By Penny Smith
Last updated at 11:57 PM on 21st January 2011
Daybreak is a failing breakfast TV programme with a disillusioned female presenter, an egocentric bully co-presenter and dreadful ratings.
No, it's not the struggling ITV show everyone's been talking about, but a fictional US morning programme featured in a hilarious new film called Morning Glory.
It also bears more than a passing resemblance to GMTV, the station I worked at for more than a decade until June last year.
Rachel McAdams plays Becky, the new executive producer who needs to turn the show around or see it replaced by game shows and soaps.
Bonding process: Ex-GMTV star Penny Smith with co-presenter John Stapleton
So she sends the weatherman off to do his bulletin from a rollercoaster, she has the show's anchor, Colleen (Diane Keaton), wearing a fat suit and bouncing off a sumo wrestler, and she tries to coax Mike (Harrison Ford), the grumpy new male presenter, into engaging in more banter. He's a news veteran with many awards under his belt, who refuses to do fluffy.
'Bantering? Isn't that Latin for jabbering like a chipmunk?' he asks, refusing to enter into the mix of fun and frolics that she thinks will bring the viewers in.
How much is true to life? Well, Mike and Colleen are in their 60s with crow's feet and neck slouch - I'm not sure how likely that is on a morning show in Britain, where looks are paramount.
And Becky stays skinny throughout, which is almost impossible, since you end up eating croissants and Danish pastries all day just to get you through. But there is a lot about Morning Glory that has the ring of truth.
In the fictional Daybreak corridor, men in medieval armour jostle with a troupe of uniformed drummers, while floor managers make sure the food for the cookery item is in the right place.
At GMTV, you could walk down the corridor on any given morning and hear Katherine Jenkins warming up behind one door, while models tried on uplift pants behind another and the wardrobe department steamed the creases out a boy band's suits.
True to life: Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford star in Morning Glory
In Morning Glory, one morning meeting for the next day's show centres on whether a miniskirts fashion feature should use different-shaped models, whether to include an item on weather vanes, and what is going to be the main news thrust.
At GMTV, the morning meetings would be just as surreal, occasionally dissolving into silliness as we worked through the items on offer. You would genuinely have conversations about anything from psychic pets to eight things you could do with a potato.
Then we come to one of the mainstays of a breakfast show - the outside broadcast (OB). If there was supposed to be a crowd, you delivered a crowd, no matter how few people turned up.
You would squish them into a small space and cheat the camera angle - just as they do in the film - making eight people seem like 80. And similarly, while Diane Keaton dissolves into a fit of giggles when their weatherman almost passes out on yet another frantic mechanical contraption, we too enjoyed the disasters that befell the intrepid meteorologists we sent out on OBs.
Clare Nasir almost got washed away in a giant wave while reporting from Bridlington sea front, and I'm afraid we all cracked up - after we found out she was all right, obviously.
Turning a corner: Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley on the real Daybreak
But I'm going to award the biggest gold stars to the film's scriptwriter and producers, for the way they've portrayed the hours you have to work in breakfast television.
It's one of the biggest challenges, working out how to cope with getting up at the crack of dawn. It causes havoc with your relationships because it's almost impossible for anyone to know how appalling you feel every day unless it's experienced first-hand.
You are permanently jetlagged and tetchy. If you're not careful, you end up with a relationship in crisis, and the only friends you'll have are either in the same business or breast-feeding.
In the film, Mike warns the ambitious Becky, 'You'd sleep at the office if you could, but you'll end up with nothing.' He's right. The temptation is to live and breathe the show, and it's exhausting.
And yet you form lifelong bonds with your colleagues because you are all struggling together. Good ratings are a team performance. The on-screen talent is important, but if you don't have the right mix of stories, then it will always be an uphill climb.
DID YOU KNOW
Breakfast TV began in the UK on 17 January 1983. Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross presented BBC's Breakfast Time - Harry Secombe was their first guest
Presenters can get over their personality clashes to deliver a programme worth watching, but viewers will switch off if there's no content. As Becky says in the film, 'We're like the well-informed neighbour talking over the fence... news is fibre. But we can't just have fibre, fibre, fibre. We need to lighten the load.'
Then there are the things that go wrong, such as when on the fictional Daybreak a picture of Jimmy Carter has a strap-line under it saying he's a sex offender.
When I was at Sky News before GMTV, we interviewed a man who'd lost everything in a credit card fraud, but captioned him as the boss of a credit card company.
With any TV programme, when things are going well and ratings are high, it's easy. But funnily enough, you can still have a good time when things aren't going so well. It's a bonding process - you're all in the same boat, so you make the most of it.
People are bound to draw comparisons between the fictional Daybreak and the ITV show, with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley. But although Chiles has confessed that he doesn't 'do chirpiness', he's in a different league to Harrison Ford's character.
I won't give away the ending of the film, but I hear that ratings have turned the corner at the ITV Daybreak, which is good news for all those people who struggle to put the show together.
As Becky says in the fictional Daybreak, 'You're in people's homes every day and it's an honour.' It was an honour for me for many years.
Go and see Morning Glory and live it all vicariously. It's more right than wrong and you get a sweet love story thrown in, too.
Penny Smith presents Market Kitchen Big Adventure on the Good Food Channel, 7pm, weekdays. Morning Glory is in cinemas now.
Explore more:
- People:
- Penny Smith,
- Katherine Jenkins,
- Clare Nasir,
- Frank Bough,
- Jimmy Carter,
- Harrison Ford,
- Rachel McAdams,
- Christine Bleakley,
- Adrian Chiles,
- Harry Secombe,
- Diane Keaton
- Places:
- United Kingdom
rihanna lady gaga celebrity news celebrity gossip entertainment news
No comments:
Post a Comment