Tvam- Timeslot

[James Martin]

Repeats of Wacaday dated back to the start of the run in 1985. TV May-Hem with a young Chris Evans was also quickly canned and they created the strand "Cartoon Carinval" (with continuity voiced by Kenny Everett ISTR) which they used to put out any cartoons they had in the library.

The news department was outsourced to Sky at this point.

They were doing a lot of "worthy" stuff to try and win hearts and minds in 1991 and their audience fell off around 25% as a result - once on death row all that was scrapped virtually overnight, they went back to crude populism and the ratings recovered the final year.

I know he's a much maligned character, but I can't blame Gyngell for going into "what are the ITC gonna do" mode, which I think all the companies did to a degree. Greg Dyke, then at LWT, himself said on TV Weekly that "you maketh the bare minimum and try and derive as much profit from the time you have left."

Thames were equally guilty, ending production of both Rainbow and Rod Jane and Freddy in 1991, and putting out repeats of both shows during 1992.

Of course it was an inferior service, but that's business. Gyngell's responsibility in the final 14 months was to derive as much profit for shareholders as possible.
Nothing more, nothing less. The company is on death row, what are the ITC gonna do, revoke the license?

And to be fair to BG, he knew how much the license was realistically worth, he knew what worked and what didn't... and really he was proved right. GMTV had to go cap in hand to the ITC to lower payments, change their programme requirements, and had to bring in Greg Dyke to basically relaunch it as TV-AM just a few months in.

Which of course then happened to Daybreak as well.

[Neil Jones]

February 1992 IIRC they sold the news output to Sky, and then the 1992 election came along three months later, so they had to cover it naturally, as cheaply as possible. Which they did.

Of course by the time they knew they'd lost their licence in 1991, it was simply a case of run it for peanuts and laugh all the way to the bank. The group accounts up to the end of December 1992 are @ Companies House here - turnover £87m for 1992 with a profit of £32m.

Gyngell still peeing and moaning about the 1990 act three years later in his director's statement in the final (TV-am as a broadcaster) statement.

[James2001]

To be fair, it feels like you can't blame him. If the franchise round was done on merit, it's hard to see how TV-am could possibly have lost unless one of the other applicants really were exceptional.

And he was right that Sunrise/GMTV bid too much seeing as they had to go running to the ITC a couple of years in and got their payments cut to less than TV-am bid.

One of the casualties of the franchise loss was that TV Mayhem, Chris Evans' Saturday Morning show, was axed after merely 6 weeks instead of the 40 it was commissioned for, and TV-am just went to cheap presenterless linking for kids shows. I guess if TV-am had won their licence, Chris might never have gone onto the Big Breakfast.

If you watch the TV news reports from new years 1993 about the franchise change, you'll see Lis Howell on several of them talking about how great GMTV will be, in reality she was one of the first people to go when they went into disaster nearly straight away.

[James Martin]

Yes, but as I stated Kenny Everett did CAs for Cartoon Carnival as a weird animated TV character. TV May-Hem was supposed to be the first major vehicle for Chris Evans. Of course, it all turned out alright for him in the end.

GMTV was heavily crippled by the fact The Big Breakfast had launched a few months previously and when TV-AM went, Channel 4 hoovered up. The franchise proposals were, of course, made without the knowledge that The Big Breakfast would ever happen.

[Neil Jones]

GMTV was heavily crippled by the fact The Big Breakfast had launched a few months previously and when TV-AM went, Channel 4 hoovered up. The franchise proposals were, of course, made without the knowledge that The Big Breakfast would ever happen.

Well, yes that and the fact they tried to reinvent the format which drove ratings through the floor so they had to revert back to what TV-am had been doing and pretty much copy it ad-verbatim in all but name. Mr Motivator was clearly a copy of Lizzie Webb for a start, plus Lorraine Kelly had come over as well despite crying her eyes out on the final TV-am show.

I dare say by the time GMTV stopped cloning TV-am you could have just stuck the original logo on it and nobody would have been any the wiser.

[James Martin]

There was actually a significant number of behind the scenes staff who joined GMTV from TV-AM. I think even Mike "Gutted" Morris joined GMTV for a bit.

[Robertclark125]

Couple of queries about the decision in 1992, to contract the news service to Sky; Firstly, how much did TV-am pay Sky? Secondly, was it TV-am's reporters, but working now with Sky, or was it Sky's reporters?

