Saturday Mornings for the UK were a bit different than the US.
When I was growing up we had 4 channels, satellite/Cable was a thing, but far from the norm, and they didn’t have specific children’s channels yet.
So, Saturday morning I’d usually get up around 0530, and pop the telly on, all that would be showing was the test image, or sometimes pages from Ceefax/Teletext, which I had no interest in reading.
About 6am BBC1 would spring to life with some old Tom and Jerry cartoon, they’d keep these loaded to play when the schedule drifted and starting the day was their go-to move. We’d then usually get some rubbish shows about slightly posh London kids pretending to be working class London Kids dealing with a basic dilemma, not doing homework, being embarrassed by a parent, or meeting their older sister who was kidnapped as a baby, all while also solving some sort of mysterious smuggling based crime, all very Enid Blyton.
We might then get some “branded” cartoons, like Kissyfur (Dull as hell) or The Raccoons (banger of a theme song aside, also dull as hell) before handing the show over to the Magazine Show. I’m of the “Going Live” generation, GTG4LYFE, but all the variations were the same thing, a couple of hosts, some celebrity guests, a lot of “Today we’re in Widnes, and we’re going to look at the Widnes Model Train exhibition, but not actually look at the trains, we’re instead going to talk about how hard it is to be cool and also like trains” type stuff, usually presented by a child with the screen presence of a ball of wool wrapped around a turnip.
These excruciating shows went on for 2-3 hours a week, and to kill the tedium they did things like live call-ins, which were only fun when someone called in to be horrible to the guests, Pop star nightmares on kids telly - YouTube games where the person at home could “control” a game of some sort with their voice and win a prize, usually a celeb guest would do the actual playing, so if you ever wanted to see Robert Smith of The Cure fail to win a cheap bike for one of the producers kids, you were in hogs heaven my friend!
One of the biggest coups for these shows was when Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, appeared on Saturday Superstore, and actually took part in the pop-music review segment where she completely destroyed the career of the band Thrashing Doves by reviewing them positively, a death-toll for a late 80’s indie band. Margaret Thatcher on Saturday Superstore (edits) | 10/01/1987 - YouTube
BBC2 would show Open University shows, which was a lot of VERY 70’s looking dudes calmly explaining things that an 8-year-old wouldn’t care about, but presented in a fashion that hungover people would greatly appreciate. Academic Beard from 1973 - YouTube
ITV was very similar to the BBC, but would do more “branded” shows, Ovid Video, Galaxy High, or Snorks, for example, and usually had their magazine show going to different towns every week in a “roadshow” format, so on a cold morning you’d get the hosts, and a pop-group with something to promote, huddled together in a truck trailer as children stand in the drizzle outside.
They also had an “early” magazine show called “The Wide-Awake Club” which went on in the TVAM slot (ITV’s early mornings were produced by a separate company) before the main Saturday Morning show, it was pretty much the same, except it stayed in the London studios, so actually got better guests, this was the place to go if you wanted to see Depeche Mode lackadaisically lips sync Master And Servant at 0850 on a saturday! Depeche Mode Master and Servant Wide Awake Club 85 - YouTube
The magazine shows would usually show at least 1 cartoon, and it would be a PROPER American one, like Jem, or Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, but they’d show these at random time, so you’d have to watch the whole show to be sure to catch it.
An aside here, I was (and remain) a HUGE Transformers fan, part of the reason I got up so early on Saturdays is because my Transformers comic would be delivered, and I wanted to read it right away, so the Cartoon was something I was excited to see, but it was only shown on weekdays in 2-3 minute segments, at times that are great for London kids to see it, but were 10 minutes after I started school. I remain mad about this to this very day.
Channel 4 didn’t really do anything on a Saturday that interested me, all sports shows and something called “California Highways” which was a lot of footage of highways in California, where nothing happened, seriously, just… pictures of roads for half an hour. Signation: California Highway (Carl Joachim Ludwig) - YouTube
the kids shows would usually wrap up around 11am, and then every channel would do news, or sports shows that didn’t show sport, just old men talking about sport, so this is when the kids would start spilling into the street to do a bit of shoplifting or a casual racism, as was tradition at the time.