Back in the early '80s, if you'd switched on your TV at 7am, you'd have been faced with footage of a potter's wheel, the testcard or a hairy professor demonstrating his algebra skills. But all that changed with the launch of BBC Breakfast Time on 17 January 1983, closely followed a fortnight later by ITV's TV-am.

Since then, breakfast TV has become part and parcel of popular culture - with millions of us tuning in each morning for a wake-up call of serious news, consumer reports and showbiz gossip. So to celebrate breakfast telly’s silver anniversary – lest we forget, Channel 4’s mould-breaking Big Breakfast didn’t show up till 1992 – we decided to revisit 18 familiar faces from the BBC and ITV who helped turn early-morning TV into a national institution...

by Jane Murphy
Pictures: Wenn, Rex Features, BBC, ITV