Waking up to a real breakfast

A Ccertain cereal may be touted as the breakfast of champions, but who'll lay claim to being champions of breakfast television, that is isn't yet clear. That's little surprise as Sunrise, TV3's meteorologically optimistic answer to One's Breakfast show, debuted only a month and the odd day ago. And while the ratings in the first few days hinted Breakfast might be having its new rival for lunch, it would be a brave tipster who'd predict on so small a sampling which programme will be toast.

You have to ask if it matters a toss anyway to other than the One and TV3 execs looking to make a buck from audience share. While the channels see it as a black and white game of winners and losers, for viewers it looks a win-win scenario all the way. Now we have real choice at breakfast, just as we do with the evening news and then current affairs at seven.

There's nothing like a bit of channel-hopping to keep things interesting: if by remote chance you're finding Campbell Live a little deadly or preachy, Mark Sainsbury's pretty well guaranteed to have something vaguely palatable. And if one breakfast telly co-presenter was struggling on Wednesday to look interested in what her health-professional studio guest had to say who wants meningoccal B on the menu at that time of day anyway? it was a relief to find a snappier exchange on a topic dear to many of us, the cooling of the housing boom, on the other channel. Later when TV3 was threatening to bore the pyjamas off us, there was Paul Henry to the rescue with a refreshing irreverence over the story of a blind person bowled by a mobility scooter.

Between the two channels, we also covered in the space of an hour everything from Halloween and new releases from The Eagles and Neil Young to an industrial blaze on Auckland's North Shore and a live interview with two Kiwis looking sharp with Jonny Wilkinson's club side, the Newcastle Falcons. Plus there was the regular diet of weather, sport and business (Michael Wilson deserves a Brylcreem medal for longevity, if in curious circumstances of late), along with regular headline updates for those of us whose breakfast is a necessarily hurried affair.

There was, of course, a fair chunk of common ground in the morning's main stories. This was the day Helen chose to rearrange the deckchairs, and there was a nice contrast in the musings of TV One political editor Guyon Espiner, John Key (caught at Auckland airport before heading south to make political capital) and TV3's Duncan Garner, aided and abetted by the always authoritative Linda Clark (when exactly did she return to television?). I don't think any of them got the new Cabinet line-up right, but the argument this is the era of presidential politics and that your average punter couldn't give a tinker's who holds which portfolio sounded persuasive enough to me.

In a way, there's something of a parallel with breakfast television. Here, the presidential style contest is between the polarising Henry and his new running mate Pippa Wetzell in one camp, and James Coleman and Carly Flynn in the other. If I were to vote today I'd tick the box for the ex-radio host and former Nightline presenter, if only because they seem more affable and down-to-earth.

Henry's quirky and clever but knows it too, and besides he's had altogether too much exposure.

Worse, he's blotted his Waikato form book forever through his inability to get along with our own Kay Gregory. By rights, the Sunrise crew should have him for breakfast in these parts.

- © Fairfax NZ News