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| Version 1 | Version 2 |
|---|---|
| How the Guardian saved TVAM | How the Guardian saved TVAM |
| (3 months later) | |
| I've just been invited on to BBC Radio Leeds to celebrate the 30th anniversary of breakfast TV with my Guardian colleague Martin Kelner. The reason being that he has written elsewhere that I am the man who saved TVAM | I've just been invited on to BBC Radio Leeds to celebrate the 30th anniversary of breakfast TV with my Guardian colleague Martin Kelner. The reason being that he has written elsewhere that I am the man who saved TVAM |
| Really? | Really? |
| Old men forget. But Martin's kind invitation gradually brings it all back; two weeks in the summer of 1983 when even the Sun was nonplussed that a Guardian journalist giggling nervously on the infamous sofa was the elixir for the beleaguered station. | Old men forget. But Martin's kind invitation gradually brings it all back; two weeks in the summer of 1983 when even the Sun was nonplussed that a Guardian journalist giggling nervously on the infamous sofa was the elixir for the beleaguered station. |
| Beleaguered was the word. I was in with a bit part at the very beginning, reviewing newspapers with a succession of ultimately starry presenters who suddenly started disappearing like aristocrats in Paris 1789. Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Anna Ford who threw wine over the station's boss Jonathan Aitken, Angela Rippon, who brilliantly saved me when I suddenly corpsed and couldn't remember why I was there. | Beleaguered was the word. I was in with a bit part at the very beginning, reviewing newspapers with a succession of ultimately starry presenters who suddenly started disappearing like aristocrats in Paris 1789. Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Anna Ford who threw wine over the station's boss Jonathan Aitken, Angela Rippon, who brilliantly saved me when I suddenly corpsed and couldn't remember why I was there. |
| Off went their heads; and so when Nick Owen had to take a pre-booked holiday, there were no men left at Eggcup Towers to stand in; which is why they suddenly turned to me. I was doing the Guardian Diary at the time, which is the equivalent of being self-employed. So I got up at 4am to co-present the three-hour cornflakes sesh with Anne Diamond and then went on to Guardian Towers. | Off went their heads; and so when Nick Owen had to take a pre-booked holiday, there were no men left at Eggcup Towers to stand in; which is why they suddenly turned to me. I was doing the Guardian Diary at the time, which is the equivalent of being self-employed. So I got up at 4am to co-present the three-hour cornflakes sesh with Anne Diamond and then went on to Guardian Towers. |
| It is all a blur now. Diamond, for whom the word 'perky' seemed invented; a lithe fitness woman and a severe consumer one. Wincey Willis who did the weather. I can't really remember what we talked about but there was this one shining statistic which Kelner has turned into an immortal pearl. Whatever else may be said about that fortnight, it was when TVAM's ratings rose to two million and overtook the BBC's breakfast programme for the first time. | It is all a blur now. Diamond, for whom the word 'perky' seemed invented; a lithe fitness woman and a severe consumer one. Wincey Willis who did the weather. I can't really remember what we talked about but there was this one shining statistic which Kelner has turned into an immortal pearl. Whatever else may be said about that fortnight, it was when TVAM's ratings rose to two million and overtook the BBC's breakfast programme for the first time. |
| Others credit Roland Rat and I am not going to dispute with them. It paid for a late holiday in Corsica and I got two free eggcups. But conceivably you might be interested in deciding for yourself if you can track down tapes of that awesome fortnight. Curiously, one certain source of them is also at BBC Leeds: the station's TV reporter and presenter Ian White is a TVAM anorak and runs the official archive and museum. | Others credit Roland Rat and I am not going to dispute with them. It paid for a late holiday in Corsica and I got two free eggcups. But conceivably you might be interested in deciding for yourself if you can track down tapes of that awesome fortnight. Curiously, one certain source of them is also at BBC Leeds: the station's TV reporter and presenter Ian White is a TVAM anorak and runs the official archive and museum. |
| My children used to call him 'Dad's only fan'. Such is fame. And such was the chaos of the cornflakes dawn. | My children used to call him 'Dad's only fan'. Such is fame. And such was the chaos of the cornflakes dawn. |
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