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My attempt at telling the story of British breakfast television initially took the shape of a series of monthly articles published on OTT in late 2000 and early 2001. Titled Morning Glory, the text spanned the period from the launch of Breakfast Time in January 1983 to The Big Breakfast's fateful makeover in January 2001, ending with some idle speculation on just how much longer Channel 4 could feasibly carry on funding such a relentlessly calamitous early morning programme. Typically, within a few weeks of the final article appearing online, C4 confirmed it was wielding the axe and the search was on for The Big Breakfast's replacement.
There seemed no reason not to continue hoarding useful bits of breakfast telly news, gossip and quotes, especially as the possibility of pitching an expanded version of the original articles to assorted publishers had gained in appeal. One of the things that the online version of Morning Glory did not possess was primary source material; a longer, more comprehensive take on the history of breakfast television would necessarily require the assembly and presentation of just such a valuable commodity. There were already various events and revelations that research had turned up too late to go into the OTT articles. Then there was the prospect of a looming anniversary: 2003 would be the 20th birthday of breakfast TV, and a neat hook on which to hang the premise of a full-length book.
Having secured a commission from Kelly Publications in the spring of 2002, 12 months lay ahead in which to turn a 35,000-word narrative into something roughly three times the size, plus secure those all-important interviews with the great and the good. As the time went on, however, compressing the most memorable incidents from two decades of television into a 100,000-word history, one that you hope will have a vague semblance of "definitive" about it, called for just as much sentiment as ruthlessness.
Familiar dilemmas surfaced again and again. The possibility, for instance, that your own personal pick of rib-tickling exchanges and potent encounters, which you're convinced capture the essence of this or that person or programme, could quite possibly appeal to an audience of less than two. Did it matter if you gave over twice as much space to the musings of one particularly respected TV executive as that for a household personality? And because you travelled several hundreds miles to actually meet the noble personage in question, did they merit an extra paragraph robbed from someone else you'd barely communicated with by e-mail?
In the end, it kept boiling down to the same thing. Faced with a surplus of what you're presuming to be self-evidently sharp, pithy anecdotage, garnered at first hand or otherwise, there's almost nothing left but to take your chance on material you trust will be accessible, illuminating and relevant - all desperately worthy qualities, it has to be said. Meantime you mutter and grumble as the more eccentric, obscure or downright malevolent excerpts have to take up residence in the well-thumbed rainy day file.
And that's where some of the patently irrelevant or gratuitously self-indulgent off-cuts from the expanded print version of Morning Glory are, you'll be happy to read, going to stay. Apart from what follows, of course.
Getting the chance to talk to Greg Dyke was quite clearly something that bordered on the very edges of unlikelihood, yet in the end happened to come about in such a perfunctory manner - through a very mundane exchange of correspondence - as to helpfully undermine any sense of overawed grandeur about the occasion. Such an impression was compounded by the manner in which the man himself showed up: ambling round a corner on the 3rd floor of Broadcasting House, pausing outside his office, tie askew and glasses on forehead, declaring to anyone who was listening, "What am I doing now, then?"
The ensuing interview, conducted within Dyke's sparsely furnished huge office, didn't get off to the best of starts when an opening gambit asking after the nature of his views on breakfast telly before he joined TV-am elicited the snap response: "Never thought about it. I had no views." This, while Dyke was wandering around his room, moving random bits of paper about, and looking pained. Once he'd sat down, though, his answers instantly became far more engaging, and to the point. "We were penniless," he recalled of TV-am, "it was a bankrupt organisation. If I'd understood what trading insolvently meant, that's what we were doing."
The real straight talking, not to say barely concealed rage, came when matters turned to Bruce Gyngell. "The hard work had been done by the time Gyngell got there," Dyke began. "I quite liked him in later years, but I always thought he was bullshit. He was quite charismatic; but I fell out with him pretty quickly. When he got onto his moralistic stuff later on and started complaining about one-parent families and the rest of it, well, this was the bloke who cleared off leaving his kids in Australia. I always thought he was a bit of a hypocrite. I'll never forget him going up to someone when he first got to TV-am, clapping them on the shoulder, and saying 'There are some wonderful women here, and I'm relying on you to tell me which of them fuck.' And this was the bloke who within three or four years was lecturing the world about moral judgements and values."
None of this seemed to sit comfortably anywhere within the book; indeed, neither did John Stapleton's tirade against Bob Wheaton, during which he labelled him "a man whose grave I would happily dance on." It wasn't so much out of a sense of prudishness, however; more that such violent outbursts of emotion disrupted what was turning out to be a largely restrained narrative. Besides, there was still room for Lis Howell fuming about GMTV, Mike Hollingsworth attacking the ACTT, and Peter McHugh laying into more or less everyone. The interview with Greg Dyke took place roughly a year before he prematurely departed the BBC. At the time he moaned about how much he hated "the bowl of flowers that sits between the two presenters on BBC Breakfast", so at least he got that sorted before he left.
