Sorry, not sorry: Schofield is symptomatic

The TV presenter's downfall and current spiteful finale reveals much about the attainment and nature of celebrity and the decline of true contrition

I write less about culture (in its broadest definition) than I could, although I try to maintain a reasonable drumbeat for CulturAll, the digital arts journal that I co-founded and co-edit with my friends Alex and Mariana (read it! it’s good!). One result of this is that my friends sometimes have to endure my expounding of observations or theories, but they knew the risks and they’re all volunteers. I haven’t written a great deal on this platform about cultural and arts-related issues, because I suppose I was vaguely anxious about confusing, distracting or vexing people expecting painstaking examination of political and constitutional news. Equally, there are some excellent and perceptive Substack accounts on subjects like this, like Sarah Ditum’s Tox Report, The Culture Bunker by Gareth Roberts and Henry Oliver’s The Common Reader.

On the other hand, to quote from the Cranberries’ debut album, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? Or, by analogy and to cite Withnail, I’ve a fuck sight more talent that half the rubbish that gets on television. Why can’t I get on television? There are a few stories and ideas that have been flitting through my mind so, if I end up not publishing them in CulturAll, I may drop them on here and see if people like them (and if they don’t, they don’t need to read them).

So, Phillip Schofield, then. Let me start with one or two provisos: I have only seen a few clips on social media and elsewhere of the current series of Cast Away on Channel 5, which has seen the former presenter taken to “a remote island off the coast of Madagascar” and left there with only a camera for company. In addition, I was not a dedicated viewer of ITV’s This Morning during Schofield’s 21-year reign as host (although—this may surprise you—there was a time in the early 1990s when I did watch the programme regularly, when Richard and Judy were still ascending to world dominance, Dr Chris Steele was the font of medical wisdom and the late Denise Robertson listened intently to people’s woes). Finally, I did not follow the finer details of Schofield’s fall from grace as they unfolded and had rather impressionistic and hastily acquired opinions on it. Perhaps daringly, I don’t think any of these qualifications affects what I want to say.

Schofield clearly intended that his participation in Cast Away would be part of a public rehabilitation and defence of his image, giving him an almost-unfiltered platform to present himself in whatever way he wanted. There seems to be general agreement that it has not gone well so far. Stuart Heritage, reviewing the first episode in The Guardian, said that Schofield is “an incredibly bitter man”, and that“just the smallest trace of self-awareness at his situation would go a long way”. Louis Chilton in The Independent described it as “the comeback nobody wanted, on the channel nobody watches, starring a man who doesn’t seem to know why he’s doing it”, calling it a “thoroughly Alan Partridge-coded programme”, a laments its “the sheer vain pointlessness”. The Daily Telegraph’s Anita Singh admitted “it was compelling television, but not for the reasons Schofield hoped”, concluding that “the real Schofield, on this evidence, is awful”.

Those are not the notices Schofield might have wanted. He seems, whether he would admit this or not, to have had two parallel objectives in taking part in Cast Away. The first is the purely reputational and rehabilitative, which is understandable for a man who was, within his own parameters, at the top of his game until the spring of last year; now he is disgrace, reviled by many, and, at 62, it is entirely possible his entertainment career (excepting this Channel 5 swansong) is at an end. He also, however, clearly wants to tell his side of the story of his fall, and in the process of doing so settle some scores with colleagues and acquaintances. I will look at both of these aspects.

First, rehabilitation. Taking part in an eye-catching television programme, especially one which places someone outside their normal context and is in some way challenging, is an established part of any strategy of repairing a career which has suffered substantial reputational damage. In November 2022, former health and social care secretary Matt Hancock was a contestant in the 22nd series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! He had been forced to resign from Boris Johnson’s cabinet in June 2021 after it was revealed that, during the course of an extramarital affair with an old university friend who was a non-executive director of his own government department, he had breached the social distancing guidelines he himself had introduced to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. (I realise there is a lot packed into that sentence.)

At first, Hancock was pilloried. He had not shown a great deal of contrition for a series of professional and personal disasters wholly of his own making, and was still a sitting Member of Parliament when the series was due to be filmed. Although he arranged with the producers that his constituency office in West Suffolk would be able to communicate with him if necessary while he was taking part in the show, the Conservative Party understandably took a dim view that he was absenting himself from the House of Commons for most of a month. Nor was this for any political or parliamentary reason but to appear on a reality television show. Accordingly, the party’s chief whip, Simon Hart, regarded the matter as “serious enough” to suspend Hancock so that he would sit as an independent MP and, crucially, would not be eligible to be re-selected as a candidate for his constituency at the next election.

