Nick Owen credits his enduring 40-year friendship with Anne Diamond for helping them through parallel cancer battles:’I like to feel that we’ve both helped each other get through it’ [Video]

Those of us with longer memories will perhaps remember them as breakfast television’s first professional golden couple. 

Long before Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan, Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield or even the recently paired Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley, it was Nick Owen and Anne Diamond who millions of Brits woke to each morning. 

With an ever-revolving wardrobe of comfortable knitwear and a relaxed, personable demeanor, Owen was the conventional yin to Diamond’s sprightly and vivacious yang on TV-am. 

Launched in 1983, it would summon the birth of breakfast TV as we know it, cement a long-lasting working relationship and, crucially, a close personal friendship that still endures to this day. 

And Owen, now 76 and working away from mainstream television, admits there is a terrible irony in Diamond’s breast cancer diagnosis coming shortly before doctors discovered he had an ‘aggressive’ form of prostate cancer.