In general, the more avuncular and generous the interviewee proved to be, the greater the disinclination to edit or omit any of their testimony. Having offered to meet up in person, Paddy Haycocks suggested he be quizzed over lunch. Once seated in a strikingly upmarket venue somewhere off Charlotte Street in London, he charitably proposed a plan for the ensuing discussion: "We'll talk for 10 minutes, then order, then talk for another 10 minutes, then eat." In fact, the talking continued unabated right through the food and the ensuing, hugely charitable, two hours of his time. He'd even brought along a carefully preserved folder containing archive Channel Four Daily billings from TV Times, photos from a somewhat bawdy Streetwise night out, and the famous promotional toothbrush, still in its clear plastic presentation box.
A great deal of Haycocks' inspired reminiscence made it into the finished version of Morning Glory. But alongside tales of conceiving the "chest nappy", mounting frustration at taping a topical daily magazine programme 18 hours before transmission, and receiving correspondence from underworld gangsters, there wasn't quite room for just how he ended up next to Debbie Greenwood in Streetwise's art-deco-meets-hub-caps studio.
"Michael Atwell was presented with 19 potential male presenters," he recalled, "and we were all screen-tested in the backyard of a used car lot. We had to do an improvised piece talking to a car salesman. It might sound terribly incestuous, but I'd known Michael from the past when I worked at London Weekend. But when I got the job, somebody obviously said, 'He looks so suburban, so Croydon; turn him into a Channel 4 presenter.' This involved the following. First of all they sent me, with a producer-director to accompany me almost like a minder, to a salon where I had to spend two and a half hours while they chopped my hair and converted it into a slightly punky sticking-up look. This was a Channel 4 haircut. I thought it looked dreadful.
"Then I was walked into a couple of quite fashionable shops nearby. They bought me two jackets and a suit, the like of which I would never have worn or chosen myself, but this was what I had to have with the haircut. To complete the makeover, they said: 'Your eyelashes are too light; they don't work on camera. You can't keep having mascara, so we want you to dye them.' So I was taken into a department store to the women's cosmetic counter, and had to lie down while they vegetable-dyed my eyelashes black. I was left with Quentin Crisp tarty eyelashes. I had three propositions on the train on the way home that night."
Unlike everyone else who agreed to talk about the Channel Four Daily - Michael Atwell, Carol Barnes and David Lloyd - Paddy Haycocks recalled working on the service with unabashed fondness and good humour. But his responses chimed in with an emerging pattern: nobody who'd worked in breakfast television ever expressed a particular indifferent or non-specific opinion about their former stamping ground. It was a subject that inspired the extremes of love and hate, and nothing in-between.
Mike Hollingsworth was particularly voluble in recalling his own fortunes at both Breakfast Time and TV-am, institutions about which he had a copious supply of reminiscences. Discussing the early days of Breakfast Time, Hollingsworth revealed how news had leaked about a forthcoming visit from Alasdair Milne, then BBC Director-General. "Word came that he was coming to lunch with us in the wretched public school dining room at the front of Lime Grove, and that after we'd drunk a few glasses of red wine he was going to announce that he couldn't actually allow us to continue having an astrologer on the programme. But when it came down to it, Milne couldn't bring himself to do it. As he went out of the room, the last thing he said was 'look after my astrologer for me'. So instead of doing what he'd set out to do, he backtracked on the whole thing. We'd even had complaints from the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York that we weren't doing religion but we were doing astrology. There was a lot of heresy about ..."
Hollingsworth was at his most garrulous, however, when it came to the matter of his relationship with the ACTT, the main trade union at TV-am who had marked his card from the off and who, at Christmas 1984, appeared to scupper exclusive coverage of Bob Geldof's Band Aid-related trip to Africa. With the prospect of having to rely purely on the efforts of one researcher with a Polaroid camera, he concluded he might as well make a big deal of filming Geldof leaving the country. "I got a stretch limo to take him to the airport," he recalled, "and Anne Diamond and I went down to his house to say goodbye and wish him well. I'd arranged for a film crew to turn up and film him leaving, so we'd have footage the following Monday morning we could talk about. When they arrived at about 10.30am and knocked on the door, Bob was really angry with them, and started effing and blinding, telling them exactly what he thought of them and their union regulations. Of course I knew that wasn't going to do me any good. I was sitting there having a cup of tea, and these guys were asking if they could come in and have a cup of tea as well, and he was saying no, you can fuck off.
"Anyway, after we'd been sitting there inside his house talking for a few minutes I said, 'Come on Bob, it's time to go,' because I wanted to use the film crew. But then the crew knocked on the door and said they'd had a discussion, and they really would have to go back to the office because it would take them a long time to unload their vehicles and their equipment, and they needed to clock off at 1pm. It was 11am by this point, and it was all of half a mile back to TV-am. They were deliberately doing it of course, it was deliberate act. So off they went, and we didn't even have a picture of Bob going to the airport."
