TV-am day one | Tuesday 1 February 1983

From the archives of http://www.transdiffusion.org

It's Tuesday 1 February 1983 and, a mere 2 months early, TV-am catapults on to the airwaves to an audience of... very few. The BBC had stolen what small audience there was with a downmarket, Nationwide-esque light programme called Breakfast Time that they rushed on air two weeks earlier as a spoiler.

There's early promise in the early TV-am, a format that Antenne 2's Télématin would freely borrow two years later. But in Britain, it wouldn't work and TV-am would come close to collapse within weeks, with the stars seen here ejected and a new bunch of (cheaper) unknowns put in their place in a more lightweight, inexpensive and popular version of the station. That was the formula that worked, eventually kicking the BBC's Breakfast Time into a newsier version, then forcing the BBC to attack from the other end of the spectrum with the entirely news-driven BBC Breakfast News.

Now tables have turned: the BBC's current show, Breakfast, is celebrity and fluff driven (albeit with space for news); TV-am's successor GMTV has given way to Daybreak, also designed to be celebrity and fluff driven but, so far, failing to take GMTV's audience with it (as GMTV had also failed on launching its newsier TV-am replacement, finding the viewers heading over to the BBC instead).