Would actually be interesting to see the history of the shows ratings over the ten years and whether they always matched the perception at the time.
Well, even during Johnny Vaughan's era they weren't all that good, in 2000 with Johnny and Liza it was the fifth out of five at breakfast time and that was considered a highly successful era for the show. The people who liked it liked it a lot so it had an influence and a kudos probably beyond its reach. It reminds me of what Chris Evans used to say about his Radio 1 breakfast show, the ratings went up by half a million to seven and a half million when he took over, but he said they didn't just get half a million new listeners, they got seven and a half million new, younger listeners, and changed the demographic profile. So similarly with Johnny and Denise, they may have had pretty much the same number of viewers as the Rick and Sharron nadir, but probably quite a lot of those were younger viewers who hadn't watched it before, offsetting those who had switched off since the Chris and Gaby era as they'd grown out of it, so it was probably quite successful in that regard.
In Morning Glory (the three most-used words on these threads), Peter McHugh from GMTV also said it had an influence beyond its ratings because Denise was so photogenic and made so much news, so they couldn't stick a big photo of Denise in the papers and say it was a failure and nobody was interested, because they clearly were. The other thing as well is that in 1993 it was very much The Big Breakfast or nothing, as Breakfast News was boring as hell and the first few months of GMTV were a shambles, whereas by the end of the decade you had CBBC, Milkshake, a much wider penetration of multichannel TV, a much more established and swaggering GMTV and even Breakfast was a bit lighter.
Like ‘all new Phil’ I watched for all of its run until 2001. Having seen how hard it was for the show to replace Evans, you always knew when watching Vaughan that they would have an even bigger problem when he eventually departed (just because it very much became his show, with even the later titles reflecting his idiosyncrasies and running jokes).
So watching during 2000 it seemed fairly inevitable that Johnny’s exit would bring the show’s axing soon after. Also the new century only drew attention to the fact that it was very much a 1990s show with a 1990s aesthetic baked into its DNA.
That's true enough, the idea in 2001 was seemingly that they'd been able to afrrest the decline and replicate the Chris and Gaby magic once, so they could presumably do it again, but that ignored the two or three years of flailing around they had before they finally stumbled on Johnny and Denise, and they certainly didn't have the time to go through all that again. It was like Live and Kicking at the same time, like that the show had managed to be successfully reinvented after the departure of the original hosts, but Zoe and Jamie were such a popular team their replacements were always going to be compared to them and found wanting, hence the umpteen revamps of that before they finally gave up.
As I say, I watched The Big Breakfast from day one and was obsessed with it until Evans left, then carried on watching with diminished enthusiasm right up to the Rick and Sharron golden age. In fact I stopped watching it pretty much just as it was getting good again, partly because I'd gone to university and was never up in time, but I came back to it in mid-98 when Johnny and Denise were in their pomp and watched it most days (although as a student and then dossing around after graduation, I barely saw much before 8.30, not like under Chris and Gaby when I set my alarm for 6.55), before abandoning it completely after Vaughan left.
I always thought Danny Baker & Rosemarie Ford were the first non-Chris & Gaby combo, though I bow to Steve’s immense knowledge.
As I say, I was obsessed with the show at the time so I would faithfully note down anything to do with it in my diary, so I remember Carol Smillie hosted in March and Rosemarie Ford did it in May, because I remember watching her do it when we were on half-term.
Yep and a game that was played by couples in bed - 'Tickle Your Trout' I'll leave the rules of that to your imagination. There was a game for kids too: 'The Kids are Right but Only if They're Wrong' which was an interesting contrast.
Such a great show and was never quite the same when he tried to take it elsewhere. His Radio 1 Sunday shows were very flat without an audience and he often just used stuff he'd done that morning.
His producer was Andy Davies, later best known for Jonathan Ross' Saturday Morning Radio 2 shows. I think they were kind of the successor to Round at Chris's... Chris left GLR and took the show to Virgin, then Ross took over the slot there, later moving to Radio 2 and taking Andy with him
The Kids Are Alright was another feature he took to Radio 1 in the early days, along with a variation on Tickle Your Trout in the shape of I'm In Bed With My Boyfriend. All those features then went for a burton within the first year and by mid-96 it was just Evans talking non-stop and settling scores, as I say it probably went off the boil quicker than The Big Breakfast, the nadir being the week in Scotland in the summer of 1996 which was a horrible, self-indulgent mess on the air, a party the listener wasn't invited to.
As mentioned in The Nation's Favourite, his first stint on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons in 1992, before The Big Breakfast, wasn't very successful. Johnny Beerling says it was too similar to his GLR show and didn't think anyone who didn't listen to that would get it, and Evans himself says that he was told he wasn't allowed to have an audience because it would sound too much like Steve Wright's show.
As you say, Evans took the show direct to Virgin when that started in April 1993, but only for three months before giving it up because he was too busy to do it. In fact the first replacement was Paul Ross, Jonathan didn't start in that slot until 1998 when Evans was actually in charge of the station and he personally signed him up, his career was completely down the toilet at the time. There's some interesting stuff in Evans' book about his time running Virgin, including how he came up with the idea of Rock'n'Roll Football on a Saturday morning and promptly did it on air that afternoon, and it's still running now over twenty years later.
