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THE FICTION is over. Anne and Nick, the Good Morning couple who weren't, have called it a day. Or, to be more accurate, the BBC have called it a day for them. The announcement that the nation's second favourite slice of mid-morning domesticity and drama had passed its sell-by date coincided uncannily with the announcement from the camp of their rivals, Richard and Judy, that they were to leave their Liverpool home and head south. So it's "Goodbye" Good Morning, and "Come on down" to our winners, This Morning.
The exchange of Richard and Judy's Albert Dock backdrop for the River Thames is the latest and perhaps final act in the sofa wars. The merry-go-round of breakfast and morning television moves has absorbed the lives of many a celebrity since the well-intentioned launch of Breakfast Time in January 1983.
Anne and Nick have gone, say the programme's makers in Birmingham, because ratings rule. With a mere 750,000 viewers, Good Morning with Anne and Nick was lagging sadly behind This Morning with Richard and Judy, who regularly pulled in audiences of 1.8 million. Without the viewers, Anne and Nick were having problems filling the never-ending slots in their daily 90 minutes of live TV. The all-important celebs wouldn't make the trip for less than a million viewers. For an A-list star to sit on your sofa, it's got to be one hell of a sofa. A discounted convertible bed will not do.
THE FICTION is over. Anne and Nick, the Good Morning couple who weren't, have called it a day. Or, to be more accurate, the BBC have called it a day for them. The announcement that the nation's second favourite slice of mid-morning domesticity and drama had passed its sell-by date coincided uncannily with the announcement from the camp of their rivals, Richard and Judy, that they were to leave their Liverpool home and head south. So it's "Goodbye" Good Morning, and "Come on down" to our winners, This Morning.
The exchange of Richard and Judy's Albert Dock backdrop for the River Thames is the latest and perhaps final act in the sofa wars. The merry-go-round of breakfast and morning television moves has absorbed the lives of many a celebrity since the well-intentioned launch of Breakfast Time in January 1983.
Anne and Nick have gone, say the programme's makers in Birmingham, because ratings rule. With a mere 750,000 viewers, Good Morning with Anne and Nick was lagging sadly behind This Morning with Richard and Judy, who regularly pulled in audiences of 1.8 million. Without the viewers, Anne and Nick were having problems filling the never-ending slots in their daily 90 minutes of live TV. The all-important celebs wouldn't make the trip for less than a million viewers. For an A-list star to sit on your sofa, it's got to be one hell of a sofa. A discounted convertible bed will not do.
Daytime TV's insatiable celeb-lust is also behind Richard and Judy's move. The refused invitations to appear on their programme reads like the index to the Hello! Yearbook: Claudia Schiffer and Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, Mel Gibson and Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hanks and Sly Stallone, Jodie Foster and Keanu Reeves. That's one hell of a sofa.
The reason none of them could find the time in their busy schedules to share a cup of instant with Richard and Judy is Liverpool and the grisly north of England. It might be all right as a backdrop to Beatles footage, but who actually wants to go there? "I was looking forward to meeting Tom Cruise," Judy said at the weekend, "but he didn't want to make the journey from London to Liverpool for a 10-minute chat."
The couple who are a couple, although they don't play it up as much as the faux pairing of Anne and Nick, pointed to other reasons for moving south - kids, family - and pledged not to become southern snobs. "The spirit of Merseyside will be with us," said Judy. Or was it Richard?
There is a more serious side to the sniping. With no more Anne and Nick from Birmingham, and Richard and Judy not in Liverpool, the rosy future of regional broadcasting of a few years ago has been damaged, possibly irreparably. Phil Redmond, head of Mersey Television, pointed to the wording of This Morning's makers Granada, when they successfully bid to win back their regional licence in 1991. Granada's envisioned status as the largest single contributor to ITV would give, "tangible evidence of a regional company's ability to make its voice clearly heard in national broadcasting - a better situation than having London impose its tastes on the whole country." Fine words, as Redmond noted. Four years later, however, and the vision of regional, decentralised broadcasting has been crushed by the merger mania of the ITV companies: Carlton owns Central, while Granada owns London Weekend Television.
So is this the end of breakfast and daytime television's game of musical sofas? With The Big Breakfast in the ascendant on Channel 4, and upmarket and downmarket programmes on the two major channels, is the mid-morning market strong enough to sustain two competing programmes based on the allure of the celebrity coffee morning? It would seem unlikely, but TV executives don't like to admit defeat. One factor that would seem to spell a limited future for morning TV is the late arrival of the genre in Britain. TV has a long way to go before it can break the hold exerted by radio on our mid-morning rituals.
One thing is sure, we can expect to see a replacement for Anne and Nick. Reported frontrunners include cookery, consumerism and Michael Parkinson, the man who graced the first sofa in TV history, at TV-am. Perhaps bidders should take a look at the success of Richard and Judy, based on a real couple, doing surreal things. The hosts are there and waiting. They are free. Both desire a role in the public eye. Yes, it's Hellish Morning with Charles and Di, with Camilla doing the weather in a tasteless jersey.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers, Limited Dec 5, 1995