The criticism was perfectly valid and reasonable. Hancock’s constituents had every right to be aggrieved, and the deputy chairman of his local Conservative association, Andy Drummond, told the media sardonically that he was looking forward to the MP “eating a kangaroo’s penis”. The campaign group for those who had lost relatives to the pandemic, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, found it an exercise in poor taste and were rightly appalled. However, we have to remember that Hancock the defied expectations by surviving all the way to the last day of the show and eventually finished third. This was achieved solely through attracting the support and sympathy of the viewing public, and, although Ofcom received 2,000 complaints on the subject, he clearly managed to connect with the audience in some way. That said, he has not established a significant public profile or career since being forced to leave Parliament, and a few months after I’m A Celebrity… he was abused and assaulted on the London Underground.

There are several other examples of disgraced celebrities using the format of reality television to try to repair their careers. Michael Barrymore was a contestant in Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, five years after a 31-year-old man, Stuart Lubbock, had been found dead in the presenter’s swimming pool with drugs and alcohol in his system and injuries consistent with sexual assault. Barrymore was arrested on suspicion of murder, but eventually received only a police caution for using cannabis. (Ironically, a fellow contestant was another sitting MP, the odious George Galloway, at that point representing Bethnal Green and Bow for the anti-war Respect Party.)

The series had enough outlandish participants to guarantee controversy: 80s pop star Pete Burns, Galloway himself, former basketball star Dennis Rodman, Welsh rapper Maggot. And so it proved: Barrymore had been tipped by bookmakers to win the series but suffered after arguing repeatedly with former glamour model Jodie Marsh. He was mocked by Galloway (which can only be a good sign) but in the end was the runner-up, with 43.6 per cent of the final vote. It did not, however, herald a general rehabilitation. He continued to be investigated by the police over Lubbock’s death, was convicted and fined for possession of cocaine in 2011 and a handful of abortive professional engagements led nowhere. Now 72, he is active on social media, but announced in May this year that he was moving to Spain.

A rare example of this tactic proving successful is the former Labour MP Ed Balls. A junior minister in Sir Tony Blair’s government then children, schools and families secretary under his mentor Gordon Brown, he was regarded as a powerful but pugnacious and often unpleasant political operator. Balls was shadow chancellor under Ed Miliband, going toe-to-toe with the more agile and feline George Osborne, but at the 2015 general election he unexpectedly lost his Morley and Outwood seat in Yorkshire by 422 votes. He then reinvented himself by appearing on charity special The Great Sport Relief Bake Off in March 2016, followed by series 14 of Strictly Come Dancing. The possibility of humiliation was substantial, but the public warmed to him for an unstuffy sense of having a go, and he lasted until week 10 of 13. Since then, he has appeared frequently as a television presenter, serves as professor of political economy at King’s College London, and since September 2023 has presented the podcast Political Currency with former chancellor and sparring partner George Osborne.

Even on principle, then, Schofield’s decision to take part in Cast Away is very far from guaranteed to help him repair his reputation. But already he seems to have thrown away what slender chance he may have had of that outcome by his behaviour. First of all, he seems to have a vastly inflated sense of his own importance and of the iniquity of what happened to him. He has reflected on the terrible fate which awaits those who are “cancelled”, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is expressing this opinion on a mainstream television programme consisting of three 60-minute episodes dedicated entirely to him. Many people would regard such a platform as a huge privilege.

Describing the criticism he has received, he reflected that “they’ve taken pretty much everything. Reputation, dignity, legacy, everything.” Without wishing to be unkind, I’m not sure that “dignity” is the first quality the public have traditionally associated with Schofield, or, indeed, any daytime television presenter; we might recall that he began his career as a glorified continuity announcer on children’s television, sharing a fake broom cupboard with a small, squeaking gopher puppet. As for any potential lost “legacy”, it is hard to imagine what Schofield had imagined. It is true he was an ambassador for The Prince’s Trust, and was dropped in the wake of his fall, while a similar position with the Royal Voluntary Service was also terminated. But he has not associated himself strongly with any philanthropic cause or championed any charitable institution. He has nothing to put alongside, say, Dame Joanna Lumley’s patronage of the Gurkha Justice Campaign or Richard Curtis and Sir Lenny Henry’s founding of the 39-year-old charitable behemoth which is Comic Relief.

