Is it time to bring back GMTV?

I accidentally stumbled across some old clips of GMTV on YouTube recently, and it struck me how easy it was to watch compared to anything ITV has offered since.

On screen, GMTV was fairly plain, unimaginative but warm and accessible. Good Morning Britain looks dynamic and ambitious and perhaps that's not what people are looking for at 6am.

(As an aside, these titles have always been fantastic and still hold up well today)


Yes, Daybreak MkII attempted to resurrect it in all but name, but the whole affair was still a lot more grand than your bog standard sofa telly. At a glance it was similar but it lacked the more basic, bog standard feel that was GMTV (or TV-am). Disposable TV that you can dip in and out of. It's a simplicity that BBC Breakfast has mimicked so well.

Perhaps it's for the best that they scrap the high paid personalities, ditch the expensive set and revert to a sofa in the corner of a pokey-looking studio. Consign the last six messy years to history and just tick along as before.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

They certainly wouldn't bring the name back. Tarnished beyond repair by the phone vote scandals that showed the contempt the management of the time had for the audience, seeing them as premium-rate phone-calling cash-cows... And whilst the phone competitions continue - that whiff still remains.

If the whiff still remains, then I doubt it has made a difference whether it's called GMTV or not.

That said I agree they wouldn't bring back the name - nobody likes to be seen going backwards.

Because the name "GMTV" ends with "TV", it sounds like the name of an entirely separate channel/broadcaster (as opposed to merely "a programme on ITV" as such). Which, of course, is exactly what GMTV originally was.

Once ITV plc fully took over that company, it did finally become "merely a programme" as opposed to a "channel" in its own right. Therefore, it is logical that ITV plc would have at least wanted to do away with the "channel"-sounding programme name, to (A) emphasise the fact that it was no longer a separate entity, and (B) because individual programmes (on any broadcaster's network) don't generally have names that make them sound like whole channels.

Yes, we had "SM:TV Live" at one stage. But, as that was always a programme made for the post-09:25 regional franchisees' airtime, there wasn't the same "point-to-make" type of situation that there would later be with the takeover of GMTV Ltd. Therefore, playing with the novelty of a slightly "channel"-sounding programme name was rather different circumstances in SM:TV's case.

I therefore suspect that at least the name would have always been changed circa 2010, even if they'd changed literally nothing else at all (e.g. the format, content, presenters, set, titles, theme tune etc). Imagine the last ever GMTV logo (the orangey rectangle-with-rounded-corners) amended to have "Daybreak" (or whatever) written in it instead, for example.

We may find that the programme perpetually reverts to being essentially GMTV in all-but-name , but the actual "GMTV" name is about as likely to make a return as e.g. "HTV", "LWT", Elvis Presley, or Lord Lucan.

That's one of the less valid reasons for not bringing it back. GMTV was an established brand in that slot and as far as most viewers are concerned, it was a programme rather than a broadcaster in its own right. As you state it isn't the first programme on television with "TV" in the title, and I fail to see how GMTV is any different from SM:TV.

The main problem with the successors too GMTV is that they've been to quick to revert to replicating GMTV and viewers haven't responded to that. The name is as likely to put people off as it is to bring back a former audience.

I do fully agree with Whataday about the average viewers' perspective being that it (and TV-am before) was merely a "programme" anyway, and not reading anything at all into the "channel"-sounding name.

Everything I have said is more me playing devil's advocate to the kind of corporate thinking that we often witness when one company takes over another, which I don't necessarily actually subscribe to myself. As we all know, head honchos and marketing twits etc often care about things that end-users don't.

Immediately post-takeover, ITV plc would likely have been in full d**k-swinging mode about the fact that it was now truly their own programme and obsessively "not wanting it to sound like a separate channel any more", completely regardless of the fact that 99.9% of normal viewers would have neither realised nor cared at any point from the inception of TV-am onwards.

I therefore still believe that ITV plc would have always had a bee in their bonnet about at least the GMTV name, if nothing else.

I think few non-telly types realised that GMTV was anything other than the programme on ITV in the morning. I don't think many people were that aware, or cared, that it was a separate franchise, and not part of ITV plc for much of its existence.

I know that's a common perception but I don't think they've come too close to replicating GMTV. They've softened the content which is considered to be regressing to GMTV, but GMTV was actually quite a well rounded programme.

In fact, I guess most viewers for the first year were still referring to it as TV-AM..

I say bring back GMTV if only so we can lock the Good Morning Britain thread.