I've finally got back after an exhaustive journey from Canterbury. Well on the tubes at least as the engineers have decided to cause disruption again, meaning I had to get a bus from Wembley Park to Northwick Park. Luckily I didn't have to pay with my Oyster card as I was carrying quite a lot with me.
I'm now back, I'm really tired, and in the words of Ben Kingsley in 'Sexy Beast' I'm sweating like a, you know what.
Thankfully my hard drive is still here in my flat.
I've been invited by Denis to join him and the rest of the housemates watching the coverage of tonight's Oscars but judging by my jet lagged condition, I'll give it a miss, partly because there's a lot I want to get done by tomorrow, and partly because I've never really been too excited about who's recieving what at the big ceremony.
On the train journey back I read through Ian Jones's book about breakfast television; "Morning Glory".
For Ian to call it "an attempt" is quite hard on himself as it's a great account on such an important area of British Television over the last 25 years and beyond.
Originally a series of articles on the Off The Telly website, I'm pleased that a lot of the content hasn't been altered although it does include the addition of extracts from specially made interviews with people such as John Stapleton, Greg Dyke, the late Carol Barnes, Nick Owen, Nicholas Witchell, and those from behind the scenes such as Ron Neil who edited the BBC's Breakfast Time and Ed Forsdick who edited the Big Breakfast during Johnny Vaughan's reign and went on to work on shows such as Saturday Night Takeaway.
I'm also interested in seeing Ian's take on quite literally, the rise and fall of "RI:SE", ironically which started after the original online articles were published.
Anyone with an interest in television from over the years should buy it as it not just gives you an account of Breakfast Television, but an idea of what television was like overall during this time.
I haven't got that far in the book yet, but I'll give my take on it so far without trying to give too much important stuff away.
Some of the parts that interested me were the way the book paid attention to the presentation side of things, such as the changing of position of the on screen clocks and how Francis Wilson's "Weather Window" was used to introduce cartoons for younger viewers during the school holidays which like most of these instances was a nice touch.
There were also parts that I didn't know about such as presenter Debbie Greenwood being a Beauty Queen before becoming a presenter on Breakfast Time. Now of course she's married to Paul Coia who these days presents at Smooth Radio London.
It also looked at Greg Dyke's appointment at TV-AM which saw the departure of Angela Rippon and Anna Ford and the arrival of Roland Rat.
I like how the book points out that when Roland joined the BBC in 1985, it wasn't to join their breakfast programme, but the entertainment department which resulted in "Roland Rat The Series" the following year.
The first series was shown in a prime time Saturday evening slot along with Doctor Who and Every Second Counts, but the second series two years later was moved to Children's BBC in an afternoon slot and that's where Roland stayed for the next couple of years with the various spin offs.
Breakfast Time's biggest shake up came in 1986 when the red leather sofa and Frank Bough's pullovers were ditched in favour of a desk, suits and ties, and a more news based agenda.
Many weren't happy about the changes and from my point of view, the only good thing about the relaunch was the new theme tune which lasted beyond the programmes axing and was used on Breakfast News until 1997.
TV-AM on the other hand had to deal with a strike which resulted in the station having to put on repeats of the Wide Awake Club and bring in Timmy Mallett and Tommy Boyd into the Good Morning Britain studio to tell viewers not to enter the competitions.
There's no way they could do that now, although computer technology allows the numbers to be overlaid which kind of defeats my above statement as shows such as Dancing On Ice are repeated on ITV2 quite often.
Around this time Wincey Willis left as the weather girl, so until Ulrika Jonnson's permanent promotion, we had weather girls such as Carol Dooley who also used to do the same on Simon Mayo's Radio 1 Breakfast Show, and
Trish Williamson who was sadly killed in a car accident last year.
1987 was a key year for Breakfast Time because of two events.
The first one wasn't particuarly a joyous event as in March of that year was the Zebrugge ferry disaster, resulting in the programme going out on Saturday which was the day after it happened.
This meant that the morning's edition of Saturday Superstore was to be delayed by an hour resulting in this rather infamous comment from Frank Bough;
"We apologise if you're waiting for Superstore, in fact we don't apologise..."
To be honest, from a TV point of view Superstore was on it's last legs but from what I've read, they covered the morning really well considering what happened.
I have footage of TVS's coverage from that day as taken from a television presentation website and ITV had made the decision to broadcast Number 73 as planned.
Back to Breakfast Time, and the second big event that took place that year was the hurricane in October, wrongly dismissed by Michael Fish.
This resulted in Nicholas Witchell having to broadcast an heavilly adlibbed programme from the BBC 1 continuity studio AKA "The Broom Cupboard" but it had all the pictures taken down and you can understand how he's not used to the adlibbed presentation and lack of autocues from this clip here. (44 seconds in).
TV-AM on the other hand ended up broadcasting their programmes from Thames's Euston Road studios.
The book also brought back memories of names and faces I had forgotten such as Rowanne Pasco who used to present a five minute religious slot on a Sunday before David Frost's programme.
I can remember when in the last few weeks of TV-AM they introduced an in vision presenter to introduce the children's programmes from a jungle based studio set and it was rather bizzare when they introduced Rowanne's slot at the end of the Sunday programmes.
More or less in the same way as Andy Crane and Sue Devaney introducing "Five To Eleven" within CBBC in the late 80s.
Frank Bough ended up quitting Breakfast Time by the end of 1987, the date being the 18th of December which was the day after Kate was born.
