As well as being the first day back at college for the new school year, TV duo Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley had their first day in their new job today.
They are now the regular presenters of ITV 1’s new Daybreak programme which launched this morning. It replaces GMTV following 17 years on air.
Being someone who regularly watched A&C when they were presenters of the BBC’s One Show, I decided to give the new programme a try. So the Freeview box in my bedroom was set to go to ITV 1 at 5:59 this morning – not BBC Radio 2.
I was impressed by the new studio setup, with a view of the sunrise over London in the background behind the presenters’ sofa; it proves that the show is actually live, not like on the BBC where it seems all their studios have four walls without any windows! The studio lighting has been set up to make the studio itself, appear to be quite dark. This creates a good ‘early morning atmosphere’ which I like, and means that as dawn breaks and the sun rises, the natural light coming in from outside floods into the studio.
As for the content, Adrian and Christine work well together, as they did on the One Show, as well as with the other members of the Daybreak team. There’s a good mix of local, national and international news (just like on BBC Breakfast, local opt-outs are included every half hour throughout the programme), and weather forecasts are provided, featuring live cameras placed in various towns and cities around the country to give you and idea of what’s happening in your area. Also, the new show brings you live guests: today, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was on, giving his first live interview since the publishing of his memoirs.
So the new Daybreak show works well, and I think by loosing Adrian and Christine to ITV, the BBC have definitely lost out. I think that ITV have been quite clever here. They have brought their early morning output into line with that of the BBC, but by having the separate “Lorraine” show (which I don’t watch) from 8:30 until 9:30 each morning, still cater for their old GMTV audience. I’d be quite interested to see how the launch of Daybreak has effected the BBC’s audience figures!
Will I start watching ITV 1 regularly in the morning? I probably will. For me, Daybreak works a lot better than GMTV did. I’m not saying that there’s nothing wrong with the BBC’s output – in fact I’ll probably watch a bit of both!
If you haven’t seen any of the programme, you can watch the first 30 minutes on YouTube, thanks to user “ladedaaaaaa“:
Let me know your views on ITV’s new early morning programme. Comment using the form below, e-mail admin@fred-hart.co.uk, or comment using Facebook/Twitter.
