It was billed to be possibly the most ITV thing to have ever happened. Hyped all week to deliver maximum mayhem, Good Evening Britain, a current affairs-meets-World Cup special, displayed the channel’s usual flair for format mashups.

Since Piers Morgan arrived in 2015 to bulldoze co-host Susannah Reid’s mannered professionalism, the channel’s breakfast news offering, Good Morning Britain, has become surprisingly watchable as the pair have honed daytime’s most unlikely chemistry. Effectively, he becomes a professional troll at the slightest touch, while she tries to tempt out the reporter he once was, and often wins. It actually works. The idea here was to bring that staged pantomime to primetime to channel the mood of a country feverish from England’s less-than-crucial game game against Belgium. The added threat was that an off-leash, post-watershed Morgan would be drinking throughout the football match. The message from ITV’s pre-publicity: “What could possibly go right?”

With the Belgium stakes low given England had already qualified for the second round, Morgan had spent a week of pre-publicity teasing a showdown with Danny Dyer. Some context: Morgan has spent the month branding the contestants of Love Island “braindead zombies,” Dyer’s daughter, Dani, is currently riding high in the villa. Touch papers, ready.

Morgan began suitably fired up after England’s miserable (or perhaps tactically shrewd) performance, shouting down David Ginola that the result was armageddon for England’s prospects. Conversation ping-ponged from frustrations around the football to Brexit and Love Island, but that in itself is pretty standard for the breakfast format. And, while dimming the studio lights and turning the thing into a mid-octane boys club added to the weird mood, Morgan’s best efforts could not land the car crash many expected. Reid largely gritted her teeth; this was not a failure she was going to own.

In an impressively berserk panel of guests, Jeremy Corbyn got to tell a touching story about watching the 1966 World Cup final before getting another opportunity to attempt to explain Labour’s Brexit policy. Amir Khan admitted to a six-week sex ban before boxing matches. Pamela Anderson rose above just about everything while admitting that she doesn’t watch Love Island or football, despite dating a member of the French squad. Ed Balls, meanwhile, just looked delighted to be there. With that lineup, you would have thought that something might have happened, but the only moment you could risk filing as essential viewing came when Dyer twice branded David Cameron a “twat” for calling the EU referendum in the first place. Hardly headline news any more, but proof you can always rely on Dyer to liven things up (regarding Love Island, he was magnanimous, to the obvious frustration of Morgan).

By the end, even Morgan was taking the optimistic road around Gareth Southgate’s strategy. In that sense, Good Evening Britain perfectly pulled off its brief in capturing the mood of a disappointed nation.