Good Morning Britain hosts, Susanna Reid and Ben Shephard, were visibly shocked by Patsy Palmer's abrupt termination of the interview and later tried to apologise. Photo / ITV
Good Morning Britain hosts, Susanna Reid and Ben Shephard, were visibly shocked by Patsy Palmer's abrupt termination of the interview and later tried to apologise. Photo / ITV
Good Morning Britain hosts Susanna Reid and Ben Shephard were left stunned when a celebrity guest announced she was "doing a Piers Morgan" and shut down their interview after less than two minutes.
The awkward on-air encounter comes a week after Good Morning Britain host Morgan stormed off set duringa heated argument about Meghan Markle. He later left the show for good.
Reid and Shephard were chatting to British actress Patsy Palmer, calling in from Malibu, when the soap star took umbrage at the choice of words used to describe her at the bottom of the screen.
"Patsy Palmer, actress and entrepreneur," the description initially read, but changed 30 seconds into the interview, causing an instant reaction from Palmer, who leaned in to read the update.
"PATSY PALMER: ADDICT TO WELLNESS GURU" it read. Palmer has in the past spoken about suffering drug and alcohol addition in the 90s, but revealed in a 2010 interview that she'd been clean and sober since 2004.
As Palmer registered the description, she became visibly upset and shut down the interview.
Actress, Patsy Palmer, was visibly upset by the tagline "addict to wellness guru" that appeared on screen next to her name. She terminated the interview immediately. Photo / ITV
"You know what actually, I don't even want to do this interview, because I don't even want to look at what it says at the bottom of that screen," she said. "So I'm just gonna switch off, do a real Piers Morgan, and say it's not OK to have 'addict to wellness guru' on the bottom of the screen. My issues that I had years ago were talked about by me many, many years ago, and it's over. So I'm not going to talk to you," she said.
Both hosts rushed to apologise, but Palmer shut down her feed and the screen went dark.
"That was obviously a quote from Patsy's book, as she's talked about in the past, and it certainly wasn't our intention to upset Patsy," Shephard said.
"No, I had no idea that was on the screen. Well that's a terrible shame. Our apologies to Patsy. She's entitled not to do the interview, and we carry on," Reid said.
Later on in the show, the hosts again insisted they hadn't intended to upset Palmer, with Reid appearing to reference her co-host's headline-making departure from GMB last week.
Piers Morgan stormed off the set of Good Morning Britain last week over his comments about Meghan Markle. He later resigned from his job on the TV show. Photo / ITV
"Everyone has a right not to be on this programme if they don't want to be, as we know," she said.
Later on, the actress hit back at the hosts' explanation that they'd used a quote from her own book.
"I haven't written a book in 20 years so don't believe that either," she wrote on Instagram Stories (her memoir All Of Me: Life, Love And Addiction was published in 2007).
"Guess what people! People change and grow and live happy healthy lives, so stop trying to make people small and worthless.
"Finish it now. Thank you for all of your kind words."
