EPILOGUE “There Was a Lot of Heresy About”
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MG-EPILOGUE.qxd 19/04/2004 07:32 Page 1 EPILOGUE “There was a lot of heresy about” My attempt at telling the story of British breakfast television initially took the shape of a series of monthly articles published on www.offthetelly.co.uk in late 2000 and early 2001. Titled Morning Glory, the text spanned the period from the launch of Breakfast Time in January 1983 to The Big Breakfast’s fateful makeover in January 2001, ending with some idle speculation on just how much longer Channel 4 could feasibly carry on funding such a relentlessly calamitous early morning programme. Typically, within a few weeks of the final article appearing on-line, C4 confirmed it was wielding the axe and the search was on for The Big Breakfast’s replacement. There seemed no reason not to continue hoarding useful bits of breakfast telly news, gossip and quotes, especially as the possibility of pitching an expanded version of the original articles to assorted publishers had gained in appeal. One of the things that the on-line version of Morning Glory did not possess was primary source material; a longer, more comprehensive take on the history of breakfast television would necessarily require the assembly and presentation of just such a valuable commodity. There were already various events and revelations that research had turned up too late to go into the Off The Telly articles. Then there was the prospect of a looming anniversary: 2003 would be the 20th birthday of breakfast TV, and a neat hook on which to hang the premise of a full-length book. Having secured a commission from Kelly Publications in the spring of 2002, twelve months lay ahead in which to turn a 35,000-word narrative into something roughly three times the size, plus secure those all- important interviews with the great and the good. As the time went on, however, compressing the most memorable incidents from two decades of television into a 100,000-word history, one that you hope will have a vague semblance of ‘definitive’ about it, called for just as much sentiment as ruthlessness. Familiar dilemmas surfaced again and again. The possibility, for instance, that your own personal pick of rib-tickling exchanges and potent encounters, which you’re convinced capture the essence of this or that person or programme, could quite possibly appeal to an audience of less than two. Did it matter if you gave over twice as much space to the musings of one particularly respected TV executive as that for a household personality? And because you travelled several hundreds of miles to actually meet the noble personage in question, did they merit an extra paragraph robbed from someone else you’d barely communicated with by e-mail? 1 MG-EPILOGUE.qxd 19/04/2004 07:32 Page 2 In the end, it kept boiling down to the same thing. Faced with a surplus of what you’re presuming to be self-evidently sharp, pithy anecdotage, garnered at first hand or otherwise, there’s almost nothing left but to take your chance on material you trust will be accessible, illuminating and relevant – all desperately worthy qualities, it has to be said. Meantime you mutter and grumble as the more eccentric, obscure or downright malevolent excerpts have to take up residence in the well-thumbed rainy day file. And that’s where some of the patently irrelevant or gratuitously self- indulgent off-cuts from the expanded print version of Morning Glory are, you’ll be happy to read, going to stay. Apart from what follows, of course. Getting the chance to talk to Greg Dyke was quite clearly something that bordered on the very edges of unlikelihood, yet in the end happened to come about in such a perfunctory manner – through a very mundane exchange of correspondence – as to helpfully undermine any sense of overawed grandeur about the occasion. Such an impression was compounded by the manner in which the man himself showed up: ambling round a corner on the 3rd floor of Broadcasting House, pausing outside his office, tie askew and glasses on forehead, declaring to anyone who was listening, “What am I doing now, then?” The ensuing interview, conducted within Dyke’s sparsely furnished huge office, didn’t get off to the best of starts when an opening gambit asking after the nature of his views on breakfast telly before he joined TV-am elicited the snap response: “Never thought about it. I had no views.” This, while Dyke was wandering around his room, moving random bits of paper about, and looking pained. Once he’d sat down, though, his answers instantly became far more engaging, and to the point. “We were penniless,” he recalled of TV-am, “it was a bankrupt organisation. If I’d