All Our Yesterdays
Article dated: Thursday 23 May 2002
Breakfast Time
We waited years in Britain for a breakfast time TV programme, and then, like London buses, two of them arrived together. The BBC was just ahead of TV-AM, hitting the ground running a fortnight before its commercial rival. While TV-AM floundered, looking for a credible proposition and initially aiming far too high with Peter Jay's "mission to explain", the BBC had no such problem. It's image was ready made. It was Radio Times; middle-brow, middle-class, middle-England, fronted by comfy presenters in comfy knitwear, the kind of people you could actually imagine answering those ads for greenhouses they used to carry in the back of the RT.
The willowy and occasionally delightfully distracted Selina Scott was a big draw in the early days, but there was no hint of sexual chemistry between her and her co-presenter, the avuncular (pre-tabloid) Frank Bough. Other presenters included Russell Grant, reading horoscopes, Francis Wilson, the weatherman who was something of a sex symbol for a short while, Diana Moran, the so-called Green Goddess of keep fit, and David Icke, who presented sport. Knowing what we now know about Bough and Icke, it is a mystery it became such a bland programme, which later had its bottom smacked (in the non-Bough sense) by both TV-AM and the Big Breakfast.
