“As you can see our home is very, very relaxed and informal,” said Frank Bough, formally, introducing the first edition of BBC Breakfast Time at 6.30am on 17 January 1983, “and we really do think that that is the right setting from which to bring you interviews with people and personalities who are making the day’s news”.
So radical was the appearance of a sofa – in this case, a red leather one – that viewers had to be warned about it in advance, by a trusted presenter wearing a pullover the colour and texture of a garden mole. After breaking viewers in gently, Bough ambled over to the sofa where his co-presenters, Selina Scott and Nick Ross, were sitting. And Scott was sitting on the left.
Where one sits on a TV sofa is, apparently, significant. We learned that this week when Dan Walker, the new presenter of the BBC’s morning show, now called BBC Breakfast, was given the left seat (as seen by viewers) on the sofa he shares with co-presenter Louise Minchin – the position that is said to denote seniority, termed “presenter one” by programme makers – even though Walker is younger and less experienced. But he is a man.
The BBC was accused of misogyny. “I’ve worked on enough news and current affairs programmes to know that men are seen by editors as having the ‘gravitas’ to lead a show,” said Miriam O’Reilly, the former Countryfile presenter. “Sadly women on breakfast news programmes, particularly, have the role of the bit of fluff by his side. They are there to smile, laugh, giggle or tease – and to show legs and cleavage.”
Other shows where there is a male-female presenting duo have been scrutinised, and it seems that placing the man on the left is the norm, from ITV’s Good Morning Britain, This Morning and News at Ten, to the BBC’s The One Show. The BBC has denied that where a presenter sits on the sofa denotes status: “It’s all about judging which is the best camera angle for the presenters.” Unnamed BBC sources have claimed they tried seating the presenters the other way around, but it didn’t look right.
“It makes assumptions about what viewers want to see,” says Dr Barbara Mitra, senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Worcester. “It assumes a female presenter wouldn’t look in the right place if she sat on the left and I wonder if that subconsciously goes through the programme makers’ minds when they position them.”
Sofa sexism is tied into bigger issues about how women are presented. On breakfast TV, the female presenters almost never wear trousers, for instance – they are most usually in brightly-coloured, tight dresses, as if they’re going to a cocktail party at 7am. “Will we ever see a grey-haired female presenter?” says Mitra. “There are grey-haired male presenters. It doesn’t matter how male presenters and reporters look.”
As for where they sit, she says, “I think people do know what it means when someone sits on the left or right – they know that’s the superior position.” Mitra thinks the left is considered senior because it’s where people tend to look first.
Fiona Phillips, the former longstanding presenter of GMTV, doesn’t agree. She often sat to the left of the screen, alongside her male co-host, and had no idea that it symbolised some sort of power position. “I never considered myself the senior partner. We had this scheme where we swapped over depending on who was leading the interview to be nearer the guest. It was very egalitarian in that way.”
But there are other sexist conventions female breakfast TV presenters have to navigate. “The man is fine, whatever they look like. It’s the woman who gets criticised – the way you look, the way you dress, if you look older.” Phillips wore trousers regularly, but she says “I think viewers prefer to see you in bright colours and skirts or dresses.”
If two women were presenting, she says, “you wouldn’t automatically assume that the one on the left was the senior one. We live in a male-skewed society and men are perceived to have more gravitas than women regardless of where they sit.”
The sofa has been a staple part of the British TV landscape for more than 30 years. “It was imported from American television, along with breakfast TV itself,” says Ian Jones, author of Morning Glory: A History of British Breakfast Television.
“Before the start of breakfast TV in this country, in 1983, you never really saw sofas on British television, certainly not in the context of news and current affairs. There was a perception that they were a bit downmarket, trivial, a bit American. That kind of snobbishness existed at that time, which is why breakfast television took so long to arrive here in the first place.”
When Breakfast Time launched, followed a couple of weeks later by ITV’s version, TV-am, “that was the first time a lot of people had seen people sitting on a sofa on television. It was a huge deal back then that people weren’t sitting at desks”.
The sofa, says Jones, “became as much a member of the line-up as the presenters themselves, so much so that when the BBC decided to get rid of the sofas later in the 80s, letters of complaint were written to the Radio Times”. So famous had it become that the Breakfast Time sofa was eventually auctioned for Children in Need. The breakfast show presenters went back to desks for a bit, before returning to sofas.
If the sofa ushered in a more welcoming, softer TV space, there were plenty of people who were ready to exploit it. “Tony Blair pioneered the sofa interview,” says Jones. “It was part of the way that Blair and Alastair Campbell retooled the relationship between politicians and the media and made it more about a conversation rather than an interview.”
In the first episode of the satire The Thick of It, the newly appointed minister Hugh Abbot triumphantly says a new policy “is a chance for me to get on Richard and Judy and plant that flag right on their fucking sofa”.
“The sofa is generally associated with informality and, more generally, a culture ruled by the TV,” says the cultural historian Prof Joe Moran. “The sofa basically replaced the three-piece suite because in the age of central heating you no longer had to arrange a settee and two armchairs around a fire, and you could point a sofa straight at the television. The adjective sofa-style, when applied to government, certainly suggests informality.” Former cabinet secretary Lord Butler highlighted what he called “sofa government”, criticising Blair’s informal style and lack of collective cabinet scrutiny for the failings over Iraq.
In television, the sofa hasn’t really spread beyond the confines of breakfast and daytime TV, except where it is used to create – both for the viewers and guests – an atmosphere of homeliness or informality. It’s why the presenters sit on sofas on The One Show and Springwatch, but not on News at Ten.
On the Top Gear studio set, the sofa was used in a different way – James May and Richard Hammond sat close together on the cosy, perhaps “feminised”, sofa, while the alpha male of the group, Jeremy Clarkson, got his own armchair throne. It’s the same with famous fictionalised sofas – on the Royle Family, it’s the dad who gets his own armchair while the rest of the family cram onto the sofa. Newsnight have used a sofa, but it’s the structured, businesslike kind you’d find in the break-out area of an investment bank rather than anything particularly welcoming.
Not everyone is convinced by the gender semiotics of sofa seating. “I don’t think there’s any great conspiracy,” says Ian Jones. “If you look back to the position people sat on the sofas in the 80s, it was a free-for-all; there was no perception that somebody sat on one side. Frank Bough and Selina Scott changed position all the time.”
What the controversy this week has illustrated instead, he thinks, is the power of the TV sofa to become a talking point, in the way that it was when it was first introduced in the 80s. “I think it’s a legacy of the fact that the idea of a sofa on television is still treated as a bit of a novelty.”
