scathing. “God knows how we got on air … We floated in on a cloud of bullshit.”
Jay was soon ousted in a boardroom coup by Jonathan Aitken, who became TV-am’s chair in spite of being a Conservative MP (he stood aside for his cousin, Timothy Aitken, a few weeks later). Ford and Rippon spoke publicly of the “treachery” visited upon Jay, and were subsequently fired for “breach of contract”. When Ford bumped into Aitken at a drinks party soon afterwards, the MP was left wearing Ford’s glass of wine – to the undisguised glee of the tabloids.
Parkinson considered quitting in solidarity with Ford and Rippon, but was persuaded to join the board to help save the company. He later reflected: “We’d all taken a battering … I think I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown … I should have left. I should have pulled the entire house down … perhaps something good might have come out of the ruins.”
On 4 April, Dyke was brought in as director of programmes, as TV-am was hanging by a thread. Arguably, though, the broadcaster’s real saviour arrived three days before Dyke. Roland Rat made his debut on 1 April. The gobby rodent, described in the press as “the only rat to join a sinking ship”, was performing scripts co-written by Richard Curtis. With Roland proving a hit, Dyke seized his moment, bringing in relative unknown Nick Owen to front TV-am’s main show, Good Morning Britain.
Not only was Owen about to front a national show for three-and-a-half hours every morning, but TV-am depended on his success. It was, he admits, “one hell of a challenge”. Especially with a press pack waiting for the whole edifice to crumble. “I was pitched on to the front pages of loads of newspapers. There was huge coverage, because at that stage it looked as though this wonderful idea was collapsing.”
Dyke asked Owen who he would present alongside, in an ideal world, and Owen suggested Anne Diamond, with whom he’d worked two years before. “Six weeks later, she was sitting next to me.”
With Diamond and Owen, or Anne and Nick as they came to be known, Dyke had found his boy-and-girl-next-door presenting duo upon which the show hung. In the coming months, he introduced the likes of Chris Tarrant, Paul Gambaccini, Diana Dors, Gyles Brandreth, Jimmy Greaves, weather presenter Wincey Willis and fitness expert “Mad Lizzie” Webb.
By the start of 1984, TV-am audiences were on the up. But the year held another disaster for the company. At 2.54am on 12 October, a bomb ripped through Brighton’s Grand Hotel, where the Conservative party conference was taking place. Due to cuts, TV-am had sent only one camera crew to the conference, and it had been redirected to a train crash in Wembley the previous night.
TV-am reported the news story without pictures, with reporter John Stapleton speaking to viewers from a payphone. Owen remembers: “John was having to report by phone, whereas the BBC had everyone there and were getting brilliantly vivid film of the rescue operation, and bringing Norman Tebbit and his wife out. We were absolutely stuffed, journalistically, that day.”
Still, Dyke’s decision to move away from highbrow news and champion Owen and Diamond made TV-am a success story. By the start of the 90s, it was the world’s most profitable TV station in terms of turnover.
Viewing early breakfast TV today, it inevitably looks dated, with some content particularly bizarre. On Valentine’s Day in 1987 Brandreth and Bucks Fizz singer Cheryl Baker broke the record for the longest screen kiss with a marathon three minutes, 33 seconds. The significant ick factor is raised even more by Baker’s warning to Brandreth: “Actually, I’ve had a runny nose, so I just hope you’ve got a big top lip to catch it as it drips.”
But that doesn’t even rank as the station’s least romantic Valentine’s Day offering. That honour belongs to Owen, who recalls his own personal disaster: “It was February 14 1984. It was a really busy day, we had live broadcasts coming in from Moscow and Australia. I nipped to the loo, and the sound department didn’t notice I’d gone. Because my microphone was still on, I shared a very private moment with millions of people. People were phoning and writing in asking: ‘What the hell was going on when Anne Diamond was speaking just now? It sounded like she was on the banks of the Zambezi.’”
But to look back at those early days and snicker at the fashions, pratfalls and – in the case of TV-am – behind-the-scenes chaos, is to overlook the fact that a TV revolution was taking place. More than any other programming, breakfast TV helped informalise the starchy world of presenting. The combination of the trivial and the serious set the tone and the template for what was to come.
“I like to think viewers never knew what was round the corner,” says Owen. “One minute it would be a laugh a minute with Eric Morecambe [whom Owen credits as his favourite ever guest], the next minute it would be a top government official.” After 45 years in broadcasting, Owen is still presenting on BBC Midlands Today, but he looks back on TV-am as his greatest achievement. “It was a totally new concept in British television. To be a part of that, to be a pioneer of breakfast television in this country is something I’m really proud of.”
What is striking is how little breakfast TV has changed over the decades. According to current BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty, that mix of the serious and the trivial continues to be seen as the key to breakfast broadcasting. “I love the variety – no two days are ever the same. From the stories we cover, to the guests we get to speak to and the questions we get to ask on behalf of our viewers. Breakfast TV reflects our everyday lives – so by its nature has to offer a variety of news items which will inevitably differ in tone … I honestly would say it’s the best job in TV news.”
With the BBC due to look back over 40 years of breakfast television with a special show on Tuesday morning, Munchetty might like to raise a glass to Bough, Owen and the other pioneers who blazed a trail through uncharted territory all those years ago.
