Didn't Chris Moyles do a pilot for a revamped Big Breakfast or something like that? I remember some clips surfacing a few years ago.
Yeah, he did the show the morning after the 2001 General Election on air and it seems did an off air pilot around the same time. If anyone can be bothered digging around the Radio X Facebook page they put a clip of of Dominic Byrne reading the news a while back - not particularly interesting. He has said in the past he felt he was being pushed out of Radio 1 at that point as he didn't really fit in with the image they were pushing at that point, so he was clearly looking around. It was probably for the best he didn't get it as he'd no doubt had to have left Radio 1 to do it and would most likely have been career suicide. In the event he did the Five 7pm show which was a bit of a disaster but no-one watched so he got away with it, and he was allowed to do his Radio 1 show simultaneously too so he could keep that on the go. Just over a year later there was a huge revamp and he got the breakfast show, and the rest is history.
It was only after Sept 11th it got pulled due to events of the time, and arguably had the show been in a stronger position at the time that wouldn't have happened anyway, certainly not all three days.
Yes, and of course the show had already been axed by then so C4 weren't particularly bothered about keeping it on air. Of course during the second Gulf War there was a morning edition of Channel Four News but RI:SE continued running from 8.10-9.30, which seemed such a waste of time.
The whole point of RI:SE was that it could take the heavy news stories when they occurred and wouldn't have to drop the show, but by that point they'd relaunched the show as Son of Big Breakfast so could hardly have Iain Lee running with it. I think that was the period when Mel and Sue were doing some kind of Lorraine-style show-within-a-show at the end, so you had C4 News, a bit of RI:SE and then a bit of Mel and Sue. Which no-one needed.
It was well known RI:SE’s ratings never got higher than those of the BB at their lowest (with the exception of Big Brother news), and when they changed the host to Iain Lee the ratings for even lower, towards zero at one point. Didn’t Channel 4 end the show’s contract about 4 or 5 months early too?
I didn’t mind RI:SE when it came from Sky as it did what it needed to do. but it didn’t feel like a Channel 4 show in the slightest. You can’t blame Channel 4 for giving up with Breakfast TV after RI:SE ended.
Well, there was that pilot run of "Morning Glory", which was piggybacked onto a series of BBLB which was moved to the mornings for one celebrity series. Both presented by Dermot from the same studio.
Thanks as ever Steve. I can’t quite remember when Mark Little disappeared but there was an awful on-air moment the day after the Dunblane shooting (which was March 1996) where he had to apologise for the ident shown at 0700 where he fired bullets at the screen in the shape of the then C4 logo. Obviously those bits of continuity are pre-planned but I never saw a BB presenter ever get as (rightly) angry/emotional as that.
I don’t remember him after that and not in any way suggesting it contributed (which it wouldn’t have done), but it was a sour note right at the very end of his BB career.
Not sure I've ever seen that ident surface online - it mustn't have been used very often or for long.
With thanks to @UKPRES1 on Twitter for pointing me in the direction of this video featuring said ident. For some reason I'd always imagined it as being part of the circles era, but that didn't start until October.
The pilot that Chris Moyles and Dominic Byrne did was for Planet 24's potential replacement for The Big Breakfast. They filmed it at the Big Breakfast house as they had the facilities there to do it
The pilot that Chris Moyles and Dominic Byrne did was for Planet 24's potential replacement for The Big Breakfast. They filmed it at the Big Breakfast house as they had the facilities there to do it
Aren't you all getting mixed up with that evening show he did on Channel 5 in 2002
Thanks as ever Steve. I can’t quite remember when Mark Little disappeared but there was an awful on-air moment the day after the Dunblane shooting (which was March 1996) where he had to apologise for the ident shown at 0700 where he fired bullets at the screen in the shape of the then C4 logo. Obviously those bits of continuity are pre-planned but I never saw a BB presenter ever get as (rightly) angry/emotional as that.
I don’t remember him after that and not in any way suggesting it contributed (which it wouldn’t have done), but it was a sour note right at the very end of his BB career.
Not sure I've ever seen that ident surface online - it mustn't have been used very often or for long.
With thanks to @UKPRES1 on Twitter for pointing me in the direction of this video featuring said ident. For some reason I'd always imagined it as being part of the circles era, but that didn't start until October.
No doubt about it that was a poor choice of ident for the morning after Dunblane.
Pedanticy alert but of course that wasn't an ident, it was a sting. Might be worth a topic on the C4 presentation of that era where the classic idents remained (although modified), but they were much more experimental in the presentation around them.