Pipeline: Channel Ten’s Breakfast Show

"...and some pretty blonde woman". Image: Sweded.

After consolidating its current affairs schedule (read: ditching Negus for an hour of Dave, Carrie and Charlie on what’s now described as The Project), Ten is about to leap into the breakfast market. Will it be worth changing your trusted morning proxy mum and dad team?

A Channel Ten breakfast show was suggested by number one son, Lachlan Murdoch, back in July. According to that Australian article, Murdoch told staff he was restructuring due to an “increasingly crowded and increasingly competitive” television market. So he thought he’d crowd the viciously competitive early morning slot.

He went hard from the start, saying he wanted Nine star Karl Stefanovic to defect from Nine to Ten’s new show (as a drinking buddy, maybe?) and was also searching for a “lively and contentious” host like Andrew Bolt, even though Sunday morning’s The Bolt Report show has been a poor performer.

So who did Ten announce a month later? None other than hunky 7PM Project regular Dr Andrew Rochford. He’s done an admirable job helming that desk before, and has the same fine balance of “agreeable” and “sober” that we see in ABC News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland (another show that started gently elbowing its way into the Sunrise/Today duopoly last May by moving to ABC1). So far, so good, so safe.

Then Murdoch went full-Patton last week, blazing his guns that Ten is not merely throwing a spoiler show into the gummy-eyed market by proclaiming, “We’re going to be in the space for the next decade.” Murdoch said the show (dubbed by the media as AM at this stage) would be “very different” to the tremendously fluffy ratings powerhouses from Seven and Nine. Granted, Ten gave the different, meditative Negus a fair shot against the Current Affair/Today Tonight comsumer shockfest. Sadly, that didn’t stick. You’ll go broke overestimating the general public and all.

Enter Sarah Murdoch. And an equally beige new suggested title: Breakfast. An “industry insider” whispered to Digital Spy that the Australia’s Next Top Model host would be one of a range of rotating heads and likely the most desirable person in the country to wake up next to. Of course, Lachlan likes her. She had a crack co-hosting Today with Karl four years ago too. And he obviously likes him. But does Lachlan want his beloved leaving the house at three every morning?

Others who had reportedly screen-tested or been considered include a range of un/familiar names/faces: Magdalena Roze, weekend news host Matt Doran (last seen with Natarsha Belling), someone called Kathryn Robins, and 7PM Project guest and Ten reporter Natasha Exelby.

Then, over the weekend, the Bolt factor kicked in as controversial Kiwi broadcaster Paul Henry blurted on New Zealand radio that he’s being paid a sweet million (in NZ dollars, sadly for him) to be the host of the show. Ten confirmed that it’ll be wholesome-as-milk Rochford, loose-lipped Paul Henry, and an as-yet-unnamed, probably gorgeous woman around the breakfast table.

Don’t know Henry? Ten’s chief programming officer, David Mott, called him “cheeky, mischievous and unapologetically forthright” in a press release.

That translates to: calling homosexuality “unnatural”, mocking facial hair on a female Greenpeace worker during an interview, dubbing Susan Boyle “retarded”, questioning the nationality of his country’s Governor-General because his parents are of Indian descent, and renaming New Delhi’s chief minister Sheila Dikshit as, obviously, “that dip shit woman” and “dick shit”, which he said was appropriate “because she’s Indian, so she’d be dick-in-shit wouldn’t she. Do you know what I mean?”

There was delicious poetic justice a decade back when Henry ran as the conservative National Party candidate for the seat of Wairarapa and was beaten by fellow former radio host Georgina Beyer, who then became the world’s first openly transsexual Member Of Parliament.

With this ‘Project’ talk, a Kiwi buffoon, Ten’s typical youth-targetting, and something “very different” to the current offerings, we’re going to presume it will be The AM Breakfast Bolt Project Report, accompanying your toast in 2012.

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