Natasha Kaplinsky, Ulrika Jonsson and Anthea Turner on the reality behind the breakfast TV sofa

There’s nothing quite like breakfast TV. The shows may have gone through many guises over the years, but what they’ve all had in common is that – from Eamonn Holmes branding his GMTV co-host Anthea Turner ‘Princess Tippy Toes’ to Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan’s tiffs on Good Morning Britain – breakfast TV is always a hot topic. Which is is probably why the Americans made a big-budget drama about it. As The Morning Show returns to Apple TV for a second season, we talk to three former stars of the sofa about the realities of life on the early shift.

Anthea Turner, 61

Hosted GMTV alongside Eamonn Holmes from 1994 to 1996

Watching The Morning Show felt visceral for me. Breakfast TV is a very unusual environment. You live in a different time zone, you operate outside of the rest of society and you become a family, your lives are so intertwined. We worked on our nerves and the only objective was those two hours of live TV. It didn’t matter what else was going on in any of our lives, that red light went on and it was, ‘Hello, good morning, this is GMTV’.

I broke the mould. I hadn’t come from a journalistic background and it ruffled feathers, but it was GMTV, not Newsnight. They needed somebody who could interview the Spice Girls. Some critics were really spiteful; Lynda Lee-Potter and Anne Robinson went outside the parameters of just being professionally critical. Nobody’s that confident and I did think, ‘Oh God, I’ve got it wrong, everything’s wrong. I’m wrong. Take me back to Blue Peter now.’

The scenes in The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston trying to wake herself up were me at 3.30am. I had so many alarms around the room. Once, I woke up to what I thought was the alarm, but I was dreaming. I got up, showered, dressed, blow-dried my hair, went outside and was like, ‘Where is the car?’ It was 11pm. I went back to bed and was like, ‘F—k, f—k, f—k, I’ve got to lie here really still, this blow-dry has to be preserved.’

In my first week, I’d only got enough ‘sofa clothes’ to get me to Thursday so, on Friday, I arrived in a rah-rah skirt, over-the-knee socks, a pair of monkey boots and a jumper. They were aghast, like, ‘What is she wearing?’ I was sent off with the wardrobe mistress to smarten me up.

They wanted me to have a sleek bob because that’s what presenters in America had – that was never going to happen with my springy hair – and Paul Smith had these natty women’s suits I wore. Magazines started commenting and I won a Best Dressed award. They weren’t interested in what Eamonn was wearing, and why would they be? He had about six suits. The most style discussion we had would be him saying, ‘What colour are you wearing?’ and changing his tie.

As soon as I left the safety of the studio, multiple things went wrong. We’d be in Torremolinos and they’d say, ‘Let’s put Anthea on a horse,’ which reared and bucked into the crowd as Mr Motivator jumped up and down and Status Quo performed.

One of my producers friends said to me, in the nicest possible way, ‘You’re a tenacious little cow’, and I was also made out to be hard. If a man says he’s ambitious, it’s like ‘What a guy!’ Whereas if you were a woman and you dared say you’re ambitious, it meant you were a megalomaniac who would tread over anybody to get where you wanted to be. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

If anybody was going to have a bit of a tiff, it was Eamonn and I. He was going through a difficult time and it was hard for me to understand. I wasn’t as worldly wise, I didn’t have children. His real-life marriage was crumbling, he was living two lives, being torn away from the kids in Ireland all week. He was unhappy. And who’s sitting next to him every morning?

When you’re in a goldfish bowl like GMTV, everybody loses perspective. But the tom-tom drums of the show meant everything got blown up out of proportion. I didn’t lose my job, Eamonn didn’t have that power. I got offered Wish You Were Here…? and I thought I’d better take the opportunity because it might not come around again.

We’ve talked about it since – hindsight is a marvellous thing – and our friendship has lasted longer than any of my marriages. I have the greatest respect for him. I was at his intimate 60th birthday party and there when he got his OBE. And I reclaimed Princess Tippy Toes – I even sign birthday cards to Eamonn that way. I own it.

Natasha Kaplinsky, 49

Hosted Sky News Sunrise before joining BBC Breakfast with Dermot Murnaghan from 2001 to 2005

You’ve got no idea how obsessed you become with sleep when you have to be up at 3.20am. I pared back my morning routine to the bare minimum so that by 3.30am I could be in the car with Louis, my driver and confidante, who was always there in case I missed my alarms. Sometimes I’d be hosting events in the evenings and Louis would pick me up from Manchester or wherever with a duvet and pillow and I’d sleep in the back of the car and go straight into the office. That was not a pleasant experience. But it was such an exciting time.

I’d be at work at 4am for a briefing, then go into make-up. There was pressure to look tip-top and there’s nothing more surreal than having a full face and blow-dry at 4am. I’d get opinions constantly about what I was wearing and whether my hair was right. We had a generous clothing allowance in those days, which was helpful because if I wore something more than once, people commented.

There were lots of personal sacrifices. I met my husband Justin and we were falling in love, it was exciting, but he wanted to go out for dinner and I was in bed at 8pm.

You never knew where the agenda would take you – my job was to marshal breaking news and help set the agenda. And it did feel like an absolutely monumental responsibility. My first major breaking news story was the Selby rail crash when I was at Sunrise with Simon McCoy. I looked at him and said, ‘Is this a big one?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, put your seatbelt on.’ It makes me feel tearful thinking about it. Before social media, TV was the source of breaking news and you knew everyone who knew someone involved would be watching, hanging on every word. That weighed on my shoulders.

