ITV Breakfast

In 1992 ITN didn't have anything to do with as the Channel 4 Daily was billed as the official continuation of ITN's coverage.

Always thought the Channel 4 Daily was an odd show. I know it was marketed as a "television newspaper" but all the parts just didn't gel.

In many ways it was a Zoo TV format just like The Big Breakfast, just with very different content. They basically went from the Telegraph to the Daily Star.

It was a strange mix. News, cartoons, Countdown and opinion pieces. The news and business sections were competent enough but the rest felt like the proverbial square peg in a round hole. I understand Channel 4 wanting to try something different but it fell between two stools. It wanted to have the gravitas of BBC Breakfast news and the blokeish appeal of the Sun and got neither.

And that's why it only lasted three years. However if C4 re-entered the market now I'd much rather they tried something different rather than just their version of GMB or Breakfast.

I read somewhere that the reason they axed the Channel 4 Daily was because they were having to sell their own advertising from 1993, and it wouldn't be able to pay its way, so they replaced it with something more populist that would bring in viewers (and therefore ad revenue). I wonder if it would have lasted longer if the original Channel 4 funding model had lasted longer?

I think the timing and opportunity of TV-am about to bite the dust also had something to do with it, and lo it came to pass, a lot of casual viewers switched over at the start of 1993 to something more familiar/entertaining/competent than GMTV.

As Morning Glory also points out, GMTV's business model assumed they'd have have a straight line to kids and young families who weren't interested in news on BBC1 and...whatever that was on C4, but they all watched the new Big Breakfast instead and by the autumn of 1994, BBC2 launched a CBBC breakfast show too. Power Rangers was one of the first things to really work for GMTV and bring people to it, I think.

I think you're getting that from this post by Steve Williams. I'm sure it was one of the reasons but I'd love to know if there any other sources that state that (No offence to Steve and his excellent informative posts!)

I read it somewhere else years ago, well before Steve's post. I seem to remember someone wrote to Channel 4 asking why it was being axed and that was the explanation they gave.

GMTV almost mirrored TV-am in its early months with viewers deserting, people at the top quitting and a major relaunch a matter of months in. Not helped by their high licence payments which made it even harder for them to make a profit. You have those news reports from late December/early January with Lis Howell bigging up GMTV, then she was gone in a matter of weeks.

Of course they later went cap in hand to the ITC to get those licence payments significantly cut, eventually to below the level TV-am had bid in the first place. Which probably begs the question, had TV-am survived with the bid they went for (something like £14 million a year I think it was), would they have gone cap in hand to the ITC to reduce that figure?

But of course they were fairly profitable by the time of the franchise round so it would have been easier for them to stump up the cash had they survived. But of course by 1993 I'm almost positively certain a major rebrand would have occurred at TV-am which of course aren't always cheap, but it was well overdue by that point, and of course the news that they were going to close 14 months later probably poured water on any plans they had at that stage to update the look.

One of the things which makes a mockery of how the 1991 franchise round was carried out.