In December, Susanna Reid was protesting lifelong loyalty to the BBC. “If you cut me open I would bleed BBC... the BBC runs through me like a stick of rock”, she said, not a simile she’d got quite right perhaps.
Now she says: “It’s time to start a new stick of rock.” Still not quite working, that one.
ITV’s Daybreak, launched in 2010, averaged only half as many viewers as the BBC breakfast show, no matter how much they changed the presenters and the colour of the sofa.
Its replacement Good Morning Britain, launched today, is modelled on US shows and boasts no fewer than four presenters, sitting in proper white leather chairs around a table.
Immediately, it’s clear: four’s too many. They can’t all easily interact at once and, for all the pretend-friend grinning and casually scattered mugs, it’s slightly intimidating for the viewer. It’s almost like being interviewed by the board.
To add to the new, more serious air, individual interviews are conducted in a kind of break-out area, in upright orange chairs. Only after an hour did a sofa appear — a tasteful, non-slumpy white circular sofa, but still a sofa.
The content remains relentlessly poppy: Paul O’Grady, a One Direction promo video, an idiotic spin-the-wheel cash game from a food market in Leeds as the main outside broadcast, faux-familiarity with George Clooney from horrific Hollywood correspondent Ross King, and a much repeated story about a family with so many children they get through two boxes of cereal every day. But, sandwiched as it is by Jeremy Kyle repeats (“even if the baby’s mine, I’ll never get back with you!”), what else to expect?
Voted 96th in FHM’s 100 sexiest women list in 2013, Susanna had been promising chemistry, not physics, with hunky co-presenter Ben Shephard.
When she fluffed a line about a One Direction single having gone to number something, Ben stepped in and said it was number one. “That’s chemistry!”, she improvised.
So now we know. It was unfortunate the grim lead news story today about a house fire in Sheffield was first reported only by phone, so that the camera had to hold Susanna’s face as she listened with a concerned look — a bit of a tilt and a mouth-gnaw, not her best. Never mind. This was a pretty confident start with her new stick of rock.
