'It's us against the world at 4am'

'It's us against the world at 4am': "

They were the BBC's dream team whose on-screen chemistry had everyone watching. Then they moved to ITV's breakfast show – and it all fell apart. Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley open up to Decca Aitkenhead
Alert: This piece contains strong language

Before meeting Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, my worry had been they might try to conduct the interview in the approved register of breakfast television presenters – brightly glib, impenetrably sunny, with that bulletproof optimism which is apparently mandatory for anyone appearing on screen before 9am. Everyone knows their new show is in trouble – but what if they just smiled tightly, and insisted everything was going brilliantly? What a yawn that would be.

"Well, I'm never, ever going to be positive about anything again, I can tell you that," Chiles says straight away. "Normally I'm pessimistic about absolutely everything. But God forgive me my arrogance, I tried being positive with this, because I felt in my water that it was going to be a storming immediate runaway success. I'd been saying to Christine for two or three years, we should do a breakfast show together, the time is right to do a breakfast show. I was absolutely sure. And I was completely fucking wrong."

All summer, a frenzy of anticipation had been building around Chiles and Bleakley. ITV had pulled off a spectacular coup, everyone agreed, by tempting the BBC's dream team on to its new breakfast show sofa. The pair's legendary chemistry, which had made the One Show such a hit, was widely expected to make Daybreak a soaraway success. Breakfast television might not attract massive viewing figures in this country, but it has become a popular barometer for the fortunes of a channel – and Daybreak was going to be the new morning glory of ITV.

At 8.30am on 6 September, when the first edition came off air, both presenters thought it had gone pretty well. "We got through it anyway, put it that way," Bleakley says. "And I was so nervous about it, I was just glad there were no blazing errors. We thought it was OK."

"And then," says Chiles, "we woke up in the morning and found out that, far from being OK, it was actually one of the biggest crocks of shite anyone had seen in years."

The avalanche of criticism that descended was almost as dramatic as the new show's plunge in the ratings. More than 1m viewers tuned in to see the launch, but by the final week of October, the figure had slumped to just over 500,000, barely a third of those for its BBC's rival, Breakfast. Critics howled with derision at the coldly unwelcoming set, the comically trivial features such as skateboarding dogs, and the ill-conceived gimmicks – what were 4 Poofs & A Piano doing on telly at breakfast time? Above all, they were merciless in their assassination of the show's star presenters. Chiles was said to look miserable – painfully awkward, gloomy and stiff – while Bleakley was accused of grinning like an idiot and appearing completely out of her depth.

When we meet on set, Bleakley manages to affect more professional good cheer about the criticism than Chiles, but neither pretends for a second to be indifferent. They are reflective and self-critical, analysing every element of the show with forensic rigour and candour, if also with a hint of gallows humour. Bad press, Chiles says, is one thing – "I learned to deal with it years ago" – but there is something uniquely unnerving about having to read it every day at 4am. "I get up at quarter to four," he says. "I get in the car at five past four, I say hello to the driver, he says hello to me. We both say how knackered we are, and then I read the papers. And I read that I'm the ugliest man that's ever presented a programme, I read that my close friend and co-presenter Christine is a social-climbing slag, and that the programme is the worst thing anyone's seen, and it's tanking, and it's a complete failure. I've read all that by the time I've gone round the Hogarth roundabout, so my day bottoms out at 4.15am. And then people say the problem is I'm grumpy. Well, a) I'm grumpy for a reason; and b) if you have got your arse in your hands, is there anything worse than somebody telling you to cheer up?"

Chiles has come across as somewhat Eeyorish on screen, leaving Bleakley to play Tigger, compensating with a bounciness that can at times verge on shrill. "But ironically," she says, "I was the one who was cautious before the show began. I was the one going, 'Please, don't think this is a given, this is going to be a very tough job.' I'd watched a lot of breakfast telly – and breakfast telly's more personal than anything else."

