The Big Breakfast

They presented it together, at least once. In one of the recently unearthed stills of the appearance Rolf Harris made on the show in 1996, there was a picture of Richard and Zoe together.

It would have to be 1996, as this is the only year Zoe and Richard worked on the show together.

That's a strange seemingly off-air shot of them all on the sofas. Not sure if he was hosting that day though as there is another image Google brings up on what is presumably the same day (Vanessa looks to be in the same outfit) with Mark Little.

I'm pretty sure Richard Orford's arrival coincided with Mark Little taking leave to do his comedy tour, from which he never returned.

EDIT: A quick check of Morning Glory says that Mark's last show was July 12th 1996, and the Rolf incident happened at the end of May. BUT by this stage Zoe and Mark were being rota-ed not to work together, so perhaps Richard was drafted in to cover Mark.

Richard came over the Easter holidays in 1995. He was moved onto Down Your Doorstep a few months later, with Keith filling his role in the house on Mondays and Tuesdays. Mark got an extra day due to this, Wednesdays, and continued to host on Thursdays and Fridays. In the July, Mark was promoted to 5 days a week, with Keith as his cover and Richard remaining on the OB. Mark then went off to do a month at the Edinburgh Festival and a 6 week comedy tour that autumn. (Oct/Nov.) I can't remember exactly when the sole occasion was that Richard co-hosted with Zoe whilst Mark was on that haunted house OB, but possibly March 1996?

On a separate note, it's funny how big a deal the Morning Glory book makes of the show not having a 5 days a week male co-host, when nowadays we think nothing of BBC Breakfast or GMB having hosts that don't do a full week. (That's a great book, but every time I re-read it, I'm annoyed by the errors in it - not a lot, but there are some - and the overuse of the words "erstwhile", "titular" and one other word that escapes me at the moment.)

There is a difference, though, in that The Big Breakfast's appeal was totally built around the personalities of the presenters and when Evans left there was a massive chasm. If they'd appointed someone full time it would have been better because with all this coming and going, nobody was able to put their own stamp on it and move it on.

With Breakfast and Good Morning Britain it's different because the show is the important thing, not the presenters, so they're all pretty interchangable. Bill reading the news is very similar to Charlie reading the news.

I think it's become a lot more accepted since those days to have a varied presenter lineup. This Morning did a lot to change that too - they've had a 4 day/1 day rotation since the late 1990s, which of course means you have a ready-made stand-in duo for when the 4-day team go off, rather than the randoms that used to turn up in the Albert Dock days. Breakfast is a 7-day operation so you have to have a split there, although the Salford move seems to have made that worse. I think the issue with the BB was that it was so closely associated with "Chris and Gaby" and they didn't seem to have the confidence (or were unable) to appoint a full-time duo as a replacement.

Chris Evans of course was quite vocal about wanting to do 4 days on Radio 1, with the weekend presenters starting on Friday to get the audience used to them. It still doesn't seem to have caught on for radio.

Going back to Moyles - I remember he presented the day after the 2001 general election, and was pretty good, so clearly they were taking the opportunity to try him out for the BB "replacement" that was being formulated at the time.

Richard Orford is probably my favourite of the Down your Doorstep hosts, and of course he did it for the longest stretching out over three different eras. Ironically it's the move which probably ensure his longevity on the show - had he stayed as main host or been promoted in the summer of 1996 he probably wouldn't have lasted anywhere near as long.

From memory, I don't think Morning Glory takes issue with the fact that there wasn't a 5 day host, it was the fact that there was no clear structure to it, and you didn't know who was going to be hosting from one day to the next. After Chris left no one was really designated main host apart from Gaby.

They really should have brought in a main replacement for Chris but for some reason they split it between Mark Little and Paul Ross. (I couldn't stand Mark Little and it's at this time I pretty much switched off until Denise and Johnny) Maybe internally they were just scared of creating another monster.

Many of the host choices baffled me over the years. The person who thought Rick & Sharron would gel together on screen deserves never to work in television again, and the less said about Amanda, Donna and Paul, the better. But this is all using the random logic that followed Paula Yates with Lily Savage and then Vanessa Feltz.

I always though Dani Behr was good, and I know Dannii Minogue wasn't popular with many people but I think she would have made a pretty good On The Bed interviewer, but as was the nature of The BB, they never quite knew what to do with her and it all came across looking a mess.

While I'm throwing random host thoughts out there, I really wish they'd tried putting Jasmine Lowson and Richard Bacon together. There was some chemistry there, I'm sure of it.

Apparently it was Richard Bacon who recommended Jasmine to his bosses and they took her on.

It seems it was always the plan for Little to stay on when Evans left, and then groom someone new to take over full time, which was the concept behind the Sunday Mirror doing that "competition", which was one of my contributions for Morning Glory, and involved talking up Greg Scott, Grant Stott and Albert "Trix" Thompson. And when Paul Ross was unveiled, I remember the papers saying he was only going to do it for a few months while they found a new permanent host. To my mind, it would probably have made more sense in that instance to just keep Mark Little on full time, but presumably they wanted to keep their options open.

It looks like in 1994 they signed up Mark Little for what must have been an eighteen month contract, hence why they kept him on when Ross began, and also when Orford began. Certainly at that point Little assumed that if they were getting in another new presenter that would be the end of him, hence why he planned Edinburgh and his tour for later that year when he must have assumed he'd be off, and if Orford had worked out presumably he'd have gone to five days a week sooner rather than later.

Yes...
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Although I am not sure it is what actually got her the job...
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