Red Alert with The National Lottery.
Presented, for no reason whatsoever, by Lulu and Terry Alderton.
Well, as it turned out they were a hopeless pairing who never gelled, although the whole programme was totally misconceived. The idea of a big star and her cheeky sidekick was a perfectly good one, though, but Lulu was just rubbish at it. I mentioned Terry Alderton a while back because I was reminded of him when Rob Beckett started getting primetime gigs - Alderton was getting a good reputation on the stand-up circuit and he seemed to be the kind of person who could work on mainstream TV. Sadly the show was very bad and it set his career back a bit. Happily since then he's gone back to stand-up and I know he's now considered one of the best acts on the circuit - albeit now his current material is far removed from his game show host persona.
It's interesting to think of people like Alderton who got a big break early on and it didn't work out. It almost happened to Lee Mack when he was booked to host C4's stand-up series Gas after he hadn't been on the circuit for very long at all. He says in his book it didn't do him many favours because he didn't have enough material (they brought in Dominic Holland to help him write the scripts, and when he came in on the first day breezily said, "Well, we've got a lot of work to do, haven't we?") and I think there was a bit of resentment from other comedians that he'd been fast-tracked.
James Redmond. He got sacked after only a few weeks because of making disparaging comments about the acts on CD:UK.
Well, he did say he preferred Radiohead, but I doubt that was the whole reason because it wasn't like he was slagging them off to their faces. Clearly they decided it just hadn't worked out for some reason and it was never going to work out, but I never thought it was Redmond's fault, really, because it didn't help that they hired Brian Dowling at the same time who got all the publicity and all the column inches and James just faded into the background. They should have had a couple of months of just Cat and James to get him established before they started getting other presenters in, it was as if they were replacing him before he even started.
It was a real shame because Redmond was very likeable and he'd been on the show quite a lot previously and been very funny. I've said this before but for ages I had an episode on an old tape from a few months before he joined where he's in the Dec Says sketch and he was hilarious, the cast and crew were in absolute hysterics. I'm assuming that was the exact moment they decided to offer him the job. Such a shame they didn't stick with him, it was the first time he'd appeared as himself as well.
Sharron Davies & Rick Adams - The Big Breakfast
Well, this was a total disaster, they were such a weird couple, more like mother and son than husband and wife. They were such a mismatch, but it didn't help that Sharron was so bad. I remember The Box magazine saying that Rick had clearly sensed the void where Sharron was supposed to be so decided he had to fill the gap with more and more talking.
It nearly didn't happen, of course, because Rick Adams was totally nailed on to do Live and Kicking, to the extent Simeon Courtie was told he definitely wouldn't get it and so defected to ITV, and then they did a pilot with Zoe and Rick and it was a total disaster. And they would have been an odd couple as well, I think. I quite liked Rick Adams at the time but I think he was always at his best as a solo host.
Ratings collapsed very quickly and Fern Britton was paid a lot of money to cut short her maternity.
Yeah, this was a total disaster, it was seriously being suggested that This Morning might be axed. We've mentioned Bargain Hunt and I think it was this period that cemented it as a big hit because This Morning was declining so badly. For a while it was finishing at twelve o'clock to avoid it completely.
That was a really iffy period for ITV daytime, after they'd been so dominant for so long, losing Richard and Judy themselves was so careless but then they messed up their replacements. Then you also had them losing Home and Away leaving that huge chasm at teatime which they took ages to fill, plus Crossroads being rubbish, and even that demented revamp in the spring of 2000 where they moved everything around - with Loose Women in the morning and Trisha in the afternoon - and then moved it all back again a month later. The Beeb took the advantage and they've been in the lead ever since.
I guess Twiggy and Coleen is another example of when programmes decide not to go for the obvious choice and go a bit left-field, because Fern Britton and John Leslie had been regular presenters but presumably they decided they didn't have enough sparkle to do it full-time - I guess they assumed it would just seem like Richard and Judy were still "on holiday" and they wanted a clean break - so went for a completely new line-up. You could also use that example for The Big Breakfast, where Liza Tarbuck had been a regular stand-in but they went for Kelly Brook as the full-time replacement, and The One Show where they picked Jason Manford instead of Uncle Matt. And in all cases they did end up going back to the stand-ins, albeit in Manford's case it wasn't much to do with his on-screen work.