Daybreak ratings fail to impress

The ratings for ITV’s much hyped new breakfast magazine show Daybreak have failed to impress as, after just over a week on-air, they are already beginning to fall.

Much missed, GMTV and its regular faces.

“The worst thing any station can do is treat the viewers with contempt, and by not giving GMTV a farewell and treating it like an ‘outcast’ for the last few months on air then you alientate the majority of people who have tuned to ITV and enjoyed GMTV all those years. By not giving it a happy farewell there was no ‘full stop’ to the programme, and that offended viewers greatly. Whoever decided it should go out without any fanfare should never work in TV again, they clearly are clueless to viewers and how they react to popular programmes being axed.” – TV critic Vivian Summers

If you went by the comments on ATV Today regarding Daybreak then you’d get the impression the new ITV breakfast show wasn’t very popular with viewers. Since the new morning format’s launch last week – with ex-BBC presenters Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley – viewers have been posting on here in there droves complaining about the new format. One thing is quite clear – they want GMTV back.

Faces you don’t want to see at breakfast time, Daybreak’s team is a turn-off.

However, it isn’t just the comments on ATV Today, Facebook and various other internet sites that demonstrate Daybreak has failed to charm audiences. The ratings for the new programme tell that story quite clearly. Daybreak launched with narrowly more viewers than GMTV ended with – just under 1 million viewers. Last Tuesday that dropped to 900,000 and on Friday it dropped to 800,000 – and they haven’t risen since. By comparison, BBC One’s own programme Breakfast has held steady at 1.4 million viewers.

Now, of course, it is still early days for Daybreak but unless it can turn itself around very quickly and take onboard criticisms aimed at it the show will not last. So by Christmas, the format will have probably undergone its first revamp and be a little more GMTV than RI:SE.

“ITV quite deliberately allowed the press to take photographs of the GMTV signage in a skip outside the studios, if they’re not careful the press will be snapping Daybreak’s logo in said skip shortly.” – TV Critic Vivian Summers

TV-am ended with a celebration of its decade on air, with viewers accepting it was the end.