Fishburn Hedges

03.09.2010

After 17 years, GMTV has gone the way of TV-am and bitten the dust. In its place, ITV hopes to establish a new format to attract viewers to its dwindling morning ratings. Stiff competition from BBC Breakfast and over the past three years, Sky News, has seen GTMV relegated to third in the ratings war. In its place will come the tried and tested combination of Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, both recently poached, at no small fee, from the BBC’s One Show. 

Daybreak will reunite the pair who enjoyed phenomenal success for a BBC One magazine show which until that point had attracted unremarkable figures. But what will actually change? Lorraine Kelly will still have her lifestyle slot at 8:30am and GMTV stalwarts Kate Garraway and John Stapleton will continue in news anchoring roles. 

From the promotional material put out by ITV, Daybreak is set to 'appeal to a core audience of housewives with children….(and) attract new viewers.' How exactly that will be achieved has not been revealed. Indeed the noises coming out of ITV seem hauntingly familiar to Channel 4 when it axed The Big Breakfast in 2002 and replaced it with the disastrous RI:SE later that same year. 

GMTV was great for the PR industry, I remember once getting a celebrity on there to promote the launch of an engineering scholarship. The simple formula of celebrity + recent reality TV show = delivery of key messages to four million viewers. Brilliant! 

Although I suspect Daybreak will follow a similar formula, the fear is that Daybreak will go the way of RI:SE and be consigned to the waste bin, replaced by cheap American imports. ITV is a public company, Adam Crozier is the newly appointed chief of the station and pressure will be on from day one to deliver ratings. The loss of such a platform would be a major blow for the PR industry. 

So, for that reason, I will be tuning in on Monday and hoping Daybreak blows away the cobwebs of breakfast TV and injects an energy not seen since the early nineties and the launch of The Big Breakfast and GMTV itself. Otherwise, the options available to clients to publicise activities to a mass audience will be narrowed even further.

Posted by James Gilheany