The show was a mix of news, weather, interviews, audience phone-ins and general features, with a light tone which was in competition with the maturer GMTV and BBC Breakfast programmes.

The Daily, which had focused on current affairs and news bulletins alongside bitesized magazine shows, a quiz show segment and a daily cartoon slot, had failed to attract enough viewers so Channel 4 opted to change direction and work towards a lighter style concentrating mainly on entertainment and humour[4] with news bulletins restricted to brief summaries every 20 minutes.

At its height in 1993, viewing figures reached around two million per edition, and it was the highest rated UK breakfast television programme.

His wife Paula Yates interviewed people whilst lying on a bed, and the puppet characters Zig and Zag created morning mayhem in the bathroom with Evans in a slot called 'The Crunch'.

Don't Forget Your Toothbrush began in early 1994, and Evans cut his involvement with The Big Breakfast to three days a week, Tuesday to Thursday.

In June 1997, Johnny Vaughan covered for Adams for a fortnight alongside Van Outen, the pair forging a successful on-screen partnership.

Audience figures stabilised and the duo fronted the programme together until Van Outen's departure on 1 January 1999 (a New Year's Day pre-record).

Kelly Brook was installed as Vaughan's new co-presenter despite an internet campaign for the role to be awarded to Liza Tarbuck, who had successfully covered for Van Outen in the summer of 1998.

Liza Tarbuck, having again covered the co-presenter role alongside Vaughan prior to Brook's departure, was made permanent at the end of August 1999.

During this time, a pilot[5] episode was filmed on a Saturday with Chris Moyles and Dominic Byrne (reading the news), with Andy Goldstein doing links from Los Angeles.

[7] Mark Lamarr, Keith Chegwin, Paul Ross, Richard Orford, Richard Bacon and Mike McClean were "down your doorstep" outside broadcasters, often turning up live and unannounced at an unsuspecting viewer's house, while rooms within the lock keepers' houses featured the puppets Zig and Zag and video games guru Ben the Boffin.

This led to them getting nicknames, such as 'Sturdy Girl', who was regularly asked to shake her head so that her hair would be hurled around whilst music played and the camera zoomed in and out.

Between 1997 and 2000, during most nationally recognised UK school holiday periods, The Big Breakfast would run beyond its typical 9 am finish to provide continuity into and out of unrelated shows aimed primarily towards children.

Although typically presented to the viewer as simply a programme on Channel 4, most of The Bigger Breakfast is perhaps better classified as an informal style of in-vision continuity.

The strand also acted as an umbrella brand for the programming which it linked to, by use of Big Breakfast style break-bumpers and Digital On-Screen Graphics.

The first run of The Bigger Breakfast during the summer of 1997 was titled as such all the way from its 7 am start, presented throughout by Richard Orford and Denise van Outen.

Presenters of The Bigger Breakfast included Josie D'Arby, Ben Shephard, Melanie Sykes and Dermot O'Leary.

The block of programming provided within The Bigger Breakfast was retained, with Channel 4's youth strand T4 taking over the continuity role.

Airing once weekly at 6.00pm on Channel 4, the half hour show was a light hearted round-up of recent news stories concerning popular entertainment in the UK.

Presented by Denise van Outen, the show was intentionally recognisable as being closely related to The Big Breakfast, from which it originated and continued to be part of.

Snap contained a number of elements synonymous with The Big Breakfast, such as using the very same boudoir set and on-the-bed interviewing of guests.

Three months after first appearing, Chris Evans, Gaby Roslin and Paula Yates hosted a live edition of the show, seeing in the new year of 1993.

In January 2021, members of The Big Breakfast production team launched a podcast in which they discussed their experiences working on the series.

The show was presented by Mo Gilligan and AJ Odudu and had many guests from African American and Black heritages in celebration.

", this feature appeared during the early years of the show; in it celebrities would give various simple but useful hints for such issues as cleaning or keeping food fresh.

Paula Yates (the then wife of Bob Geldof, whose company produced the show), and later Paul O'Grady (as Lily Savage) and Vanessa Feltz assumed the role of interviewer.

A repeating feature in the Vaughan and Van Outen era, in which an erratically filmed, sped up video clip of a line of tea cups was shown to a call-in viewer.

Unusually for a live British TV show at the time of its creation, The Big Breakfast was broadcast entirely from a real house.

In November 2002, seven-and-a-half months after The Big Breakfast was axed, a fire destroyed a significant proportion of the first floor of the cottages.

The Big Breakfast's return on 13 August 2022 has been confirmed to be from a new house, leaving the original Lock Keepers' Cottages behind for the first time in the show’s history.