He moved onto Holiday 88 but was sacked shortly after his shameful private life was exposed.
In his place on Breakfast Time were Jeremy Paxman, Kirsty Wark, and newcomer Jill Dando.
Changes were soon afoot as in September 1989 they relaunched the programme as Breakfast News with most of the old team present apart from Paxman who had moved to Newsnight and in his place was Nicholas Witchell.
Channel 4 around this time had launched the Channel 4 Daily which attempted to aim for the "yuppie" market but wasn't too succesfull.
Some of the items I can remember from the programme were "Countdown Masters", and "Early Bird" which was aimed for the younger viewers and presented by children.
One of them being our one of our Westminster alumni Lynsey "A" Rose.
There was also the appearance of the puppet "Earl E Bird" which for me was probably the standout part of the Channel 4 programme.
By 1992 the programme faced the drop and Michael Grade took the risk in accepting a proposal from Bob Geldof and Charlie Parsons of what was to become "The Big Breakfast".
It looked as if it would change the face of breakfast television forever and most of the presenters were familiar to me if not to others.
Chris Evans had already done a show on TV-AM called "TV-Mayhem" and had taken over the Sunday slot from Phillip Schofield on Radio 1, playing highlights of his GLR show to a nationwide audience.
I seem to remember him constantly plugging his new TV show on his final edition and it definitely paid off.
I'd seen Gaby Roslin on Motormouth and it was obvious she had experience of live television so it looked like she would work briliantly on the programme.
As for Paula Yates, I know she was married to the boss and had an irreverent interviewing manner but she never did it for me. There's a difference between being irreverant and unlikeable, and I wasn't too impressed by her flirtatious manner which went to a head when she started dating the late Michael Hutchence behind Sir Bob's back.
I seem to remember Bob appearing on ITV's "What's Up Doc" performing one of his lesser remembered solo singles, the Saturday before the Big Breakfast started and Andy Crane was hassling viewers to watch because "Gaby Roslin is presenting".
I only really started watching the programme around Christmas of that year and it was Zig and Zag who stole the show for me. I even ended up laughing in the train whilst reading quotes from them in the book.
Evans quite rightly pointed out that to be that funny every day took an awful lot, and Zig and Zag (or Ciarran and Michael) pulled it off brilliantly.
TV-AM had lost its Franchise in 1991 due to the stupid method implied by the goverment of franchises winning if they bid the highest amount of money (without going too high like TVS).
Apart from TSW, I was disapointed that those who lost their franchises produced some of ITV's finest programmes, and it definitely showed in the decline in quality that started in the mid 90s and is still present today.
Even ITV1's biggest show "The X Factor" isn't produced by one of the regional companies or ITV itself as it's now known.
I can remember watching TV-AM's final morning in 1992 and may still have bits of it in the form of Youtube downloads, so it may be worth having a rummage through that again before too long.
I also have the TV Hell documentary "Storm In An Eggcup" from the same year, which like most other things I haven't seen yet but am meaning to.
In TV-AM's place on the 1st of January 1993 was GMTV, originally bidded as Sunrise but had to change their name because it was the same as Sky News's Breakfast programme which it still has today.
Many people thought the station's first few months were dreadful but I thought it was a refreshing change. Although to be honest I only really watched at weekends and at half term where the highlight was Simon Parkin's children's magazine series "It's Not!".
Even the man himself looks back on it as one of the highlights of his presenting career and quite rightly so as it gave him the sort of vehicle he deserved as a live presenter.
However the show was a victim of cutbacks when GMTV relaunched in April with a studio set identical to TV-AM's and the departure of Fiona Armstrong as presenter.
With Greg Dyke in charge, many elements of TV-AM returned including Lorraine Kelly being promoted to co-presenter, Paul Gambacinni and Jimmy Greaves reviewing the week's film and television respectively, and even Mike Morris made a return to host "Sunday Best".
Simon Parkin however had his half term and school holiday show reduced to "Parkin's In" which was just him stood opposite a psychedelic background introducing cartoons such as The Legend of Zelda and Tom and Jerry Kids.
It more or less lost me as a viewer on weekdays at least.
Things got even worse when Anthea Turner was hired as Eammon Holmes's right hand girl although I've already had my two cents on that episode.
However the children's output was pretty good with Mr Motivator now hosting linking into the shows including the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers which was preceded by him "persuading" viewers not to imitate what they did on screen.
I wasn't really a fan of the brightly coloured defenders and their Dinozords in all honesty.
Simon Parkin on the other hand was now demoted to hosting "Rewind" which was some sort of bizarre historical magazine show and "Eat Your Words" a word based game for younger viewers which had previously been hosted by a young Konnie Huq (at just 20 years old) and the late Mark Speight who was an indicator that the worst was yet to come.
I thought the quiz was better with Simon Parkin at the helm who always said halfway through the game that it was "probably the oddest game show on television, because if you lose, you win the prizes".
This was because the contestant with the lowest score would go on to play the endgame whilst the remaining contestants would stay on for another week.
Simon's still one of my favourite presenters on television although he's one of the many to come from the Broom Cupboard. However like all the best he started off in radio and you can't fault his wit and ability to adlib which is missing a lot from TV and Radio these days.
That's quite a lot isn't it?
I'm not even finished reading the book but in all cases, it's just a personal reflection of some of the best years of watching television.
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