Schofield’s self-pity has also fuelled a powerful sense of betrayal. He clearly thinks that many people around him, including his This Morning co-presenter Holly Willoughby, either were insufficiently supportive of him in his time of need or were actively conniving to destroy his career and reputation. Towards the beginning of Cast Away, he said that he would not have considered emulating Matt Hancock and taken part in I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! because “there are just some channels, some people you won’t work for”. He clearly regards ITV as a whole as his enemy, though it might also be relevant that Willoughby hosted the 18th series of I’m A Celebrity… with Declan Connelly in 2018 while regular co-presenter Anthony McPartlin took a year out from the entertainment industry.

He has a long list of enemies, even if he has not been explicit about their identities. At one point in Cast Away he remarked that, just as he had been “chucked under the bus” by his employers and colleagues at ITV, so he could “drive a bus over so many people but I am not that sort of person”. He did not name Willoughby but seems to have been referring to his co-presenter when he said “When you throw someone under a bus, you’ve got to have a really bloody good reason to do it. Brand, ambition, is not a good enough reason to throw someone under a bus.” Warming to his theme of betrayal, he continued:

I think there are only three shits… a coward who never stepped up in Queuegate.. a coward because they never stepped up when I was being battered… and the other one is just brand-orientated, not what you expect, not what you think you’re gonna get.

The third is believed to be Willoughby, while the person who “never stepped up in Queuegate”, a minor scandal when Schofield and Willoughby were accused of skipping the queue to see the late Queen Elizabeth II lying in state in Westminster Hall in September 2022, may be Martin Frizell, the editor of This Morning. Frizell was accused of overseeing a “toxic” culture in the show’s production and it was alleged that complaints about his behaviour were ignored by other senior members of the team.

This may be a personal issue, but I’ve also been troubled by the way in which Schofield has talked about the aftermath of his departure from This Morning and the fact that he became suicidally depressed. In June 2023, he was interviewed by Amol Rajan for the BBC, and spoke openly of how seriously his disgrace had affected him. He admitted that his behaviour had been wrong and his relationship with a young colleague had been “a grave error”. But he clearly felt the opprobrium he attracted had been disproportionate.

I have lost everything. What am I going to do with my days? I see nothing ahead of me but blackness, and sadness, and regret, and remorse, and guilt. I did something very wrong, and then I lied about it consistently.

He emphasised how distressing the pressure from the media had been and how unending it had felt.

It is relentless, and it is day after day, after day after day… Do [you] want me to die? Because that’s where I am… last week, if my daughters hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here. They’ve been by my side every moment because they’re scared to let me out of their sight.

Let me be quite clear: I am not in any way diminishing the seriousness of depression or the terrible bleakness of someone who finds himself or herself genuinely and realistically contemplating ending their life. Nor am I saying that Schofield was not suicidal—only he can know that and he says that he was, so I will take it to be true. Furthermore I am not in any way suggesting that suicidal ideation is shameful or that people should not talk about it. But there are intertwined issues of context and intention.

Rightly or wrongly, when Schofield left This Morning in May 2023, he was widely condemned as having behaved at least inappropriately on his relations with a much younger colleague. It was reported that Willoughby had given the show’s producers an ultimatum that Schofield had to leave or she would. He admitted that he had lied to colleagues about his relationship, and the fact that it had happened while he was still married was also criticised. Inevitably, some accusations went much further: the fact that Schofield had first met the other man when the latter was only 15 years old raised the spectre that he had “groomed” him or perhaps had sex with him while he was under the age of consent. Schofield insisted that the relationship had been “unwise” but “not illegal”; nevertheless there is no easier insinuation to make or any stigma harder to shake off than that of paedophilia.

An article in Vogue by Raven Smith a few days after Schofield spoke to Rajan captured some of the frenetic nature of the scandal and its reporting.

For years there have been social media rumours about Phillip and a showrunner, a man 30 years his junior, having a relationship… Phillip’s brother was convicted of pedophilia, and Phillip admitted to knowing about the abuse—this is incredibly fucking not good, absolutely no caveats… some of us are still asking who knew what and when—and, grimly, how old the man was when the relationship started. There’s no two ways about pedophilia, there’s no two ways about consent.

However, Smith then noted that there had been no specific allegations of sexual abuse or underage sex, “just lots of pictures of Phillip and a boy looking considerably younger”.

