Reminiscing The Big Breakfast

It looks like a different shape window

The window has bigger curtains and a vase on the sill, but it looks to be the same window.

I'd say it looks like a recreation of that area but I don't see why they'd do that as it was usually used for comps.

It's the original competition area. There used to be extra segments of The Crunch on school holidays, and sometimes they would come from elsewhere in the house.

Sir Robin won't go on the bed...

No, a couple of people did that, when they didn't find it appropriate, I remember Tony Benn and Cecil Parkinson, as Paula says, being interviewed on chairs on the living room rather than on the bed.

I've mentioned it before, but Paula once said in an interview that I think Nigel Benn refused to get on the bed because it was against his religion as a symbol of fertility. And Paula told him how lucky he was to have a religion that allowed him to beat people up but not sit on a bed.

Up to 1995 on the UKTV Bill episodes and there was one episode where Tosh was talking about how much he liked Zig and Zag. Didn't have him down as a Big Breakfast type of person... or even around to watch it in his line of work 🤣

Probably would have depended on the shift pattern he had. I can't remember what rank he was in the show but I'm sure it was relatively entry level. At that entry point in any job you're a dogsbody and prone to being dumped in unpopular shifts like 2-10 or overnight or whatever. I don't see any reason why, if he was a real person, he couldn't have sat in front of Channel 4 some mornings.

Shame what happened to Kevin Lloyd, don't think he even reached the age of 50 before he died.

I have a very vague memory of Zig & Zag on The Bill set wearing police helmets, so that may be the reason for the crowbarred in reference...

In fact, I may be going crazy but I'm sure they were actually in the back of shot in a real episode.

Interesting to find he lived quite close to me and commuted to London and back for the show, that's a hell of a commute!

Very much a tragic story though. He was always "the face" of The Bill for me when growing up... though I wonder if he'd have lasted much longer even without the drinking problems, didn't really seem to fit in with the new era after the 1998 revamp.

I followed the Bill from 1999 onwards and I'm sorry to change this thread into a Bill thread but the 1998-2003 period under Richard Handford & particularly Paul Marquess was a huge period of change for the bill with 2 massive cast culls and some long serving characters with 10+ years on the show like Lines, Brownlow, Conway, Boyden, Cryer, Monroe all gone. While shows have to reinvent themselves and it certainly brought higher ratings with the changes that was implemented by the Bill it is a shame how some of the older cast members were treated especially the likes of Eric Richard that only found out he was being axed when a colleague read a script.

Even worse was a few years later when Reg Hollis was written out and Jeff Stewart slit his wrists on set as a result... that was not long before the dreadful 2009 revamp. Where they also got rid of Tony Stamp who'd also been there since the start pretty uncerimoniously.

I did talk to someone twitter a couple of years back who claimed they worked on The Bill and said many aspects of the 2009 revamp (the film look, the music etc.) were forced on them by ITV and they didn't want them. Whether they actually did work for the show and there's any truth in it, I don't know though.

But we probably should get back to the Big Breakfast here!