This period saw the ITV companies, and the BBC, expand their services further into the day than previously. A large part of this was a result of the franchising of a breakfast service in 1980. TV-am was awarded this contract and given a provisional start date of May 1983. There had been other programmes previously, such as Yorkshire's "Good Morning Calendar", which had shown that the public were interested in a breakfast service. As a result, TV-am and the BBC rushed their own services to the air. TV-am would broadcast between the hours of 6.00am and 9.25am every morning; the somewhat obscure 9.25 close time came about in order to allow time to switch transmitters from the breakfast broadcaster over to the regional ITV stations; today this transition is seamless, though the anomaly remains. TV-am launched as a serious news programme on 1 February 1983; however, it changed its format soon after to attempt to copy the success of the BBC's "Breakfast Time".