Given all of this, it is easy to imagine that Schofield felt helplessly and hopelessly beleaguered, and we only need to recall the tragic death of presenter Caroline Flack in 2020, or of former Welsh Labour politician Carl Sargeant in 2017, to accept that he might have had suicidal thoughts. By talking about the subject in the way he did, though, Schofield at the very least allowed some people to infer that he was using it as a buttress of his defence, proof of how badly he had been treated. After all, if someone says that they have been so depressed that they have considered suicide, it is difficult to insist that the situation which caused their depression had been triggered by their own behaviour. It can be seen, in some ways, as a demand that critics back off.

I want to spend a little time expanding on Schofield’s apology, and the idea of public apologies in general. Let us just be clear about what we know to have happened: in 2020, ITV looked into rumours of a relationship between Schofield and a younger male colleague, and both men had “categorically and repeatedly denied” any relationship; in 2021, following complaints by resident medical expert Dr Ranj, there had been an investigation by an independent and external adviser of bullying and discrimination within the production of This Morning, but “this external review found no evidence of bullying or discrimination”; on 20 May 2023, with continuing media speculation about Schofield’s relationship with a colleague, the presenter announced he was stepping down from This Morning because “I want to do what I can to protect the show I love”; on 27 May 2023, Schofield resigned from ITV altogether because he had conducted an “unwise, but not illegal” relationship with his younger colleague and had lied to his employers about it; ITV said in a statement that “We are deeply disappointed by the admissions of deceit made tonight by Phillip Schofield… [he] made assurances to us which he now acknowledges were untrue and we feel badly let down”.

At the end of May, Schofield issued a statement to The Daily Mail to try to draw a line under the controversy and set the facts on the record. He used the statement to apologise and to show contrition for his behaviour, presumably in part, at least, to prevent more reputational damage (though he may have meant it in all earnestness). Let’s be very clear what he was apologising for.

The first thing I want to say is: I am deeply sorry for having lied to them (the Daily Mail), and to many others about a relationship that I had with someone working on This Morning… I am painfully conscious that I have lied to my employers at ITV, to my colleagues and friends, to my agents, to the media and therefore the public, and most importantly of all to my family.

This was unavoidable. Schofield clearly had deliberately misled his employers at ITV, denying a specific (and true) accusation because to have told the truth would have been uncomfortable and inconvenient. However, he was insistent that there had been nothing illegal about his relationship and that it had begun purely as platonic association.

Contrary to speculation, 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.

However, he acknowledged that his deception was not just a matter between him and his employers and that his relationship with his colleague had been a betrayal of the marriage he was still in at that point.

I am so very, very sorry… for having been unfaithful to my wife… I will reflect on my very bad judgement in both participating in the relationship and then lying about it.

Prima facie, it is a relatively frank apology for conduct which was clearly unprofessional towards his employers, a breach of trust with the audience of This Morning and unquestionbly a betrayal of his wife. He had come out as gay in February 2020, although he admitted that when he had married Stephanie Lowe in 1993 he had privately thought he was bisexual. He said that he was not at that stage ready for a relationship with a man, which in hindsight would seem to have been untrue.

Nevertheless, there is nothing in the narrative that Schofield presented which would seem to be serious enough to be career-ending. Given that the country had then recently had a prime minister in the person of Boris Johnson the number of whose children is not even officially known and who had engaged in at least five extra-marital affairs that were in the public domain, Schofield had not committed a capital crime. Given his lying, ITV was entitled to dismiss him and he had to accept his responsibility for that. But celebrities lie and are sacked from time to time (again, Boris Johnson was sacked from his first position as a graduate trainee at The Times for inventing quotations for an article) and many have confessed, been granted absolution and found their way back to some professional standing. Why did Schofield fall so much further, to the extent that he acknowledges he will probably never work in television again?

I think there are two factors to consider. The first is that Schofield, in repeating his “unwise, but not illegal” mantra, partially misses the point. Setting aside the tabloid innuendo and the darker accusations of parts of the internet, it is possible to accept that there was no unlawful element to his relationship with his much younger colleague. It remains the case, however, that they first met when the younger man was legally a child, that Schofield used his influence to help him make his first steps into the television industry and that, when a sexual element to their relationship did develop, Schofield was one of the most famous, popular and highly paid presenters on television. The power imbalance is glaring, but it is not an aspect he addressed. If he had been honest with ITV when asked explicitly about the relationship in 2020, would the channel’s management have shrugged and let him get on with things? One or other of them would surely have found his employment coming to an end, and, at that stage, it was unlikely to have been Schofield.

