Snap! Crackle! Fluff!

British breakfast television is born, and the competition is keen

When British citizens straggled out of bed last week, there was something new to go with the obligatory toast and tea: morning telly. Two rival shows are making British television history by filling the screen, American-style, with news and chatter: the BBC's Breakfast Time and TV-am's combination of Daybreak plus Good Morning Britain.

Until now, the British had lived happily with only fuzz on the air in the early morning. But when the ubiquitous David Frost, leading a group of investors and television veterans, was granted a morning franchise by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) in December 1980, the BBC would be damned if it was going to be left in the dark, and it planned a rival show.

Breakfast Time was the first to arrive, on Jan. 17. A relaxed, rather modest and determinedly cheery program lasting from 6:30a.m. to 9a.m., it features a mix of news stories, interviews and the amiable atmosphere of a Sunday brunch. Says Editor Ron Neil: "You cannot machine-gun people with information at that time in the morning." The program massages them with it instead. The hosts (modestly called presenters, not anchors) are the avuncular Frank Bough, a veteran of the British sports program Grandstand, and the fetching Princess Di lookalike, Selina Scott, whose alluring television manner may heat up cold winter mornings. But the hit of the first show was the "Green Goddess," a supple Valkyrie named Diana Moran, clad in green leotards, who gently bullied bemused and bleary-eyed commuters at Waterloo Station into shaping up and stretching out on the spot.

The commercial network's entry, headed by Peter Jay, a former British Ambassador to the U.S., arrived Feb. 1 with enough razzle-dazzle to cause some sleepy viewers to pull a pillow over their heads. TV-am produces a glitzy transplant of American morning television, slicker and faster-paced than its placid competitor. TV-am's morning programs have an annual budget of $12.4 million, as opposed to Breakfast Time's $9 million. According to Jay, TV-am's task is "to demystify the news." But as of the inaugural week the direction of the program was still obscure.

The first hour, called Daybreak, was predominantly devoted to a rapid-fire rendition of major news stories. The next 2 1/4 hr., titled Good Morning Britain, presented by Frost and the sloe-eyed former Independent Television News (ITN) newscaster Anna Ford, featured interviews averaging five minutes each and lighter fare. The first week showed Frost, cheeky and condescending as usual, performing such tasks as reading bloopers from the morning papers. Frost and Ford will also be hosts on a semiregular feature called Through the Keyhole, in which a probing TV-am reporter rummages around the home of a celebrity, psychoanalyzing the star from the decor and belongings, while Frost, Ford and the invaded subject watch and chuckle away in the studio.

Both shows are challenging more than just the British suspicion that television in the morning is faintly decadent. Less than half the population rises before 7, and British television sets are not generally in the kitchen. Moreover, the morning ritual of breakfast and BBC Radio 4 remains sacred for many. So far, the reviews have been mixed and ratings inconclusive. One day last week more than 5 million people watched morning television, many of them sampling the inaugural broadcast of the new show. A gastronome once claimed that to eat well in England one should have breakfast three times a day. It remains to be seen whether British breakfast TV proves tasty enough to try even once a morning. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.