I am not, I will admit, a breakfast TV sort of person. The primary colours and endless jollity traditionally favoured by television in the early hours have always been, to my mind, an affront to all that is decent and proper. I’ll keep the TV off, the curtains drawn and have Radio 4 on at a low murmur, if it’s all the same to you. But, because it’s good to mix things up (and because I was told to), over the last few weeks I have braved the carnival of controversy that is Good Morning Britain (Weekdays, 6am, ITV). I have done this every morning through a mist of tears, while biting down on a stick to muffle the screaming.
In this case, it’s not the dazzling sets, the zany “light” segments and the relentlessly upbeat weather reports that have pushed me over the edge; in fact, all these things have brought merciful relief. The source of my agony is Piers Morgan, a man so ghastly that even America packaged him up and sent him back with a note saying: “Keep him. He’s yours.”
It seems the more he is bounced from one show to another, the more bullying and cartoonishly grotesque he becomes. Now he has taken to yelling at guests as they try in vain to finish a sentence. On his quieter days, they will get roughly eight seconds to make their point before he starts hurling insults and barking like an elephant seal. Witness him huffing and frothing at the trans model and campaigner Munroe Bergdorf recently, and reducing what should have been a thoughtful and nuanced debate about white privilege and racism to: “How dare you insult ME? ME ME ME ME ME ME MEEEEEE!” A few days later, GMB’s bookers saw fit to invite suited corpse Jacob Rees-Mogg to air his grimly reactionary views on abortion and gay marriage, perhaps because he’s the only man in Britain able to make Morgan look vaguely reasonable.
Morgan’s early-morning scenery chewing is, of course, great news for GMB’s bosses, who have seen a spike in ratings and round-the-clock bonfires on social media, many of them stoked by Morgan himself who, in the reversal of the vampire trope, starts to smoke and shrivel whenever the light moves off him. It’s not such good news for A&E departments that, one assumes, have experienced a surge in Morgan-induced aneurysms. It’s a wonder that his co-presenter Susanna Reid wasn’t carted off long ago, driven to distraction by his incessant foghorn condescension. Still, Reid’s expression is currently less “surrendered wife” than “woman biding her time”. We shouldn’t be surprised if one day, in the not-too-distant future, the cameras zoom in to find her sitting beatifically next to Morgan’s head skewered on a pole.
Ultimately, with Morgan’s pointlessly combative questioning and world-gone-mad rants, Good Morning Britain doesn’t feel much like breakfast TV at all. There’s precious little jollity among the presenters and guests here, more gritted teeth and a “let’s see if we can make it to 8.30am without anyone crying” resolve. There was a time when breakfast telly, with its bland yet jolly presenters, terrible sweaters and sunshiney motifs, was about easing viewers into the day. In Morgan’s sweaty hands, it’s about getting them up, slapping them about a bit and sending them off to work with a black eye. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m going back to bed.