Saw some of Daybreak this morning which is a rarity. The concert bit seemed so stilted and felt like a promo of some Russian singer who has bought his way onto the screen.
John is such a natural warm presenter, great to see him getting airtime. Which I cannot say about Kate.
To be honest, if I was ITV I would give up on the whole enterprise and lob some cheap repeats on in the morning. I don't know if they're able to due to the GMTV licence, but if they can they should. Keep Lorraine's show on but otherwise give up.
They tried a glossy new look with Daybreak and it flopped. They've tried to tone it down and bring it back to a GMTV-style format and it's failed. They put Lorraine Kelly - a huge favourite of the target audience - on and it's not setting the world alight. All things are cyclical and it could be ITV's time again at breakfast some time in the future, but for now memories of the initial Daybreak failure are still there, especially as the name is on screen constantly. The brand is toxic.
The BBC has established how to do breakfast in a way that wins over the target demographic. It's a way that baffles me as I bloody hate it, given half their reports are twee nonsense that isn't good enough to get on the regional news, but I can see how it could win over middle-class Daily Mail reading housewives in the south of England, and that's probably the target.
How do I put the next point? Content-wise the BBC has it spot on and aesthetics-wise as well. The presenters on the Beeb are presented in a way that they're attractive, but not stunners, so it's not going to offend the female audience. I still hold that part of Daybreak's original problem was that this audience couldn't relate to/was jealous of a presenter who was married to a Premiership footballer and a good looking weathergirl and set of presenters - this is Britain, it's not the aspirational telly of the US we're after, the audience doesn't want to wake up feeling rubbish staring at someone who looks stunning. More to the point, women would wake up looking at Christine and wonder what's in it for them, given they had Adrian Chiles staring back at them...
The other problem is that the UK doesn't have a strong tradition of breakfast TV. Only in recent decades has there been anything worth watching - or indeed anything at all. The Big Breakfast broke the mould when there were only really four or five channels but now that audience is fragmented. There's little room for more than one entrant.
Of course, if the Daybreak portion of ITV is still profitable then they should quite simply be laughing at me right now. But if it's not, and it's dragging down the audience share, then why not save some cash and throw that into slots you can win, while thinking about what you could do with breakfast in the future?
I think they should stick at Daybreak and improve the format, maybe make it more like This Morning. If by Summer next year it is still failing, I think they should axe it and maybe keep the Newshour?
They should replace the sofa with two chairs and a tv to the left to them. Add some whopping crew members, introduce some talking muppets (No, i'm not talking about Aled and Lorraine there!) and have Keith Chegwin waking people at silly o'clock live on air. Now that's surely going to be a hit!
I've taken this from the current (2004) license - there have since been 18 amendments but I can't see anything to impact on the news/current affairs obligations
"News
The Licensee must broadcast a total of at least 60 minutes each
weekday of high quality national and international news and regional
opt-out material (news and weather) each weekday excluding bank
holidays measured in slot time (i.e. including advertising breaks,
programme trailers and presentation material during and at the end of
the programme)."
"Current affairs
The Licensee must broadcast at least one hour each week of high
quality national and international current affairs programmes
measured in slot time (i.e. including advertising breaks, programme
trailers and presentation material during and at the end of the
programme)."
How do you know it isn't profitable as it is? Yes it gets ratings much lower than Breakfast but if every programme that was in 2nd place was done away with, there wouldn't be much TV around.
Channel 4 threw the towel in and look at them now, completely off the agenda at breakfast time.