A secret, on-off relationship with a man who has known you since you were 15, helped you launch your career and with whom your involvement, if discovered, would probably cost you your job is not a sketch of a healthy working life or one free from coercion or suggestion. This was not some far-off, casually accepting era in television’s past, but a matter of a few years ago, well into the era of “wokeness”. If the relationship was lopsided or unhealthy, the blame has to lie with the older, more powerful, more experienced participant: Schofield. But he clings to the defence that it was “unwise, but not illegal”.

There is one final factor which I think is relevant, and it is part of the explanation for the dramatic thoroughness of Schofield’s fall from grace. His whole career has been spent as a presenter, from his earliest days in New Zealand fronting television music programme Shazam! and his first steps with the BBC in the Broom Cupboard. The role of a presenter is a strange one, since it relies not on any particular, identifiable talent or skill. This is not to disparage it: I may be in a minority but I think hosting television or radio shows is one of those roles which is underrated and much harder to do well than people think. It requires a quicksilver combination of qualities which can include charm, wit, charisma, patience, improvisation, resourcefulness and an ability to project, whether sincerely or not, the image of some acting naturally and spontaneously.

In short, it can rely on you appearing to be warm and nice. Think about those who do it well and are successful: Ant and Dec, able to remain endearingly light-hearted and unserious despite approaching the age of 50, effortlessly engaging and versatile; Davina McCall, empathetic, kind, good-humoured and retaining a sense of the ridiculous; or a legendary figure like Sir Terry Wogan, a man who concealed a formidable work ethic and a passion for broadcasting beneath a genial, generous-spirited and self-deprecating exterior, witty and possessed of an uncanny sense for the tone his specific audience wanted him to strike.

I would argue that for decades Schofield was able to pull off this performance and pull it off well. Even after he moved on from children’s television in the mid-1990s, he preserved an innocent enthusiasm and unthreatening friendliness that made him adaptable, whether hosting a game show like Talking Telephone Numbers or Dancing on Ice, acting as compère for industry events like the British Soap Awards or navigating the varied demands of a magazine format like This Morning. More than that, he made it look artless, straightforward, easy: as Ben Dowell described “the Schofe” in The Times last year, “a man who made us smile, whose impeccable presenting career represented, to anyone with similar ambitions, a dream”.

This friendly, open, welcoming persona simply cannot survive the revelation that Schofield may not, after all, be such a nice man. He does not need to be a sexual abuser for us to find him now duplicitous, self-interested, perhaps manipulative, lacking in judgement, self-pitying and, on occasion, venomous. In a different part of the television industry, this might not matter, and might even provide some of the foundations of a very different but still successful persona; but as a presenter of daytime television and light entertainment, the image of “niceness” was all Schofield had. Now that it is ripped away, he is simply a bitter man in his early sixties, a whining victim despite continued financial health and security, a fallen idol who resents his absence from the pedestal on which he once stood.

Phillip Schofield has no doubt been through trauma and turmoil since his fall from grace last May: most people do at some point in their lives. It is also true of Schofield, and of many people in this world, that at least some of that trauma and turmoil resulted from decisions he made, the consequences of actions taken for self-interest returning, boomerang-like, to knock him off-balance. Few people, whether famous or anonymous, are pure-bred villains or heroes, and it is unfair to put Schofield, as some have done recently, on a par with Huw Edwards, also a disgraced TV presenter but guilty in law of much darker, more horrific offences.

What can now be seen in Schofield is a man who probably sees himself more as victim than perpetrator, let down by friends and intrigued against by colleagues, all the while minimising his own misconduct. Whether Cast Away represents a genuine bid for rehabilitation or just a last opportunity to present his version of the truth and settle scores with enemies, the audience may find it interesting, revealing or entertaining, but viewers are unlikely to think better of Schofield as a result. To call it a loss of “legacy” may be grandiose; it might be more accurate to view it as a fair assessment after a 40-year career. He rode high for many years before succumbing to sabotage in which he himself had at least connived, and that messy, tangled, human dénouement may in fact be the most relatable thing he could have done. Many of us could have made a similar set of decisions and seen them have a similar outcome, but it was in the end Schofield, not the public, who did so.