[Inspector Sands]

Couple of queries about the decision in 1992, to contract the news service to Sky; Firstly, how much did TV-am pay Sky? Secondly, was it TV-am's reporters, but working now with Sky, or was it Sky's reporters?

I don't think the first bit will be publicly available knowledge.
I think they used mostly TVam reporters and Lisa Aziz continued to present. Lisa and a few of the TVam reporters such as Geoff Meade stayed at Sky after TVam closed

[Jexedback]

I didn’t realise at the time, but Lisa Aziz and the TV-am news set was moved over to Sky HQ when the news was outsourced. On the last programme she talks about getting a bike across to be back at Camden Lock after the last bulletin.

If I recall correctly in the Morning Glory book, it states that Gyngell and Michael Grade had talks about transferring the TV-am programmes to Channel 4 after they lost their franchise. Presumably they considered becoming an independent production company in their post franchise loss discussions.

I’d love to see it but I hear their ‘91 franchise application was very worthy with features that would have been a ratings bomb especially with the Big Breakfast.
I’m sure their news would have been outsourced as a cost saving at some point if they’d won anyway, despite being the nominated provider for Frost/Branson failed CPV-TV bids for London, South and Anglia.

[Neil Jones]

Ah, the infamous CPV-TV pitch, which put all their eggs in one basket for news with no provision for what would happen if TV-am (who would provide that news them for them) didn't survive. Classic schoolboy error. Element of cockiness maybe? "we're brilliant, we're making a fortune, how can we not lose?" Oops.

[James2001]

I’d love to see it but I hear their ‘91 franchise application was very worthy with features that would have been a ratings bomb especially with the Big Breakfast.

Not that they would have stuck to any of it in the long, or even medium, term anyway, like pretty much anything else the winners in that franchise round promised.

[Steve Williams]

Didn't Gyngell ditch regional ads in any case due to the cost and man hours involved in putting the breaks together (a team which had their own night shift?)

I'm not sure that would be the case, I think Gyngell would have wanted to make as much money as possible for the last year and you would obviously benefit from selling more than one set of ads.

In the Independent Television in Britain book, which discusses the franchise round in some depth, there's a bit about TSW who put in an enormous bid, and Harry Turner, the Chief Executive, said they justified that by suggesting they'd contract absolutely everything out so you'd be left with a newsroom and ad sales and that would be enough to run the channel (although that sounds so far removed from the original TSW you wonder why they were even bothering). But ads would be the last thing you'd get rid of.

Steve Williams has commented on this before so can hopefully clarify, but I think in the summer of 1992 they were showing Wacadays from 1987?! The repeats were early at weekends to be fair, but like most live TV- by its very nature- clearly wasn’t designed to ever be shown again...let alone several years later.

Yes, this was in the autumn of 1992, they were repeats from the summer of 1987 and they showed them at 6.30 on Sunday mornings. I got into the habit of watching them as well, because it was quite interesting to see "old" stuff like this which, as you say, was never made to repeat with all the competitions you couldn't enter and all the references to pop music and films from 1987 which seemed a million years ago at the time. I don't know how far through the run they got but they showed them once a week, so that meant it took five weeks to see the whole of the Gobots cartoon they used to strip across the week.

The Wiki page suggests new episodes of Wacaday continued up until the demise of TV-am (of course, the Wide Awake Club had ended back in 1990). I've had a quick look at my Radio Times back issues and it did indeed run throughout the summer of 1992, but seemingly not in the October half term, and at Christmas it was mostly cartoons in the Wacaday slot, but they did something called Timmy Mallett's Utterly Brilliant Christmas Show on Christmas Day and Boxing Day which was presumably just Wacaday under another name, and on 28th December they actually bill Wacaday, which would have been the last one ever, although I assume both shows were pretty much the same.

Here's the weekend TV-am line-up as seen in the Radio Times of 17th-23rd October 1992...
Saturday
6.00 A View of Britain
6.30 Top Banana (presumably these were repeats by now)
7.30 The Junglies
7.35 Widget
8.00 Dink The Little Dinosaur
8.15 Captain Planet
8.40 Captain N
9.05 Doug
All the shows from 7.30 were, as mentioned, under the Cartoon World banner.

