Anyone who follows daytime presenters Dan Walker and Piers Morgan on Twitter will know the two have a (mostly friendly) rivalry, which largely revolves around the ratings for their respective shows, BBC Breakfast and Good Morning Britain.
This reared its head once again on Thursday, as Dan was forced to point out an unfortunate mistake in Piers’ latest brag about GMB’s viewing figures.
After initially urging the BBC Breakfast team to “hide your eyes”, Piers tweeted: “So, @GMB averaged 1.16m viewers & 27% audience share pts yesterday. That’s UP by 20% & 58% on the 2016 US election.
“But.. @BBCBreakfast was DOWN by 852k viewers (34%) & 8 share pts (20%) on 2016.”
“Well done,” his BBC counterpart wrote back shortly afterwards. “But we weren’t actually on yesterday.”
Indeed, instead of their usual daytime offerings, the BBC showed rolling news coverage all morning on Thursday.
This didn’t deter Piers’ argument, though, with the divisive presenter firing back: “Could have sworn the BBC was on air yesterday morning? Did you air the Test Card or something? (Might have got more viewers..)”
After someone else pointed out Piers’ mistake, he also responded: “Mate, if my show got bounced by the news division because it’s not deemed strong enough to cover a big event like the US Election, I’d be too embarrassed to admit it let alone play Billy Big Balls.”
Despite his friendship with Donald Trump, Piers has repeatedly called out the president for his actions in the lead-up to America discovering whether Trump or Biden has won the election.
However, Piers was met with a lukewarm response when he described Trump’s behaviour as “unprecedented”, particularly in light of his own support for the current administration in the past.