FILM

Notorious grumpster Harrison Ford lightens up in Roger Michell’s witty comedy about breakfast telly, ‘Morning Glory’. Robin Askew gets up early.

"I found no difficulty in slipping into the skin of the third-worst person in the world." Normally when Harrison Ford does press, he seems thoroughly bored by the whole process, discharging his contractual obligation with the bare minimum of effort and enthusiasm. Today he's trying on 'droll' for size, which is not only rather refreshing but also pretty appropriate since the film he's at Claridge's to plug marks a rare excursion into comedy. 'Morning Glory' – we’ll come to that title in a moment – is a funny, undemanding comedy about the tension between news and entertainment in the competitive world of breakfast TV. Written by Aline Brosh McKenna, who gave us the enjoyable 'The Devil Wears Prada' and the dismal '27 Dresses', and directed by Brit Roger Michell – whose eclectic career has taken him from the 1995 BBC adaptation of 'Persuasion' to the Richard Curtis product 'Notting Hill' and beyond into more interesting fare such as 'The Mother' and 'Venus' – the film casts Ford as a grumpy hard news veteran who's forced to work out his contract as co-anchor of a fluffy breakfast TV show with Diane Keaton. It's here that his character is memorably described as the third-worst person in the world.

Although the film is set in the world of US TV, British audiences will derive additional pleasure from it for two reasons. Firstly, the ailing, bottom-of-the-ratings show presented by Ford and Keaton is called ‘Daybreak’, which just happens to be the name of ITV's ailing, bottom-of-the-ratings breakfast TV show. To add to the fun, the British ‘Daybreak’’s grumpy co-host Adrian Chiles is on record describing his own show as "one of the biggest crocks of shite anyone had seen in years". In a positively post-modern twist, 'Morning Glory' co-stars Rachel McAdams and Patrick Wilson appeared on the real ‘Daybreak’ last week to cook novelty omelettes as part of their promotional duties – exactly the kind of fluff that's sent up in the film, although viewers have yet to see Christine Bleakley rapping with 50 Cent, as Diane Keaton does on screen.

"We got there first!" protests Michell. "We were called 'Daybreak' before they were called 'Daybreak'. You obviously have to check the names of your fictional TV stations, and we were amazed to find out that of all the 250,000 stations no one had thought of the name 'Daybreak'. Adrian Chiles then proved us wrong…"

Then there's that title. If nobody in Hollywood realised that 'morning glory' is British slang for, you know, a pleasant AM pyjama surprise, then surely Michell did. "I have heard it can have a second meaning," he deadpans. "I think Paramount caught up with this possible confusion quite late in the day." So was there no discussion about changing the title for UK release? "On the contrary, I think it's especially appropriate to Britain," he grins.

We expect Diane Keaton to be funny, but 'bundle of laughs' is not a phrase one tends to associate with Harrison Ford, despite his claim that "I laugh a lot – usually at inappropriate junctures". So the real surprise is how good he is as Keaton's bickering, pompous co-anchor. Why, then, have we not seen him do more comedy? "You know, I think there's not a lot of wit in comedy any more. In America these days, there's a lot of sort of adolescent humour and I'm a little too old for that, so I was grateful to have this script. I thought it was very well written and I thought the character was an interesting one to play."

McAdams, who plays the show's hapless producer, went to check out how breakfast TV is made and drew on her own early experience as a viewer. "I watched a lot of morning television growing up because I skipped school all the time," she confesses. "I didn't go out and smoke pot or do normal things. I just wanted to watch daytime television. So I had a fair amount of experience of what you see in front of you, but not so much behind the scenes. It was really fun to go on these shows and see the anchors with their fluffy slippers on underneath their chair and all their accoutrements right beside them just off camera."

Her love interest in the film, Patrick Wilson, has the advantage of a brother and father who are both US TV news anchors for the same network, so no actual research was necessary on his part. But what did they make of the film? Does it reflect their own experiences? "They loved it. My dad's not nearly as crotchety as Mr Ford's character, but I certainly think the attitude of the evening news man towards morning fluff is pretty accurate."

Ford says his only experience of breakfast TV comes from having appeared on many of these shows over the years to promote his films. "I certainly do admire those people who do it well – and there are a lot of people that do," he says carefully. "My character is a pretentious, stuffy, self-satisfied person who really only has respect for what he's done, his particular form of journalism. And that was something that I could understand – his point of view about morning television."

Surely his character deserves a more positive assessment than that? Grouchy he may be, but he's also fighting a heroic battle against the encroachment of celebrity-oriented piffle upon real news. "He thinks it’s a sacred profession – and in a sense it used to be,” Ford concedes. “In the United States, the most trusted man was Walter Cronkite, who kept his opinions out of it until nearly the end of his career, when he came out against the Vietnam war. I still think the network news anchors do a very good job. They have the resources and the budget to do it. But there's another brand of news now that confirms whatever political prejudice you have and is full of bombast and vitriol [that'll be 'fair and balanced' Fox News, then], and I think that's contributed to the divisiveness and lack of civility in American culture."

"The film doesn't attempt to proselytise about what the balance should be between hard news and entertainment on morning television," points out Michell, in defence of what is, after all, just a lightweight comedy. "But clearly that is the debate about television in general and morning television in particular: how far you stress the hard news bit and how far you stress the funky cooking bit. And that's integral to our characters and our plot. What the film does is that it raises that debate and then kicks it around with some passion, but it doesn't pretend to come up with a definitive answer."

Having delivered one pleasant surprise already this year, it's just possible that Ford will give us another in the middle of the summer blockbuster season. In among all the depressing franchise flicks and remakes, there's one comicbook adaptation that could just prove to be this year's 'Pirates of the Caribbean'-style unexpected pleasure if it lives up to the promise of its trailer. Jon Favreau's 'Cowboys and Aliens' pits a posse of Arizona gunslingers against a spaceship full of aliens bent on conquering the world back in 1873. So what can Ford tell us about it? "'Cowboys and Aliens' seems to be the kind of movie people go to these days and I'm delighted to be involved in one of those," he says dryly. "I think everyone involved did a bang-up job. It was wonderful working with Daniel Craig, who's a funny, smart guy. I love westerns. It was great to be outside all day on a horse. And I play a grumpy old man in that one as well."

'MORNING GLORY' OPENED ON FRI 21 JAN.  FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

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