Sunday
6.00 Zoo Family
6.30 Wacaday
7.15 Nellie The Elephant
7.30 Dappledown Farm (again, probably repeats)
7.55 Thought for Sunday with Rowanne Pasco
8.00 Even on Sunday (it used to be Frost from September to June and then Maya Even in the summer, but I think this year there was no equivalent show in the summer and Even from September to December, with Frost returning for one last show on the last Sunday)
9.00 Saved By The Bell (which of course moved to C4 in January 1993)
And the RT points out that Jennifer Pearsall was introducing the programmes, and there's a picture of her too.

To be fair, it feels like you can't blame him. If the franchise round was done on merit, it's hard to see how TV-am could possibly have lost unless one of the other applicants really were exceptional.

One of the casualties of the franchise loss was that TV Mayhem, Chris Evans' Saturday Morning show, was axed after merely 6 weeks instead of the 40 it was commissioned for, and TV-am just went to cheap presenterless linking for kids shows. I guess if TV-am had won their licence, Chris might never have gone onto the Big Breakfast.

As Evans says in his book, TV Mayhem was another spin on what they'd been doing on Power Up on The Power Station. I remember him being inteviewed in Look-In at the time, saying he wore the same clothes every week to look like a cartoon character, and when they did the pilot they did the Wacky Weekend Weather, which was basically an excuse to throw buckets of water over his co-host (and later big cheese behind the camera) Gary Monaghan, only to find that the studio floor was painted with water-based paint and it all dissolved under their feet. Evans also points out in his book that they went to the meeting to tell them they'd been axed with a lawyer, and even though they didn't make the other 34 episodes, they were paid for them all.

As Morning Glory points out, there were plenty of reasons why TV-am could have lost on merit, and it quotes William Phillips of Broadcast saying it was at risk because it made more money than was "diplomatic", it did so by making programmes that were noticeably cheap, and it was "populist without being particularly popular". It certainly was coining it in, but you certainly never saw much evidence of that on screen, even as a kid I could see that TV-am's programmes were incredibly low budget. If the aim of an ITV franchise was to make tonnes of money for its shareholders, then yes, TV-am was a very successful company, but you would hope the ITC would aim a bit higher.

There was actually a significant number of behind the scenes staff who joined GMTV from TV-AM. I think even Mike "Gutted" Morris joined GMTV for a bit.

Yes, he did - he took over the Sunday show in the spring of 1993 after Eamonn Holmes moved to the other days of the week, back when there was a live GMTV on Sundays. He was there for about a year, but the ITC were making noises that GMTV's news coverage was crap, so they added a load more news to the show, Morris found it all a bit relentless and quit, and it became a fullyfledged news programme with Alastair Stewart.

Ah, the infamous CPV-TV pitch, which put all their eggs in one basket for news with no provision for what would happen if TV-am (who would provide that news them for them) didn't survive. Classic schoolboy error. Element of cockiness maybe? "we're brilliant, we're making a fortune, how can we not lose?" Oops.

I looked at the CPV-TV pitch a while back, it was very bad - and of course they actually bid for three franchise areas, with the bids for the South and East being exactly the same, but with "London" scribbled out and "Southampton" and "Norwich" scribbled in. Of course Frost wasn't too downhearted when they lost to Carlton, as he immediately signed up to do a show for Carlton.

[Steve in Pudsey]

In those last few months, TV-am would have been selling ads for the Big Breakfast I guess? Can't have done any harm to that final profit

[nwtv2003]

In those last few months, TV-am would have been selling ads for the Big Breakfast I guess? Can't have done any harm to that final profit

Indeed they would have, I’ve read somewhere that the ratings for the breakfast slot had doubled by the end of the Big Breakfast’s first week on air.

At this point even TV-am didn’t care, the below clip from 2:00 in even has a promotion for the programme a whole fortnight before it began.

https://youtu.be/MXLWEbsa8fM

[Markymark]

In those last few months, TV-am would have been selling ads for the Big Breakfast I guess? Can't have done any harm to that final profit

Indeed they would have, I’ve read somewhere that the ratings for the breakfast slot had doubled by the end of the Big Breakfast’s first week on air.

At this point even TV-am didn’t care, the below clip from 2:00 in even has a promotion for the programme a whole fortnight before it began.

As you would expect. C4's Breakfast Slot was in effect TV-am-2, it made total sense to promote it, just as the other ITV companies promoted C4 programmes. What would have been odd was TV-am promoting daytime and evening C4 shows