"I wish now I'd watched it a lot more," Chiles agrees ruefully. "I've got a newfound respect for all of them. They look comfortable in their skin, and I think just to be companionable at that time is a challenge. And that laconic, sardonic, cynical thing I do, I'm not sure how that plays in the morning. I've got to be myself, I can't be inauthentic; I've got to do some sort of approximation of myself – but I haven't squared that circle yet. I'd thought we could just fire that big, magic bullet – me and Christine – and it would work."

'I didn't,' she points out. 'No, I knew it was more than that. It was two and a half hours of a tough, tough show.'

Both agree the show got a lot of things wrong. For a start, the new £1m studio had looked fantastic in July, with its spectacular glass backdrop looking out on the Thames. Unfortunately, it hadn't occurred to anyone that come launch-time in autumn, the sun wouldn't rise until the show was nearly over, casting the set into chilly gloom and turning it into what they laughingly call 'the purple cave of sadness'. It was also a misjudgment to come on air only two days after GMTV was consigned to broadcasting history. By then, their predecessors' ratings had sunk to about 750,000, tempting bosses into the misapprehension that almost any replacement was bound to do better.

'That was another mistake,' Chiles says. 'The GMTV audience was down to the bones of its arse, but it's like when West Brom went down to the third division. There were only about eight or nine thousand going to the home games, but that represents the hardcore. So, in fact, these are the last people who are ready for somebody else to come in. They were absolutely, and quite rightly, in love with GMTV and what it stood for. I don't know why I was surprised that they were not really up for this new thing, because we'd killed off what they loved. It was as if some sort of broadcasting fratricide had been perpetrated. So I really wish we'd done a soft launch, just come on air quietly, instead of those big grandiose billboards.' He practically cringes. 'Everyone was driving past them thinking, 'Well, who the hell do they suddenly think they are?''

'To be fair though,' Bleakley says, 'I understand from a bosses' point of view why they want to tell the world about their new baby. But on a personal level you're sort of like, 'Shiiiit… that's us on that billboard, and a lot of it rests with us.''

Chiles has always said the secret of his appeal lay in low expectations; he was never the BBC's main man, and his most successful shows – Working Lunch, Match Of The Day 2, the One Show – all quietly evolved into hits without any great fanfare. Similarly, when Bleakley joined the One Show she was barely known outside of Northern Ireland, and was only standing in for Myleene Klass. "No one cared," she says with a laugh, "so I had time to learn on the job before anyone noticed." Neither had experienced the wrath of media schadenfreude, and seem to have been unprepared for its ferocity.

'The time I knew I had to either give up or get a grip,' Chiles says, 'was when we were interviewing somebody and I was about to come out with a question, and I swear to God, I literally saw myself quoted on, say, Ally Ross' page in the Sun as Twat of the Week. I literally saw it in black and white before my eyes. And once you've got to that stage, I thought the game is up.'

Part of the backlash, they acknowledge, has been to do with money. Chiles' four-year contract is reported to be worth £6m, Bleakley's three-year one £4m. 'It's a bit of a crude thing,' Bleakley squirms, and Chiles admits, 'We're both embarrassed talking about money. We do very well. But it's embarrassing. I go out running and somebody's waving the Sun at me, going 'How fucking much?''

Predictably, of course, neither of them will confirm how much they do earn; all they'll say is that most of the reported figures are inaccurate. Presenters always say this, so it's impossible to know what's true, but they are emphatic their decision to defect to ITV wasn't motivated by money. "It's just bullshit," Chiles says hotly. "I would have stayed exactly where I was, and everyone involved knows that, and I thoroughly resent them saying otherwise in the press. Saying it was a big money move – well, it just wasn't bloody like that. I was very happy staying at the BBC doing exactly what I'd been doing for no more money. But then that wasn't deemed possible, so I had to look for something else."

