Breakfast Time
Selina Scott joined nice "uncle" Frank Bough on BBC1's Breakfast
Time at 6.30am on 17 January 1983 . Along with ITV's Good
Morning Britain it was one of the first breakfast shows on
British television.
Helped by a £25,000 government grant for computer equipment, the
BBC won the race to start first but never in the history of
breakfast was more egg left on more famous faces in fewer weeks than
with the start of breakfast television.
To say there were teething problems would be to underestimate the
financial and personal wars that ensued . . .
An avuncular Frank Bough in a jumper and a tangled-tongued Selina
Scott - a smooth-as-silk Princess Diana clone in grey nanny dresses
with severe white collars - were the anchor persons on the Breakfast
Time red leather sofa, introducing items which included a horse
race, cricket and pearl fishing.
During the five weekdays Nick Ross added gravitas as a
co-presenter, but the bigger stars were a skinny blonde in a lurid
green body-stocking, Diana Moran the 'Green Goddess' of exercise,
bubbly Russell Grant who babbled about the stars (the celestial type
not the Hollywood type), and Francis Wilson the whimsical weatherman
who told us everything we did not need to know.
Two weeks later TV-AM began its "mission to explain" -
as Peter Jay had called it when a team of five celebrities (David
Frost, Michael Parkinson, Robert Kee, Angela Rippon and Anna Ford)
won the franchise - with Good Morning Britain.
Selina left Breakfast Time in 1987, and in 1988 moved to
work in America, moaning that she had never been taken seriously.
Frank Bough left in November 1987 then retired from television after
a Sunday newspaper shattered his wholesome image by revealing his
one-time drug use.
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