There is a degree of personality and honesty you can share with a breakfast audience. I’ll never forget when there was a major political incident in Kenya and my father was on one of the last flights out of Nairobi. Little did I know that Breakfast had set up a crew to meet him at Heathrow, so I suddenly found myself interviewing my own father, which was surreal. He was brilliant, although I kept thinking, ‘Oh God, I wish he’d brushed his hair.’

Things would go wrong constantly; guests not turning up because of traffic or oversleeping. That’s when presenters earn their money. It’s the gliding swan paddling like crazy under the water to keep the programme together. There was one incident where we had two interviews juxtaposed –a high-level one about the State of the Union Address in the US and one with somebody who had recently discovered they were an IVF baby. The floor manager put them on in the wrong order so I turned to this poor person who was just about to emotionally unload and asked her a hard-hitting question about the State of Union Address and what it meant for global politics. Her face just fell. It was the floor manager’s last day that day, you can’t make a mistake like that. That’s where the team fell apart slightly.

I can’t say I’ve always had a happy experience with my TV husbands, but my relationship with Dermot Murnaghan was special. We worked well as a team because we both knew that if one of us looked stupid, we both looked stupid. There was no one-upmanship or rivalry or trying to steal interviews from each other. It was one of those things where when one person breathes in, the other person breathes out. He was my first on-screen true love.

Interest in my personal life started when I did the first series of Strictly in 2004. There was quite a lot of pressure on me to take part in the show and nobody knew at that point how much rehearsing was required but when a show has 12 million people watching, you certainly need to rehearse more than one or two hours. It was a very intense period. I would come out of the news studio, dance all day and just literally fall into bed.

‘Letters From Lockdown’, introduced by Natasha Kaplinsky (Wren & Rook, £8.99), is out now, with all profits going to Barnardo’s

Ulrika Jonsson, 54

Presented the weather for TV-am from 1989 to 1992

My first job on TV-am was to roll the autocue – it was like a toilet roll with the script on it that you rolled through a machine and, if there was a change in running order, I’d be on the floor with reams of paper, scissors and glue. One day, training somebody to read the autocue, I sat in newsreader Gordon Honeycombe’s chair and pretended to read the news, and my then-boss said, ‘You look great on screen. Want to do the weather?’

I did an audition and I was terrible, so I went off to a Scandinavian satellite channel, made my mistakes to a Swedish audience, went back to TV-am with a VHS tape and got my break. I’d finish my Swedish reports at 11pm and have three hours’ sleep, almost going from one to the other.

While all my friends were at uni, drinking and shagging, I had the life of a nun, but I was so dedicated to what I was doing. The only day of the week that was unaffected by my job was Saturday, because on Sunday, you had to go to bed early again. It took me a year to get that out of my system.

They sent me out on the road, doing the weather and talking to people across the country; I’d never done an interview in my life before. It was hard graft but I never once thought ‘I hate this’. I remember being driven to work in the dark when London was starting to wake, thinking, ‘God, I’m lucky this is my job’.

Sometimes you’d go in and it felt lovely and other days everybody would be antsy. There was a lot of ambition. One presenter was a Queen Bee character, she told the powers-that-be she would walk on glass for this job. But I was content with my little weather slot. I did always feel slightly on the periphery, though. The presenters had an office; my desk was outside it, like a poor relative. But the weather is so important in this country. I’d be allocated three minutes and invariably someone would say in my ear piece, ‘Ulrika, you’ve got 15 seconds!’ and I’d think ‘F—king hell, where do I start?’

The day the first Iraq war broke out, they cancelled every report and people were up in arms. We had a post mortem after the show and I tried to fight my corner because, even though this horrendous thing was happening, people were still going to carry on with their lives and wanted to know what the weather was like. They looked at me like, ‘Who do you think you are? You’re the blonde one who does the weather, shut up.’

There was a lot of casual sexism. A male presenter said, ‘So you’re Swedish? Have you got any English in you? Would you like some?’ Another dropped something on the floor so I would bend over and pick it up. As a 21-year-old in those days, I didn’t feel I had the right to assert myself, so I brushed it off.

Wearing bright colours was the instruction from above – the theme was eternal summer, they even paid for us to go on sunbeds. In real life, the only colour I wear is black, so a yellow blouse with huge shoulder pads was an occupational hazard. It was a hangover from Dynasty and you had to really cake on the make-up. I hated that profoundly.

Things went wrong, it was pantomime. I had velcro symbols to stick on the map and one of the fogs or a cloud would fall off. There was a props man sitting on a stool behind my board, turning the different sides for morning, afternoon and evening weather and, from time to time, he’d fall asleep because it was so gloomy back there. I’d be going, ‘This afternoon, THIS AFTERNOON’ to jolt him.

There were poignant moments I got to be a part of, too. I vividly remember standing in Scarborough in the middle of a forecast when they cut to the studio because the hostage John McCarthy had just been released. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

I was on Good Morning Britain recently and they got me to do the weather. It made me feel a bit old; I’m rubbish at technology and really uncoordinated so the whole idea of talking, waving your hand and pressing a button… But would I do it all again? For the right amount of money!

Ulrika is doing a cookery demonstration at The Great Bath Feast on Saturday 25 September