Hollingsworth's bitterness at how he had been treated by the ACTT, as well as how he'd been subject to, as he saw it, a giant exercise in historical revisionism that had conspired to write him out of TV-am's life story, leant his testimony a rather melodramatic urgency. But he wasn't alone in voicing particularly sharp opinions. The more people agreed to be interviewed, the more it became noticeable how many grudges and feuds were still nursed amongst those who had severed all ties with breakfast television 10, if not 20 years ago. Hollingsworth's anger was matched by Lis Howell's simmering resentment towards her one-time masters at GMTV. Agreeing to meet in a solitary café close to the Angel underground station in North London, she spoke in a hushed but confident tone of her enduring feelings towards the organisation that had masterminded the bid to replace TV-am.
"LWT, like a lot of ITV franchises at the time, was not a commercial set-up; it was a regional monopoly," she argued. "LWT was not a commercial business. It was in competition with no one else. It was given a very plum part of the network. I don't want to demean what people achieved, but the money just rolled in. It had done some very good programmes, but compared to American businesses with whom I worked later, and Australians who I'd worked with before, LWT was totally naïve about what commercial television was really about. It had always been given the viewers on a plate."
This blinkered attitude, she contested, fed into a mindset that LWT could take over breakfast TV and expect a similar kind of success immediately. "In an arrogant sort of way, and I was part of that mistake, the assumption was that anything that anybody did was going to be better than what Bruce Gyngell did. And of course it was crap, because he'd built it up. And one person who saw this was Gus MacDonald (then at Scottish Television, one of LWT's partners in the GMTV consortium). I remember him saying, 'why don't we just hire the TV-am people, do it like TV-am, then phase them out?' But we couldn't do that because our franchise specified we had to do it another way, and there was always this fear that if we didn't do that, what would the ITC say? But Gus was absolutely right, because nothing succeeds like success, and Bruce and TV-am had cracked it."
Howell's parting salvo before leaving the still noticeably deserted café was blunt: "I think that the ITC behaved badly. I think it was inept. The sooner it gets absorbed into OfCom the better. I think it's stupid in this country to have the breakfast television franchise, but that's how it is. It doesn't make sense - we don't have a four o'clock in the afternoon franchise. I don't know what more GMTV can do; there's a glut of media in this country; I can't see how else it can develop."
Piecing together the history of breakfast TV from assorted interviews and other research involved reconciling impassioned testimony from people like Lis Howell and Mike Hollingsworth with contemporary material (reviews, listings, articles) and your own personal memories and reminiscences. A priority seemed to be finding the most practical fit between these respective sources, and one that didn't end up rooted in somewhat shameless nostalgia. A useful corrective to any temptation for rose-tinted melancholia usually came in the shape of a recollection that flew in the face of received wisdom; an out-of-character aside, or barbed remark. There was Ron Neil, the de facto inventor of British breakfast TV, admitting, "I don't watch much breakfast television, I'm much more a radio man." There was John Stapleton airing more of his views on successive Breakfast Time editors: "Dave Stanford I loved; Bob Wheaton I hated. Dave was absolutely wonderful, but it got worse under Wheaton - far, far worse." And there was Ed Forsdick's curt one sentence summary of Planet 24's relationship with Channel 4: "Good and bad in equal measure."
Richard Porter, meanwhile, provided a telling insight into the enduring contrast in currency between television and radio at breakfast time: "A little known fact: John Simpson first liberated Afghanistan on BBC Breakfast, not on the Today programme as was reported. His famous line, that 'I think in a sense the BBC liberated Afghanistan', he first used that line at nine minutes past six on our programme. But funnily enough when he said it on the Today programme an hour later more people noticed it. The combination of him saying that and the pictures we had, which were fantastic that morning, ought to have been a reason why people noticed it. But they weren't."
Finally there were those who, for one reason or another, declined to be interviewed. Sebastian Scott, the then-embattled executive producer of RI:SE, turned down an invitation to put his thoughts on record, his PA replying: "Sebastian does not feel he would be able to give you the time he feels you would need for this project ... He wishes you the very best of luck with your book and he will look forward to reading it when it is published." Liz Forgan, erstwhile Channel 4 Director of Programmes and now chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, conceded: "To be perfectly honest it all seems such a long time ago - I can't imagine I've got anything useful to say, and indeed I can barely remember most of the key arguments. I wish you better luck with others." Pride of place amongst all the reject letters, however, had to be the following hand-written note: "Sorry I can't help you, but I've severed all links with my TV time, and the constant requests to become an archive! Regards, Frank Bough."
The old adage about best-laid plans falling foul to that curse of the political world, "events", haunted the last stages in the preparation of Morning Glory for publication. The penultimate chapter had to be re-written three times in as many months to reflect Channel 4's seemingly ever-shifting public stance towards the future of RI:SE. When Greg Dyke resigned from the BBC almost a year to the day since he'd given up 45 minutes of his schedule to entertain questions about Wincey Willis and fireplaces, the closing chapter had to be hastily amended. The finished book is a near as possible "present day" survey of breakfast TV's 21 years on air. Saying that, by the time this article appears online, Channel 4 may very well have announced its next big idea for a new breakfast programme. And by the time you finish reading this, it may well have changed its mind back again. But that, in a nutshell, is why breakfast TV remains such a fascinating aspect of British television, and one which Morning Glory tries to analyse and celebrate in equal measure.
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