understood what trading insolvently meant, that’s what we were doing.” The real straight talking, not to say barely concealed rage, came when matters turned to Bruce Gyngell. “The hard work had been done by the time Gyngell got there,” Dyke began. “I quite liked him in later years, but I always thought he was bullshit. He was quite charismatic; but I fell out with him pretty quickly. When he got onto his moralistic stuff later on and started complaining about one-parent families and the rest of it, well, this was the bloke who cleared off leaving his kids in Australia. I always thought he was a bit of a hypocrite. I’ll never forget him going up to someone when he first got to TV-am, clapping them on the shoulder, and saying ‘There are some wonderful women here, and I’m relying on you to tell me which of them fuck.’ And this was the bloke who within three or four years was lecturing the world about moral judgements and values.” None of this seemed to sit comfortably anywhere within the book; indeed, neither did John Stapleton’s tirade against Bob Wheaton, during which he labelled him “a man whose grave I would happily dance on”. It wasn’t 2 MG-EPILOGUE.qxd 19/04/2004 07:32 Page 3 Greg Dyke considers his next move while nursing designs on a bowl of flowers so much out of a sense of prudishness, however; more that such violent outbursts of emotion disrupted what was turning out to be a largely restrained narrative. Besides, there was still room for Lis Howell fuming about GMTV, Mike Hollingsworth attacking the ACTT, and Peter McHugh laying into more or less everyone. The interview with Greg Dyke took place roughly a year before he prematurely departed the BBC. At the time, he moaned about how much he hated “the bowl of flowers that sits between the two presenters on BBC Breakfast”, so at least he got that sorted before he left. In general, the more avuncular and generous the interviewee proved to be, the greater the disinclination to edit or omit any of their testimony. Having offered to meet up in person, Paddy Haycocks suggested he be quizzed over lunch. Once seated in a strikingly upmarket venue somewhere off Charlotte Street in London, he charitably proposed a plan for the ensuing discussion: “We’ll talk for ten minutes, then order, then talk for another ten minutes, then eat.” In fact, the talking continued unabated right through the food and the ensuing, hugely charitable, two hours of his time. He’d even brought along a carefully preserved folder containing archive Channel 4 Daily billings from TV Times, photos from 3 MG-EPILOGUE.qxd 19/04/2004 07:32 Page 4 a somewhat bawdy Streetwise night out, and the famous promotional toothbrush, still in its clear plastic presentation box. A great deal of Haycocks’ inspired reminiscence made it into the finished version of Morning Glory. But alongside tales of conceiving the “chest nappy”, mounting frustration at taping a topical daily magazine programme 18 hours before transmission, and receiving correspondence from underworld gangsters, there wasn’t quite room for just how he ended up next to Debbie Greenwood in Streetwise’s art-deco-meets-hub- caps studio. “Michael Atwell was presented with 19 potential male presenters,” he recalled, “and we were all screen-tested in the backyard of a used car lot. We had to do an improvised piece talking to a car salesman. It might sound terribly incestuous, but I’d known Michael from the past when I worked at London Weekend. But when I got the job, somebody obviously said, ‘He looks so suburban, so Croydon; turn him into a Channel 4 presenter.’ This involved the following. First of all they sent me, with a producer-director to accompany me almost like a minder, to a salon where I had to spend two and a half hours while they chopped my hair and converted it into a slightly punky sticking-up look. This was a Channel 4 haircut. I thought it looked dreadful. “Then I was walked into a couple of quite fashionable shops nearby. They bought me two jackets and a suit, the like of which I would never have worn or chosen myself, but this was what I had to have with the haircut. To complete the makeover, they said: ‘Your eyelashes are too light; they don’t work on camera. You can’t keep having mascara, so we want you to dye them.’ So I was taken into a department store to the women’s cosmetic counter, and had to lie down while they vegetable-dyed my eyelashes black. I was left with Quentin Crisp tarty eyelashes. I had three propositions on the train on the way home that night.” Unlike everyone else who agreed to talk about the Channel 4 Daily – Michael Atwell, Carol Barnes and David Lloyd – Paddy Haycocks recalled working on the service with unabashed fondness and good humour.