The Big Breakfast

The Big Breakfast seems to me to buck the trend of most shows - with most shows, format is king. Without wanting to take away from the excellent job Alex Jones or any current One Show presenter does, if they left the show and were replaced tomorrow the show would go on.

The Big Breakfast was up against the big beasts of ITV and GMTV so had to differentiate itself - ITV even to this day struggles to do that against the BBC, never mind having another competitor in there - and had a format which felt like it gave the presenters a showcase, rather than asking them to do a straight sit-down interview with some politician (in which case you can only make a name for yourself if you trap them into a huge admission).

You can imagine the London execs of Channel 4 having a bit of a downer on what they probably saw as a low-brow breakfast show, so I can see why after 9/11 they fell into the trap of thinking "People just want news now". The reality being, of course, that while people cared about the news they also need escapism - more than ever at that point, I'd argue.

It needed to catch a new audience. People would of perhaps grown out of it after 10years. So TBB should have gone back and targeted a younger audience.

I don't think it's a show people grew out of, they just grew tired of it. Both the revamps in 1996 and 1997 arguably pitched at an older audience than the original format, and I wouldn't say the 2001 revamp was about bringing in a younger audience too - it was just about giving it a much needed refresh, which I think it did much more successfully than 1996 but they gave it about 6 weeks and then turned the clock back once again.

RI:SE was just awful in comparison to The Big Breakfast but I think in many ways it was probably ahead of it's time. It may be sacrilege to say so but it would probably sit a lot easier in the breakfast TV landscape today than The Big Breakfast might. That said though if The Crystal Maze can come back I would never say never as far as The BIg Breakfast is concerned, but not in the current climate.

Not sure about the latter, they moved the news to every half hour with the revamp, but moved it back to run every twenty minutes when they did the revamp of the revamp in January and brought everything back. I've mentioned this before, but one odd thing about the Family of the Week was that Richard Orford would be in the house with them on Friday, and not just doing their bits but more or less co-hosting the whole show. Then you had Denise's helicopter dropped with incredible haste, I think it only lasted about six weeks with the excuse it would be too dark, but they'd have known that when they started it. So you ended up with Orford and Denise in the house very frequently, which makes me think that they already knew Rick and Sharron were a hopeless pairing and needed support.



Indeed, as mentioned by Simeon Courtie on the Broom Cupboard website, the Saturday morning job was up grabs on both the Beeb and ITV that summer, and Courtie went for both, and when he was told that Rick Adams was definitely doing Live and Kicking, he signed for ITV - only to find out the second he signed the contract that the pilot he'd done with Zoe had been a disaster and he wasn't doing it. So it could well have been the other way round given Lisa Clark was adamant before the revamp that Zoe was staying.

I didn't mind Rick Adams so much, I used to like him on CBBC but he was clearly an acquired taste. It might have worked if he'd been with another presenter, though, because Sharron really was awful. The short-lived TV magazine The Box did a bit about the show at the time and pointed out that literally all Sharron did was read stuff off her clipboard like a shopping list ("Right, I've trailed Tom Hanks, just three more things to trail"), and that Rick had clearly sensed the void where her personality was supposed to be and decided to talk for both of them. So he came across as over-frantic and annoying because there wasn't anyone there holding him back. Also they made for a weird double act too, more like mother and son than husband and wife.



Yes it did, which is my cue to again tell everyone to find a copy of Morning Glory, or indeed read it on Google Books...
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Morning_Glory.html?id=WpQ_esoMKLMC&redir_esc=y

Lisa Clark, who oversaw the 1996 revamp, left and Ruth Wrigley, who'd been there on day one, was asked by Planet 24 to come back and revamp it.





It wasn't fine, though, in mid-1996 it was in a terrible state. In 1993 every kid in Britain was talking about it, in 1996 it was about as fashionable as flared trousers. As mentioned, it hadn't really been revamped since day one and it had completely run out of ideas.

The high water mark for The Big Breakfast was in the autumn of 1993 when it was definitely number one at breakfast time, beating GMTV, which was amazing as before that Channel Four had been a very, very distant third. It was around early 1994 it started to decline, probably unsurprisingly around the time Evans started appearing less and less, and by 1996 it was miles behind GMTV. I think a lot of the audience, including me, had defected alongside Chris Evans to Radio 1. Throughout all this the Beeb was a bit of an irrelevance, it had a loyal but small - and crucially, old and commercially unimportant - audience that watched it but nobody else did.



Well, as mentioned in Morning Glory, C4 sent around a memo in 2000 to request ways to refresh ageing brands, which included The Big Breakfast as well as TFI Friday and Brookside, because they were all showing their age a bit. Certainly towards the end Planet 24 seemed to be under the impression that C4 didn't like the show and wanted it off, and they were being disloyal, though if you look at the figures and some of the decisions Planet 24 made (like hiring Kelly Brook), I don't know what Planet 24 expected, the show was clearly declining and no longer innovating.



The problem with RI:SE is what happens with a lot of things Sky do, they spend so long trying to emphasise what a quality production it is, they never get round to actually coming up with any actual content. They spend so long saying what it isn't they never actually bother saying what it is. It's like Sky Atlantic, they continually refer to that in the broadest of generalisations but never explain what the point of the channel is. So with RI:SE they kept on saying it wasn't going to be like The Big Breakfast or other breakfast shows, but never said what it actually was going to be like, so when it came on air it was just a concept rather than a proper programme.

I was reminded about RI:SE the other week actually while talking about something else, because in many ways what summed up that show and its horrible cliquey nature was during the weather forecast in the first show. Every time they did the weather for Cardiff, they always said "Here's the weather for Cardiff, if you're going to see Kylie tonight". Clearly, they'd thought "Why would anyone want to go to Cardiff for any other reason? Kylie going there must be the most exciting thing ever to happen there, so everyone must be going." That was the kind of attitude that show seemed to have, and that more than anything sunk it.

A bit of a random question I know, but can anyone help with how many different theme tunes were used for the news bulletins on The Big Breakfast? I know that the same one was used from 1993 until about 1995/96?? And I know there was another one used around 1999-ish - and another at the 2001 relaunch. But where there any other versions in between? It's really hard to find examples of the BB news bulletins because people mostly chop them out of YouTube clips!

Somebody on here sent me the second news theme from 1993 which they found on a few cd's they had. The 1996 news theme lasted until September 1998.

The Big Breakfast just naturally reached the end - it had a very, very long run and was of its time, like many of the best shows out there.

RI:SE, on the other hand, felt like what happens when you let a lot of London media executives who have never been north of Watford decide what the people want to watch. The logic of educating the viewer ahead of entertaining is an ongoing mistake in breakfast TV - right back to the start with the "mission to explain". While a different show, the Chiles/Bleakley era Daybreak felt in terms of the titles and treatment eerily reminiscent of it as well.

Weren't the 1998, 2000 and 2001 versions just reworking of the 1996 where as the 1992 was completely different?

Full final 10 minutes of Denise's last show from the 1st Jan 1999.

That was a pre-record, which is why she keeps saying "see you next week".

This is from her real last show:

Does anyone remember "politics hour" or "politics time" or something like that?

On The Big Breakfast? I doubt it.