Firstly, are you OK? I hope so. All perspective has appeared to leave the building in the wake of This Morning co-presenter Phillip Schofield’s resignation from one of Britain’s longest-running daytime talk shows.
You either understand its evergreen roots in Britain’s national consciousness or you need a quick explainer, so let’s recap before we get into the weeds of this. In 1988 This Morning was originally presented by real husband-and-wife Richard (Madeley) and Judy (Finnigan), who set up the very specific heterosexual-partners dynamic of British daytime presenters. Until very recently, the show was fronted by the marriage proxy of Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, a veteran of live telly, who came out of the closet in early 2020 after a lot of onscreen crying and hugging.
Where did things start going awry for the duo? In the run-up to the 2019 general election, Holly and Phil did a selfie with the incumbent prime minister, Boris Johnson, and not with opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. This might sound incredibly fucking trivial, because it is incredibly fucking trivial, and yet many column inches were devoted to their “shameful” selfie-ing and apparent Tory favoritism. (It’s worth remembering that unlike the BBC, their network, ITV, has no due impartiality commitment to programming.) The second red flag is that Holly and Phil queue-jumped the snaking civilian patriotism to see the queen in state. Nothing makes Brits feel safer than an orderly line, and nothing annoys us more than line-jumping—the royal funereal aspect making the outrage exponential. Holly was massacred in the press, Phillip less so.
For years there have been social media rumors about Phillip and a showrunner, a man 30 years his junior, having a relationship. It’s important to state that no official news outlets have reported on these whisperings, even when they felt like deafening shouts. Then, Phillip’s brother was convicted of pedophilia, and Phillip admitted to knowing about the abuse—this is incredibly fucking not good, absolutely no caveats. More recently there have been rumors about a feud, of Holly hating Phil, a chilly atmosphere on set. Conjecture as to why was rife—speculation is a helluva drug. Phil put out a statement aiming to brush those rumors aside, calling Holly his “rock.” His TV-wife “rock” remained notably silent.
In late May, Phillip quit This Morning—the story had become too much about him—and admitted to an affair with the runner. This is the point where Britain’s wheels really seem to have come off. We have entered a period of disproportionate “This Mourning”—co-host and emerging national treasure Alison Hammond openly wept on live TV, quoting the Bible because…her colleague lied about an affair he had with another colleague. Please remember, a presenter on the children’s show Blue Peter went on an (obviously illegal) cocaine rager in 1998 and nobody cried between segments. We’re verging on tabloid and broadsheet mass-hysteria. Yesterday saw Holly practically eulogizing the very alive Schofield and speaking to the hurt to the This Morning family.
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