Reminiscing The Big Breakfast

Going slightly off topic can I ask. Did this ever do any cross-promo bits with Big Brother considering the close proximity of the other house in the same area?

Just wondering.

He mentioned it a couple of times on Radio 1, during this period I was still faithfully watching The Big Breakfast but would also have Evans on and listen to it during the adverts or whenever there was a boring bit on The Big Breakfast, so I was pretty much listening to Evans at 7.01 most mornings.

I remember when it fell off the air for about half an hour in 1995, they ended up showing a bit of the standby emergency tape which included clips of the Evans era, and someone phoned him up to tell him he was back on The Big Breakfast, but the one I most remember was in the summer of 1996, as Dan McGrath was married to Lisa Clark, the incoming Big Breakfast editor, and Evans said that they'd reveal "exactly what's going on with The Big Breakfast", and Clark came on the phone to talk about what the revamp was going to be like and was adamant that Zoe would be staying, which of course she didn't. I faithfully noted it all down in my diary.

I don't remember him mentioning it much after that, but presumably they always had the telly on in the studio, and I remember in the first week of the revamp Evans saying "Well, here's the big news about the new look Big Breakfast, the clock is a different colour!".

There's a bit in The Nation's Favourite where Matthew Bannister talks about when Evans was producing Danny Baker on weekend breakfast on GLR, and on Saturday mornings they'd have TV-am on in the studio because they both fancied Michaela Strachan. And one week TV-am was outside on Camden Lock so the Bake invited listeners to go down there and hold up a sign saying "Listen to Danny Baker on GLR", which someone promptly did.

My favourite DJs-watching-the-telly-in-the-studio moment was when Emma B on Radio 1 one Saturday was giving updates from the football match she was watching on Sky, which went on for about half an hour before someone phoned in to tell her it was a repeat.

I seem to think there were Big Brother updates on the Big Breakfast. ISTR them taking a live feed but everyone was asleep most of the time.

During Series 2 of Big Brother, they had Mel from Series 1 regularly appearing on the Big Breakfast as their “correspondent”. I seem to remember them having a purpose built interview area with her which looked like a giant TV in the back garden. There was never any kind of official tie-in that I remember, though RI:SE Mark 2 went all out with their Big Brother coverage, presumably as it was the only way to entice viewers by that point!!

RI:SE MkII was presenter by a BB winner, of course.

Ri:se v2's Iain Lee would've been a great Big Breakfast presenter. I wonder why that never happened?

He has said he was offered the 2001 revamp but, like Dermot O'Leary, turned it down because it sounded terrible.

... but then he accepted Rise Mk 2?! 😅

Chris Moyles was also up for the job in 2001, and recorded a pilot

https://www.facebook.com/RadioXBreakfast/videos/1926118360941402

What I didn’t understand from that pilot footage is why they used the graphics from the show as it was.

Because it was a not for broadcast pilot?

And you find production companies won't spend any money more than necessary on pilots that go no further than the VCR in the office of the commissioning editor of that channel.

To spend time and effort on a new set of graphics on a tryout, when you have a set of ready made graphics airing, ready made up would be a huge waste of time for your graphic designer - who was probably busy in knocking up the captions for the next days live show.

Has any footage ever surfaced of the original rival pilot to The Big Breakfast, which IIRC was made by Central? May have been more but think was it was narrowed down to two who made live pilots broadcast to C4 execs at the same time and they basically turned the other one off after 20 minutes or so.