Morning show host’s fall from grace exposes Britain’s strange obsession with celebrity

London: For all of Britain’s great figures in history: of literature, of music, of science; the place remains a nation with a deeply weird and unhealthy obsession for low-rent celebrity.

Being a celebrity in Britain, mind you, doesn’t necessarily correlate with those who have achieved great things. You don’t need to write the novel of a generation or even invent a vaccine to become a celebrity here. In fact, even if you do you’re unlikely to become one. Just being a “personality” will often do it. Famous for being famous.

Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield in 2022 in the winners’ room at the National Television Awards in London.Credit: Getty

Celebrity culture – mainly driven by television – has infested Britain for decades, courtesy of a highly concentrated national media market. In his 2001 novel, The Rotter’s Club, author Jonathan Coe evoked memories of BBC TV comedy Christmas special, Morecombe and Wise, as a symbol of national consensus, with the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows was watching it too.

“It came to him,” Coe wrote. “That he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets … all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of … oneness ... a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together.”

Modern celebrity culture was enhanced by the popular tabloid press of the 1980s and ’90s, where the scandal sheets on Fleet Street latched on to the favourite stars of the living room to build up heroes and bring them down almost immediately. Footballers, their wives, stars of Coronation Street and EastEnders, the royals, rockers, politicians and TV presenters.

A poll of 2000 adults earlier this year by OnePoll found 44 per cent Brits admitted to caring about things that make no difference to their life. Half of respondents said they know more about celebrities’ lives than they do their friends’, a further 80 per cent said they knew less about their mum and dad.

Around 38 per cent said they were bothered by the fact Kylie Jenner hadn’t revealed her son’s name eight months after he was born. A further 36 per cent said they spent too long thinking about how Harry and Meghan stepping down from royal duties would affect the royal family.

So, what are Britons obsessing about this week? The life and times of Phillip Schofield, the one-time popular host of ITV’s morning show, This Morning.

After weeks of tabloid headlines that his purely platonic relationship with long-time co-host, Holly Willoughby had collapsed, Schofield’s 40-year career is now imploding after admitting he was a liar, a cheat, and he was sorry.

In a dramatic statement on Friday night, UK time, the 61-year-old quit TV, confirming years of speculation and innuendo online that he had an inappropriate relationship with “a younger male” who worked as a show runner on This Morning.

Phillip Schofield cried on the shoulder of his co-presenter, Holly Willoughby when he came out as gay. His career has since imploded.Credit: itv.co.uk

“Whilst I met the man when he was a teenager and was asked to help him to get into television, it was only after he started to work on the show that it became more than just a friendship,” he said in a statement to the Daily Mail.

“That relationship was unwise, but not illegal. It is now over.”

Schofield said he was “painfully conscious” he’d lied to his employers, colleagues, friends, agents, the media and therefore the public, and was so “very, very sorry” to his family as well as for “having been unfaithful to my wife”.

Unless you’ve lived in the UK for a time during the past 20 or so years, you’d have absolutely no reason whatsoever to know who Schofield is. Unlike someone such as Piers Morgan, he has never been a journalist or tabloid newspaper editor, nor a professional provocateur.

Unlike David Koch, of Channel 7’s Sunrise, he didn’t have a career as a finance commentator. Nor was he a successful journalist, such as Today’s Karl Stefanovic, on Nine.

He had never really made any memorable TV moments either, beyond giggling fits at sexual innuendos and double entendres alongside his longtime co-host, the glamorous and much-younger Willoughby.

Schofield was once attacked by alpacas on air, interviewed the woman with the world’s largest breasts and chatted with an 80-year-old grandmother about a night of ‘rumpy pumpy’ with an Egyptian toyboy Mohammed, 35, where she used “a whole tube of KY Jelly”. But he was largely banal, inoffensive, occasionally warm and looked a bit like a Gazman model.

A one-time children’s TV host, Schofield’s big cultural moment came a few years ago when he, tearfully, on national television announced he was gay despite his long-time family man persona and 27-year marriage to his wife with two adult daughters. He expressed his guilt for the pain he’d caused them.

Phillip Schofield and his co-presenter Holly Willoughby as he came out as gay one year ago.Credit: itv.co.uk

Willoughby comforted him as he made the announcement, embracing him at the end when he called her the “sister he never had”. Viewers loved their chemistry. And they seemingly loved Schofield.

That was until last September when, during the 10-day national period of mourning over the Queen’s death, the pair were accused of “jumping the queue” of hundreds of thousands to pay their respects to the late monarch who was lying-in-state. It dominated the tabloids for days and forced a public apology.

Quarterly research by pollster YouGov this year put Schofield and Willoughby – equally the fifth most famous TV stars in the mind of Brits – with 97 per cent of respondents knowing who they were. That’s behind celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay (99 per cent), Morgan (98 per cent) but ahead of Oprah Winfrey, David Attenborough (96 per cent) and Stephen Fry (95 per cent).

Schofield has spent his entire adult life being a personality and for the past 20 years he’s sat on a couch from 10.30am to lunchtime shooting the breeze with a variety of co-hosts. But like so many TV marriages things were not as they seem.

Constant headlines about how things had become so bad that they could not sit next to each other on a couch and interview other celebrities about pointless things went on for weeks as ratings fell.

On late-night talk television and in celebrity gossip columns he’d been subject to constant innuendo about his behaviour and attitudes towards colleagues – particularly women – as well as speculation of his inappropriate relationships with a younger staff member.

It’s taken up inches of columns in the popular press and broadsheets and on their homepages.
Things reached a tipping point recently following the conviction of Schofield’s brother, Timothy, who was found guilty of child sex offences.

Last weekend when Schofield announced he was leaving the show, but would continue to present events such as the British Soap Awards for ITV, the BBC sent out a news alert to mobile phones. Now seven days later he has quit altogether, and his TV peers are now publicly accusing management of knowing and covering up his behaviour. He has also been dropped by his agent of 35 years.

Eamonn Holmes, a former colleague on ITV who also sat next to Schofield for his coming out, tweeted on Friday evening (UK time) that he’d felt “deceived and lied to”.

“We had no issue with him being gay, only support,” he said. “What transpired took us for fools. The man told us complete lies, and we unfortunately believed him.”

It’s been a turbulent past year in Britain. Political chaos of a kind not seen in generations. Deep financial and economic peril sparking a cost-of-living crisis, the death and rise of a monarch, of course, and the bloodiest battle in mainland Europe since World War II.

But oddly, the Schofield affair weirdly now ranks among them. And everyone has a view.

“I think the level of coverage of the Phillip Schofield story – which has almost no importance whatsoever – is totally weird,” David Aaronovich, a British columnist, radio presenter and author tweeted on Friday evening.

But it never seems to matter, that it never matters. And despite the woes of the world, don’t expect it to change any time soon.

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