The Big Breakfast seems clearly to be aimed primarily at a teenage and child audience and contains many features typical of youth T.V.

Programmes aimed at this audience try to avoid boredom at all costs and therefore the mise-en-scene is immediately surprising especially when it is seen in comparison with the more traditional GMTV breakfast show. In fact much that we see on the screen could be seen as a parody of ITV. In the ITV programme we are presented with a "typical" middle class living room which is in fact too perfectly neat and tidy, in contrast, everything in the Big Breakfast house is deliberate clutter- papers scattered around on the table, flowers in the sink etc. Instead of the tasteful pastel shades used on ITV the walls of the living room are painted in lurid colours and decorated with exaggerated cartoon eggs. ITV is trying to wake you up slowly, the Big Breakfast clearly wants to surprise you with deliberately tasteless connotations. The same kind of Mise-en-scene is seen in the news broadcast where each brief news item is accompanied by a change of colour and a tabloid style headline suitable for what they imagine to be the short attention spans of their audience. As well as the main presenters, we are also shown many other people. Included amongst these are camera crew and other staff of the programme who in most other shows would remain behind the scenes. The audience are given the impression that the show is like a big party where anyone can join in.

The presenters chosen fit in with the warm, friendly and anarchic connotations created by this atmosphere. The leading male presenter is lively and affable and his Australian accent brings with it associations of matiness as personified in the past by Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee and by the popular Castlemaine XXXX adverts. The female presenter acts slightly as a contrast to him by being calmer and more sympathetic than he is. All of the presenters dress casually, making them seem more similar to their audience than the suit-wearing ITV hosts.

Visually like much "youth T.V," the show is very fast moving. The cameras move from shot to shot frequently and a feeling of good natured amateurishness is also created by the frequent use of hand held cameras. If, for example, the presenter makes a point about the newspapers, the hand-held camera will zoom in manually on what he is talking about just like the audience at home would lean over to see it if they were there in the room. On a couple of occasions, to add to the humour, sound effects and visual gags are used- a French flag is waved when they talk about France for example and a deep voice over is used to announce the "Boy with balls" None of these is particularly funny on its own, but they are fast moving and add to the atmosphere of chaos in the studio. The producers presumably hope that the amateur nature of all of this will not be a problem for their media-aware audience, but in fact will be refreshing for them after the over-slick shows they are all too used to.

With a show this fast moving and this apparently without structure it can be easy to imagine that it has been thrown together without thought. In fact it is likely that to achieve this chaos, the team behind the programme need to be even more organised and professional than those on more "adult" shows- throughout the section we watched it was clear they were keeping to very strict time limits, receiving constant instructions through their earpieces.

I have mentioned earlier the idea that the show makes implied comparisons with other examples of the Breakfast show genre. In fact, much of the appeal of the show to this particular audience is in the way it plays with our genre expectations. The age group being targeted is probably the most sophisticated in terms of its recognition of different television genres and therefore they will be able to pick up many references. As well as parodying the traditions of Breakfast T.V. Lily Savage with her Liverpudlian accent and her talk of "bacon butties" seems like a refugee from a warped version of Brookside. The two pop stars present in this episode are gently mocked as the presenters do an imitation of their dance from their latest video and even the news acts as a mocking version of a more traditional broadcast.

So with all this parody going on, the audience at home is being presented with a show that is most easily understood in terms of what it is not. Not like the other breakfast shows, not full of sickly sweet presenters, or boring professional ones, not serious or calming. It can be more difficult, however to discuss what the show is doing. On ITV for example it is fairly clear that what the audience is being given is a representation of themselves on the screen- or an ideal version of themselves. The two main presenters are like idealised parents, always patient ,always smiling and sitting in an idealised middle class dream home straight out of an IKEA catalogue. Obviously the big Breakfast is not like that, but what representation of everyday life are we being presented with?

Firstly in the section that we saw there were some apparent gender specific roles- the man tended to dominate when the two presenters were together and was also the funnier of the two. However, there are less traditional representations of family life present- the presence of a man in drag is an obvious one but more subtly the most direct intrusion of the audience into the show was not traditional- the family of the week was a mixed race couple who had been to Glastonbury. Despite the presenter making fun of their "trendiness", this family were clearly selected by the producers of the programme because they were in some way "alternative"

Steve Baker

1/10/96