Julia Davis is to star in a new Channel 4 sitcom about a failing breakfast TV show in which any resemblance to real-life programmes past or present is presumably entirely coincidental.
Morning Has Broken will feature Davis as Gail Sinclair, the “Queen of Daytime” and star of Good Morning … with Gail Sinclair.
The six-part series, which is expected to echo the dark humour of Davis’s previous series, such as BBC3’s Nighty Night and Sky Atlantic’s Hunderby, takes up the story after eight years of high ratings and awards when the audience drifts away and tensions break out within the production team.
Channel 4 has not had a dedicated breakfast programme since the ill-fated RI:SE was axed in 2003, filling the slot with repeats of US sitcoms such as Frasier.
ITV’s breakfast troubles are more recent, with Good Morning Britain, fronted by Susanna Reid – the broadcaster’s big-money signing from the BBC – replacing the short-lived Daybreak earlier this year.
Morning Has Broken was one of a number of new Channel 4 shows announced on Tuesday including The ABC, a school-set drama that the channel hopes will echo the success of its Educating … documentary series.
The ABC, which will be set in a big northern comprehensive school, is written by actor and writer Ayub Khan Din, who wrote the film East is East, and will also mark the channel’s return to an 8pm drama slot. In recent years C4 dramas have tended to air at 9pm or 10pm.
Other new shows include Hunted, in which a group of volunteers will “go on the run” to try to avoid detection by the UK surveillance state, described as “part documentary, part thriller”; and the observational documentary The Massage Parlour, about the UK’s “only female-owned massage parlour”.
