Flashback to 1st January 1993. As the UK entered this brave new year, viewers accustomed to getting their wake-up entertainment fix from ITV (or Channel 3, as it is legally known) were having to endure the seismic shake-up that was taking place with the channel's programming. TV-am, the production company responsible for the past decade's worth of breakfast television (their greatest contribution to popular culture was the puppet creation Roland Rat), was being ditched in favour of a newly-appointed licensee, GMTV (Good Morning Television), and there was little rejoicing about this fact. My understanding is that the circumstances under which the power had shifted - new legislation in the early 1990s meant that commercial television licences were allocated not on the basis of quality, but on whoever placed the highest bid - left a bad taste in people's mouths, while GMTV's desire to adopt a more family-friendly, less news-driven approach was widely criticised as the dumbing down of the channel's morning programming. Personally, I was seven years old at the time, and while I was aware of the air of negativity surrounding this upcoming change, so long as there were a few decent cartoons in the mix I was likely to be satisfied. I gave GMTV a shot, though I think my household switched over very quickly to Channel 4 and The Big Breakfast and nowadays I can't remember a danged thing I saw from the program. Well, one solitary memory does remain - I may have forgotten GMTV as a whole, but I've always remembered the promotional spot they used to trumpet themselves around the time of their launch.
The controversial new format was heralded by the image of a decrepit stop motion rooster staggering out to face the world to an extremely distorted version of "Good Morning", a song from the 1939 picture Babes In Arms. This, the ad insinuates, is the rooster who rings in your morning (or, more accurately, doesn't) when you get out of bed on the wrong side. The premise behind this ad is that there are two possible realities awaiting the early riser every morning, with the preferable option, or "bright side" being represented by a second, greatly more animated rooster who pops up in the final ten seconds and takes us into a world of dizzying colour. There's not so much of interest going on here, but for the possibility that the GMTV titles might just have squished the rooster as they closed in on him (we see his feathers flying at the end). The reason the ad stuck with me as it did, I suspect, has more to do with the twenty seconds we spend lingering in that twisted parallel universe, entrenched in the horrors of a morning that flat-out refuses to get going. The footage of the rooster is interspersed with scenes depicting two human denizens of morning on the wrong side, and their torturously barren breakfast routine, which largely involves grappling with obstinate household appliances. Ostensibly the duller of the two realities, there is a certain demented personality to how things operate around here, manifested in the rubbery, flexible nature of said appliances - a toaster expands and contracts while not making that bread any browner, and a pipe bulges as the water flow (a single drop, as it turns out) struggles to make its way up to the shower head (although what's weirder still is why on earth the man standing below would be dressed in his pyjamas; I get that nudity might have been too risqué for GMTV's target audience, but was he really planning on getting his clothes soaked too? Unless the implication is that this skimpy shower is such an ingrained feature of the man's regular morning routine that he barely bothers undressing for it). The prosaic backdrops have a neatly claustrophobic feel, particularly the overhead shot of our would-be showerer, reinforcing their feverish discomfort.
The intent, naturally, is to convey something of the stifling monotony of routine, but the ad's merits lie in how convincingly it creates a state of being that exists halfway between tedium and delirium. The world here is unable to wake up and progress beyond its half-asleep stupor, an existential despair encapsulated in the image of that lethargic rooster hobbling along his wooden walkway without ever mustering the verve to crow, usher in the new day and embrace the possibilities it brings. That is the nightmarish beauty of this promo - how it captures a sense of time grinding to a moribund crawl. The slowed-down audio seems grotesque in how taunting it is - we hear the (just comprehensible) words "Good morning" babbled over and over, a supposed celebration of renewal and the promise of what lies ahead (or alternatively, an unwelcome reminder that we have to get up and do the same thing all over again). The truly warped thing about this reality, though, is that it has nowhere to go. The rooster reaches the end of his walkway and topples into oblivion, much as the shower never materialises and the toaster conks out, leaving the bread perpetually bread. This is a world with no potential; the diurnal cycle has short circuited and the apocalypse happened before we even got to breakfast.
At the end of the ad, we flip over abruptly to the bright side, where our alternate rooster loudly announces not merely the dawning of a new day, but the arrival of GMTV, who supposedly rule the roost over here (and exercise this by snapping their titles on him). The rooster, though, is all we actually see of this frenetic parallel reality - a possible alternate existence for our human chums is not represented in any capacity. Alas, we can only leave them stranded in their black and white inertia. But then I suspect it wouldn't take terribly long for that hyperactive rooster from the favourable side to start messing with your nerves either.
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