They both certainly seem nostalgic for the One Show: it comes up a lot, always with a certain wistful longing. Had the BBC not decided to parachute in Chris Evans to present the Friday edition – "The climax of the whole week's work," Bleakley says indignantly – both of them would still be there, she insists. But Chiles' pride was, he says, "holed beneath the water line", and he felt his position had become untenable. When Bleakley dithered about following him to Daybreak, declaring herself "torn", her indecision was interpreted in the press as disingenuous manipulation and a bid for more money – but when I bring this up, she looks visibly upset. "Nothing would have changed if the upset and turmoil hadn't kicked in. We were very, very happy to continue as we were. We'd have stayed without a penny more. I loved every second of my time there. I wouldn't change anything."

In the face of so much public criticism, what has not been reported is that viewing figures for Daybreak have been steadily climbing for the last three weeks, now averaging more than 800,000 a day – an improvement on GMTV's average – and peaking at up to 1.4m. The set is gradually being warmed, with sunshine-coloured screens and mounds of flowers, and the presenters' initial stiffness is slowly softening as they seem to find their feet. Watching from inside the studio, it's a surprise to see how much more energy and chemistry there seems to be among the team than has yet translated to the screen; Bleakley seems infinitely more authoritative, and Chiles much warmer and funnier. It's not clear why this isn't yet evident when you watch it at home, but when we go for breakfast afterwards, the famous chemistry between them is perfectly apparent.

Like all successful presenting teams, they are a lot like a married couple – intimate, affectionate and irreverent. They defend each other a lot, and seem to be more hurt by media criticism of each other than of themselves. The endless speculation that surrounded their relationship during the One Show has at last receded, but everyone used to suspect Chiles was a little bit in love with Bleakley. He always denied it, but he did once say of the rumours, "It was like West Brom being linked with Ronaldo or something. Look at her and look at me. West Brom might quite like to sign Ronaldo, but it is simply not going to happen," – which gave the impression he'd have signed Bleakley like a shot.

'Oh God,' Chiles groans. 'I was trying to be clever and get a laugh out of it, and I just caused untold aggravation. I fucking wish I hadn't said it. It was a stupid thing to say. But you're asked the question so many times that you try 100 different ways of answering it, and the cleverer you get trying to answer it, you just dig yourself a bigger bloody hole. You just… you can't disprove a negative, you can't. And then, once it turned out not to be true, people said, 'Oh, you made out it was true to drive figures!' When nothing was further from the bloody truth.' Was it tiresome? 'Fucking tiresome!' He looks as though he might explode.

"You know what it was as well, I think," Bleakley intervenes more mildly. "When there's a couple on telly, people think either you absolutely despise each other and you're pretending to be nice, or you're in love with each other. The truth of the matter is we're literally in the middle of that." When she broke her toe recently, she says, the first person she called was Chiles. "It sounds silly, but you are, you're my best mate."

They see less of each other socially since joining Daybreak, but only because of the hours. Bleakley isn't struggling with sleep anything like as badly as Chiles; after the show, she goes home to bed for a couple of hours, and can stay up in the evenings, whereas Chiles couldn't even sleep for an hour at a time for the first six weeks, and is still managing only three or four hours. "I would sleep for 40 minutes, wake up and even if I took sleeping pills – I was taking Nytol, prescription stuff – it would make me have nightmares or feel drowsy. It was a mixture of caffeine, anxiety, adrenaline… all those things." He is recently divorced from Jane Garvey, the Radio 4 Woman's Hour presenter, but collects their two daughters, 10 and seven, from school every day, and has the shattered air of a new divorcee struggling to hold together several different strands of life.

Bleakley, on the other hand, is contending with all that comes from being a footballer's girlfriend, having been going out with Chelsea's Frank Lampard for the past year. "Unless she went out with somebody who played for West Brom," Chiles jokes, "I couldn't choose a better footballer for her." But some critics have suggested that WAG status is incompatible with the breakfast TV sofa, whose occupants traditionally present a girl-next-door sort of glamour. Does she think there might be some truth in the claim that viewers struggling to get their kids to school simply can't relate to a premiership millionaire's glamorous girlfriend?

