Colin Hogg: Good Morning show in capable hands

Jeanette Thomas and Matt Gibb host TV One's Good Morning.

TV One’s breakfast offering better than you might expect.

In the relentless search for new and challenging viewing experiences, I turned to Good Morning, a television show with one of those titles that says it all.

Oddly, it turned out to be better than I expected, though I hadn't really expected a great deal. Well, you shouldn't expect a great deal at nine o'clock on Monday morning, which is when the TV One show launched its 2015 season.

And not with a splash so much as a talkfest, except, as I said, the show actually wasn't that bad, apart from the advertorial, though I do have a strange soft spot for a super-excited salesman shrieking about the quality of his vacuum cleaners.

The guy on Monday was levitating on his own energy and the vacuum he was raving about was so powerful it could stick to the ceiling, which he duly demonstrated, though he didn't say what practical purpose that could have.

Aside from the advertorials, Good Morning was mainly a talk show and not a bad one in the hands of Jeanette Thomas and Matt Gibb who manage to be affable without running completely on empty.

And if that sounds like thin praise, then that's partly because the show wasted its first 10 minutes making scrambled eggs in almost extended real time with a restaurateur called Ganesh Raj and Good Morning's other Monday man-panel members, broadcaster Wallace Chapman and a cocky cockney geezer called, weirdly, Miles Davis.

Gibb chaired the man chat once they'd finished with the endless eggs and it was very entertaining. The topic was whether fathers should be present at the birth of their children and the blokes all got variously exercised about it.

Chapman declared, rather old-fashionedly, that he'd rather sit outside and read a magazine and be called in when it was all over and tidied up a bit. Davis, a father of six, was appalled, to the extent of questioning Chapman's manhood.

"I'm not even sure Wallace wants to be present at the conception."

Raj claimed he was present at the birth of his children only for the gas.

Chapman further admitted he hadn't discussed any of this with his wife. Davis rolled his eyes. There should be a follow-up next week. There'd better be.

Even stranger, there was a segment involving Jeanette Thomas in conversation with the ageless Jude Dobson about a multimedia manual for parents she has developed which might have been rather dull and worthy.

But also present to share personal parenting experiences was ex-boxer Shane Cameron with wife Tara and their bouncy little boy. Cameron was revealed as a softie, and a father who hopes his "little boy" doesn't want to be a boxer.

And then, after another duly signposted advertorial, Thomas and Gibb interviewed Kiwi TV actor and notable hunk Ben Barrington in a way that made me like him, despite all his gratuitous toplessness in the hit Australian TV series Offspring.

I mean, it didn't stick me to the ceiling like the vacuum cleaner or anything that exciting, but it was engaging - certainly for morning TV. Which, as previously mentioned, might be thin praise.