Early doors at the GB News breakfast show yesterday, Darren McCaffrey had a stark warning for his viewers: “My word! It’s not looking great.”
Darren was simply introducing the weather forecast, but he could just as easily have been talking about the channel itself.
Following a fairly healthy start ratings-wise on Sunday evening, the figures have dropped so alarmingly it looks like GBN’s brash and boastful main man Andrew Neil is about to have the rug pulled from under him.
Still, I guess that would make a change from having it glued to the top of him.
I wouldn’t say the first five days have been a complete disaster, but for anyone who criticised the BBC for not immediately cutting back to the studio when Christian Eriksen collapsed at the weekend, GBN has provided a daily example of the dangers of going live to the nation when you are clearly not ready to do so.
The microphones have rarely worked a full shift, the lighting has been patchy at best and the on-screen captions have been riddled with inaccuracies.
Plus, unlike one or two of the line-toeing presenters, the phonelines appear to have minds of their own.
As for the studios, where do I start? The interview studio appears to have been set up inside a sound-proofed shipping container, which makes the head-to-head chats look like a strange cross between the interrogations on SAS: Who Dares Wins and a job interview at an Amazon warehouse.
For the main studio, GBN appears to have taken over a fancy coffee shop (Central Berk?) and left a load of random mugs strewn around the place (NB. I’m talking about the drinking vessels, not the presenters).
While sympathising with the poor GBN shipmates, I must admit the cock-ups and calamities have made for brilliant entertainment in between the football matches.
Had the finest comedy minds in Britain been charged with creating a sitcom based on the ill-fated launch of a news channel they would have struggled to write and stage something this consistently hilarious.
And that was before the viewers started calling in with silly made-up names, and the form tutors – sorry, presenters – started admonishing them live on air.
If only GBN could stay exactly like this, I would carry on watching it forever.
Sadly, I fear the teething issues will soon be ironed out and the prank callers will, ironically, have their free speech restricted.
At which point, GBN will become what it was always going to become: Just another news channel in an ocean of white noise news channels.
Whereupon, I will write a letter to Andrew Neil to tell him he has lost another viewer.
And sign it “Yours, Hugh Janticlimax.”