"I think that's all nonsense," Bleakley says crossly. "Just because of what he does, suddenly he gets put into this box and that makes you this certain type of person. And that's not the case at all. He's incredibly humble, non-flashy, down to earth. I wouldn't be with him if he wasn't."

"Everything Christine says is right," Chiles agrees, "but that doesn't help if that's the perception. But the perception will change. Th more people watch, they'll realise that. She's got more empathy with the ordinary Joe, and I hope they'll see us for our true colours – but, you know, if the press every day are painting Christine as some social-climbing minx, well then…" He tails off looking glum.

If Bleakley's beauty is said to be a problem on the Daybreak sofa, this isn't a criticism anyone has levelled at Chiles, whose physical appearance has come in for surprisingly cruel jokes. He has been described, among other things, as "the ugliest man on TV" and a "talking Toby jug". It is the convention for male presenters to laugh off mockery about their looks and pretend not to care, but Chiles brings it up several times, and very obviously does.

"Well, of course you do," Bleakley says protectively. "When you're getting slated about it and people are being incredibly personal, well, of course." Chiles looks awkward for a moment, and says, "I don't want to sound like I'm exercised about it. But I just think, well, it's just an unpleasant thing to say about somebody. The day you stop being pissed off about it, you've ceased to be human." Then he laughs and adds, "I still have the advantage that I don't think I'm as bad-looking in the flesh as I am on the telly, so people always say to me, 'Ooh, you're not as ugly as we thought you were. Oh, and you're quite tall! Not as bad as I thought at all.' So it works to my advantage in that respect, I suppose.'"

By 11am, both of them are starting to look bleary and ready for bed. Is there any truth, I ask, in the rumours that one or other will be soon be leaving?

'We've only been doing it eight weeks!' protests Bleakley. 'Who quits at anything after that length of time? And it kind of feels like it's getting better already. Also, you feel like it's us against the world at 4 o'clock in the morning. We're all in this together.

"I'm in it for the long-haul. I don't ever consider myself to be a quitter at anything, just because it's not going according to plan. In my head, it's a long-term plan. There's no show in the land that's on every day, doing what we do, that gets it right immediately."

What about the rumours that ITV might sack them? "People say they could get rid of us," muses Chiles mischievously, "but I don't think they can, can they? We've got contracts, haven't we? Unless I say 'cunt' on air or something. Which I might do on a bad morning, and try it to see if that gets me off… On a particularly dark moment the other morning, something had fucked up and I just felt miserable. I just thought, perhaps Peter Fincham will call me in and say, 'You can leave Daybreak, but you've got to do I'm A Celebrity… next year.' Would I do that? Fucking yeah. Bring on the beetles. I'm scared of heights, rats, snakes, spiders – fucking bring them on. I'll have them all,' he laughs.

Then he says seriously, 'I don't think anyone would blame me for thinking like that when you are getting such a kicking. Sometimes I look at myself and think, 'Do people really want to wake up with you?' Some days I've thought very definitely no, in which case my days are numbered. But I've changed my mind about that. I think it can work. The figures are getting a bit better. Lately we've been having a laugh, it was a bit more like the old days and we felt a bit happier in our skins.'

If the qualities that made them great evening TV broadcasters really do make them hopeless breakfast presenters, the show probably is doomed. But the possibility they might instead create a version of morning television less saccharine, more ironic, than the one with which we've been familiar seems plausible, too. There's no chance, Chiles laughs, of him ever becoming sugary sweet – "I just can't fucking do that, that would be an absolute car crash." But nor is there a law that says breakfast television presenters must conform to the same old shiny prototype for ever more.

"It's still early days," Bleakley keeps pointing out. "It's not all bad, and that's why I want to be positive. And let's keep it in perspective," she adds, laughing. "No one is going to die today if we get our words wrong. This is television, and as wonderful as it is – and it is our lives, and we live and breathe it – no one's ultimately going to die."

'Well,' mutters Chiles, with a dry chuckle, 'somebody might die. There's a couple of TV critics who might die if I get hold of them."