Breakfast with Eamonn and Isabel, GB News, review: stardust, humour, and a dash of Partridge

“Do you know what really annoys me? Wrapping paper.” And just like that, with one seemingly meaningless, Partridge-esque quip about Christmas presents, the Eamonn Holmes era of GB News truly began.

The veteran broadcaster, having jumped ship from ITV after 15 years, joined his old mucker Isabel Webster for their first GB News breakfast show together, having promised he “would not change”. And he was good to his word. If you like Holmes, you’d have liked this. Mostly.

It is easy to poke fun at Holmes, but the real value the Northern Irishman brings is the ability to make silly asides about wrapping – and about fireworks and people who don’t wrap up warm in the winter and having to call binmen “bin operatives” – seem totally natural and in keeping with the tone of a semi-serious morning show. Holmes brings several things to GB News that it sorely needs – stardust, of course, a bit of gravitas, a sprinkling of humour. But, most importantly, he shows how to have personality as a TV anchor without being a windbag.

If you haven’t watched GB News in a while, the embarrassing glitches are mainly gone, the production values are far less village panto than they used to be and the studio looks like it would just about stand up in a strong breeze. The breakfast show remains a curious mishmash of half-hearted rolling news, upbeat roving reporters and jolly banter between the hosts. The whiff of cheapness remains, but it’s fading.

The constant marriage of fact and viewer opinion gives the show the feel of a radio phone-in, rather than a traditional TV breakfast show. The constant straining for strong opinion from everyone, all the time, on everything, is quite a stressful viewing experience. Holmes is the perfect man for the job, puncturing the anxiety with an amusing story about his school bus being blown up by terrorists (no, really).

Holmes did seem a little subdued, possibly down to a desire to prove that this really was just another day – “no change” – and possibly because it sounded like he was carrying a heavy cold. He seemed, literally, quite stiff too, which we can put down to the back problems he has suffered of late.

The meat of the show was made up of sections on wearing face masks in schools, which sought many opinions without ever really telling us anything and culminated in a soft-soap interview with education minister Nadhim Zahawi, and on how dogs suffer when we let off fireworks, something close to Holmes’s heart. Following his slap on the wrist about his comments about 5G conspiracy theories, Holmes stayed firmly on the right side of Ofcom, his most controversial opinion being that Istanbul is a bit smelly.

Partnering him up with Webster, reprising their Sky News breakfast double act, is a canny move – they have an easy chemistry, plus Webster is punchier than Holmes, more forthright, tougher on guests, and gives as good as she gets from her senior co-host.

GB News would be wise to let Holmes shape the breakfast show as much as he can. Some segments were poor – a newspaper review in which Jenni Murray griped about canine caviar and scary technology (“I don’t want my bank to know how fast I am walking”) was far too “country’s gone mad” for a show with pretensions of seriousness. While a roving report from Altrincham, canvassing local opinion on face masks in schools on deserted 6am streets, threatened to descend into farce when the reporter admitted he’d had to interview a woman doing her paper round.

At one point, a milk float loomed slowly into view behind him, bringing about the tantalising possibility that he would have to interview the milkman. He did have to interview the milkman.

However, where Andrew Neil, in his brief stint on the network, may have rolled his eyes and huffed and puffed at the amateurism and naffness, Holmes simply jumps into an anecdote about working on a milk float when he was 11 (“they’re basically big golf carts – the smell was awful”) and moments later we’re onto something else. That’s Holmes’s great gift to GB News, wrapped up in a bow. The big man’s not for changing. But is GB News?

On GB News every weekday from 6-9.30am