No, just no.
GMTV needed to go. It
needed
to go for ITV to refresh its breakfast offering. There's no "all it needed was revamp" about it. Whatever happens, GMTV should not come back. It's in the past. Bringing GMTV back would be the absolute worst decision IMO. I cannot stress that enough.
ITV did get the Daybreak launch wrong, and they launched it with the wrong presenters. Really, the show should have tried to become successful at first and then try and get Adrian and Christine in and see if they would work.
But at the end of the day this is just another one of those "what if" posts in the biggest "what if" thread on the biggest "what if" forum on the internet.
I agree with you that it was the right decision at the time but if they were serious about getting rid of GMTV they should have tried a completely different format. It had turned back into GMTV within 6 months and with how the show looks now, and the direction it is going in (Lorraine Kelly presenting, Richard Arnold supposedly returning, hassled mums, newshour etc) it makes the entire exercise pointless. What was the point, really? They didn't have enough perseverance to stick it out for the first year or so and backtracked too quickly.
I absolutely agree if they had stuck to the original format when Daybreak launch and made the necessary changes then we might have seen a different outcome. However, bosses freaked out and reverted back to the lighweight format that led to GMTV's demise. Those that are part of the GMTV brigade have always said "if it ain't broke don't fix it" but GMTV was clearly broke and had lost over half its viewing audience in a period of four years. The fundamental problem was ITV's management of the transition between axing of GMTV and launch of Daybreak.. If they managed it through a softer re-launch and had the right presenters before appointing Adrian and Christine the launch could have been more successful (However, everybody is entitled to their own opinion).
I am concerned however, with the news that Richard Arnold is potentially returning and that Daybreak more than likely will take the showbiz route. If they do decide go down that road then ratings will decline further. Last week, on the ratings front Daybreak only averaged 600,000. For a normal school week that is pretty dyer whereas BBC Breakfast has succesfully managed to transition to Salford with ratings of around 1.6 million and increased audience share since the beginning of the month.
I do not buy the idea that a more newsier approach and hassled mums are somehow mutually exclusive. Even housewives with children want to know news, weather and even sport. The last few months Daybreak's format has become progressively worse being more tacky, lightweight, and inconsistent. Even viewers on the show's social networking sites are criticising it on a regular basis.
Even though Daybreak will be moving to studio 3 in the beginning of September what's really frustrating is that they still insist of having a second wall in the current studio. The wall was useful when the mornings where much darker but now it's daylight when the show starts at 6am. I would say that the dark orange wall makes the studio darker compared to the natural daylight from the windows. If they removed the wall and pulled the LED screens back the studio would look so much better.
