I have never cared for breakfast TV. It's usually due to the fact that I associate it with being woken up before I am ready to meet the day. As I work in the evenings I seldom need to get up in time for a typical 6am show, nor do I see the need to record it for when I do rise. I quit teaching secondary school mathematics three years ago now and I am still elated that I don't need to set an alarm to get up. Life was pretty sweet, I had it made, right? Then I went and spoiled it all by getting a girlfriend. I no longer have the bed to myself which is something I can live with as I relish the opportunity to roll over and 'star fish' in the bed upon her early morning exit much to her chagrin. As I'm a stand-up comedian I "only work for an hour a night" and it's "not a real job" which makes it that much more satisfying when she begins the morning ritual of *sleep, snooze, shout, snooze, scream, snooze, scream louder, gets out of bed, thinks about going back to sleep*. But there's one thing she does to make that 6-7:30am time slot as painfully uncomfortable as possible; she puts the TV on. Worse, she puts the morning news breakfast show on. Good lord. It's bright, it's loud, it feels like the news presenters are in your bed and asking you to move over as they take more than their fair share of the blanket. I can't help but passively take in whatever the half-hearted topic of the day may be or worse fall back to sleep and allow the content of the show to infiltrate my dream.
All of a sudden I'm a parent and I'm complaining about there not being enough spaces to park when I drop my 17 children off in my 7-seater. I guess I'd have to make 6 trips in total for that so I'm now arguing with some environmentalist who thinks I shouldn't have any children and should walk everywhere. Any sort of TV debate for that matter is quite pointless, the fashionable strategy seems to favour getting two opposites of extreme views and let them talk at each other for 5 minutes just as the programme talks at you. "Let us know what you think", so we can do absolutely nothing about it as we need to fill 4 hours every day, so invent issues and create arguments. It's essentially opinions for people who don't have them. I can almost imagine someone watching, leaping out of their seat in agreement on a "Do we as parents rely on our parents too much to look after our children when we go to work so in theory are watching this debate as we are in the middle of getting up for work dropping our kids off at their grandparents' house?" and exclaiming "that's it! That's the opinion I'm going with today, I'll bring it up at work and will make sure I get my point in". These debates (that grandparents one was a real one so let's go with that) never seem to go anywhere, they raise useless statistics such as "£8 billion was spent on children last year by Grandparents". What's that? What's it in comparison to? How much was the year before? What are the projected figures for next year? Who cares? Doesn't matter, let's just drop a buzz phrase like "significant impact", Segway into a sister debate on affordable childcare. Tomorrow it's "Should holiday companies be allowed to raise prices when children are off school or should kids go on holiday to their grandparents for 2 weeks?" Let's finish this off with an informal "chat" between the two hosts:
Host A "Well my kids LOVE their grandparents' Sheppard's Pie"
Host B "Why's that?"
Host A "Because oh, I'm a terrible cook!"
Host A, Host B & the boom mic guy "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.......AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
Then it's usually time for the most vacuous part of the show if that was at all possible; the celebrity correspondent guy. He tells us that John Barrowman is being deaf for a day and Ringo Star is doing something.
These debates, issues, phone in's, emails and tweets are all just intended to make us angry and distract us until the next stupid thing happens or is invented. They'll never run out either, people are always doing stupid things and there's plenty foe-topics on the breakfast TV shelf should anyone be having a slow news day, week, month or year.
Take nothing away from this, this hasn't helped or hindered your day in any way. It's hopefully left you as underwhelmed as I feel when 7:30am comes around, my girlfriend leaves, turns the TV off and am too irritated to sleep. At least reading this is shorter than watching one of these shows so I've saved you a bit time if nothing else. Remember to tweet in too, so I can do absolutely nothing about it.