Phillip Schofield scandal: ITV’s This Morning is broken – and even Holly Willoughby can’t fix it

Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby pose in simpler times before the This Morning scandal broke. Photo / AP

OPINION

The debacle of This Morning is a soap opera for our times. Indeed, were it fiction, you might think it a ridiculous exaggeration of the truth. But the departure of Phillip Schofield following an affair with a young ITV employee, and the seemingly irreparable rift between Schofield and co-presenter Holly Willoughby, all unfolded before our eyes, greeted with opprobrium by social media and the press – and with a heavy dose of Schadenfreude, too.

Had Schofield and Willoughby been a bit more rock‘n’roll, we might have been prepared to swallow it, but here was the public collapse of a duo whose squeaky-clean demeanour represented Britain at its blandest. Think George at Asda, work karaoke parties, baby showers. When the mask slipped, we were all too ready to pounce and make judgments. The public vituperation continued on Tuesday night at the National Television Awards, when the cast of This Morning (including Willoughby) were booed. An Anglo-Saxon nation at its baying best, you could say.

Yet the situation has made me think that This Morning needs to call it a day. It has become a toxic brand, and not even Willoughby – supposedly rejuvenated after a summer break – can save it.

The show has felt like an anachronism for some time. It was launched in 1988 in what was a different TV landscape: “showbusiness” gossip, fashion, beauty tips and cookery were all the rage for an audience who demanded very little. It was the sort of thing ripe for a Victoria Wood sketch – and in fact, the late comedian did send it up brilliantly in a 1992 Christmas special, complete with a frenetic keep-fit expert: “We don’t all want to be Madonna, do we? Some of us want to be Petula Clark.” Such shows were always a joke, but the ribbing was affectionate. Nor is This Morning the first daytime show to be beset by scandal. Remember the unravelling of Breakfast Time’s Frank Bough back in the 1980s, a man as much at home in sex dungeons as he was in an Aran sweater?

Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby both issued statements on their Instagram accounts after the scandal. Photo / Instagram

To give them credit, the extraordinary longevity of This Morning is partly down to Schofield and Willoughby, a giggly brother-and-sister duo to whom viewers really took – although I could never stomach their concerned faces whenever a celebrity was interviewed about their latest trauma. In recent years, however, the show has felt larger-than-life, with stories becoming more extreme and the gentler ambience evoked under the aegis of original husband-and-wife-team Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan becoming a distant memory. This Morning still felt out of date, but out of date on account of its cosy sofa format as opposed to its content (which instead felt as though you were being drip-fed a deranged person’s Twitter feed).

If This Morning is now at a crisis point – and it certainly feels like it – the question for ITV is whether it should continue at all. The very name has become synonymous not just with scandal, but with a breach of viewers’ trust. This was epitomised by the “Queuegate” debacle of last year, in which Schofield and Willoughby appeared not to join the long line of mourners for the late Queen at Westminster Abbey. They later claimed that they were there in a journalistic capacity, but for millions of viewers and readers, the damage was done: as the pair returned to Britain’s screens, a show that prided itself on empathy and understanding suddenly looked stage-managed.

I don’t think there’s any point in keeping This Morning, as a brand, alive. ITV could try to come up with a similar replacement, although history shows that when TV companies do this, as Channel 4 did when it launched RI:SE following the end of The Big Breakfast, the clout of the old programme usually lingers and the new show is rarely able to break through in its own right. And it isn’t as though ITV needed a morning chat-show in that slot. The channel already has Good Morning Britain earlier in the day, doing perfectly well, and Loose Women at 12.30pm, running since 2000 (and a totally different kind of crazy). This Morning had more of an emphasis on lifestyle, but I am not sure if that’s such a draw for daytime audiences these days – at least not in a sofa-chat style format.

Because lifestyle, as the TV listings prove, is still extremely popular. You could argue that it’s a little too popular with daytime schedules, which are crammed to the rafters with things that I’m never at home to watch. The BBC has it down to a fine art: Bargain Hunt, Homes Under the Hammer, Money for Nothing and repeats of Rick Stein’s Cornwall all air in the late morning-to-early afternoon slot, forms of reassuring mental chewing-gum. And ITV could do worse than follow in the footsteps of its rivals. As a general rule, these shows are quick to make, and cheap, and the corporation’s success with them is such that they are often repeated or reformatted.

This provides far better value than a live show such as This Morning: once an episode of the latter has aired, it essentially becomes ephemera, or fodder for prodigious tweeters at best. Yet there are rumours that Willoughby’s salary is about to rise to £1 million: think of how many episodes of a lifestyle series set at a Shropshire owl sanctuary you could film for that. It’s a bit like if the BBC reduced Gary Lineker’s salary by half, and saved the BBC Singers. But that’s a discussion for another time.