40th birthday of Breakfast TV

Calendar is celebrating 40 years since bringing the first breakfast television programme to air.
The nine-week experiment that was 'Good Morning Calendar' was first broadcast in Yorkshire back in 1977.
It paved the way for other breakfast TV formats, bringing viewers live traffic updates, a morning weather forecast and the morning news headlines.

Bob Warman was the presenter of those early shows. Duncan Wood spoke to him earlier:
http://www.itv.com/news/calendar/update/2017-03-30/breakfast-television-milestone-marked-40-years-after-the-first-good-morning-calendar-was-broadcast/


I can't find the old thread which also had some details about.

Find the listings:

First DAY


From 18th April until the end:

I think the more important move was for BBC1 to actually start broadcasting after Breakfast Time/News from 27 October 1986. Before that, we'd had a testcard until the midday news, which was renamed the 'News After Noon', and even included a start-up sequence . . .



Quite astonishing that the national broadcaster didn't really offer a service until half way through the day.

Interestingly the listings show it as "Good Morning Television" - did Yorkshire sue GMTV for that one?

Quite a few oddities in that schedule, by modern standards:
BBC1 first day
Songs of Praise - on a weekday? I thought this was on Sundays because that's the day you traditionally go to church?
John Craven - if you're going to shorten the title, shouldn't the other half of the name - Newsround - have been used?
BBC2 first day
Newsday - That's the name of a World News/News Channel programme. This one is obviously completely different... and scheduled immediately after a normal news bulletin?
Thames first day
Spider-Man, Jamie and the Magic Torch, Rainbow - was this during school holidays? Those are children's programmes, in the middle of the day. No way should kids have been at home at 11.35am unless it was the Easter break.

I believe Songs of Praise was given a midweek repeat. I believe this was the start of the School holidays ( remember ITV schools Winter season could have been finished by this point) but you may have misread it Rainbow country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSsH1OLe1HE&ab_channel=CanadaClassics the one at around 9.30.

While Jamie and the other Rainbow is in the correct slot for the pre school kids at Noon.

You have mist: ATV midnight showing of Wait till your father gets home and the lack of Crossroads

As mentioned, Songs of Praise got a daytime repeat, ages before daytime telly was a thing. Don't forget Songs of Praise was a special case - religious programmes were the only things permitted to be screened in the God slot on Sunday evenings. As for Newsround, Craven was inexorably linked to the programme, and indeed if you look at Genome for the first few weeks the name constantly changes.

Newsday was a current affairs programme, probably the nearest thing in 1977 to Newsnight. These were of course the days when news and current affairs were distinctly different departments, in different buildings (news in TVC, current affairs in Lime Grove) so the programmes were also distinct. Showing it very soon after a news bulletin was no different to Nationwide after the news.

To be fair, the format was already well-established in the U.S. (and Australia), so Yorkshire didn't really invent much -- it just made the first attempt to import an already successful formula to the UK.

On the schedules for Tyne Tees on both those days, the scan says...

First Day
8.30am Good Morning Television

Second Day
8.30am Good Morning North
8.45 Cartoon
9.00 Peyton Place

On both days, the other ITV stations don't start broadcasting until either 9.30 or 10.30.

Was what was on TTTV a simulcast of the YTV show?

They couldn't afford to, (you might agree they still can't, given the sort of stuff that's shown)

Anyway, up until about 1972, neither BBC nor ITV weren't allowed to have regular daytime TV broadcasts, unless it was schools, or other PSB related stuff. The Postmaster General and all that !

Amazing to think a lot of what we're now well accustomed to only started relatively recently in the grand scale of TV as a whole. No or limited daytime broadcasts before 1972? No breakfast TV as we now know it before 1977 and even then on a limited regional basis before 1983? No concept of watching TV at 3 in the morning until about 1988? Heck, even only three channels before 1982!

It is totally mind blowing sometimes to think that's how it used to be. An entirely different world. It's just, wow. Compared to today where you can get access to hundreds of channels with a lump of metal in the shape of a dish, a few more channels if you rotate your dish one way or another and be able to live stream a few hundred more over the internet from all over the world.

On 19th January 1972, the government lifted all restrictions on the amount the BBC and ITV could broadcast in a given day.

Up until then, there was a limit of 50-60 hours of general entertainment on television in a week, limiting it to just 8 hours a day at maximum.

The exemptions were - Schools programming, adult education, religious programming, Welsh programming, ministerial/political broadcasts and state/official occasions. Sport came under a special quota of 350 hours a year allowed.

ITV launched their proper daytime line up on Monday 16th October 1972 as part of their new autumn schedule. BBC were always lacking, due to their idea of restricting how much licence fee money should be spent on daytime television.