Gareth Roberts

Holly Willoughby and the trivial narcissism of television

From murder to morning shows

  • From Spectator Life
(Malcolm Park/Alamy Live News)

Sometimes, the amazing crassness of television can still take your breath away, even from the longest-in-the-tooth viewer. Sky News has a correspondent reporting live from Jerusalem, in the midst of the worst pogrom since the second world war. On Tuesday evening he broke off from bringing details of the mass murder of babies in a kibbutz and the slaughter of ravers. ‘Let’s get some news away from here now and it is breaking news… that the presenter Holly Willoughby has told ITV that she will not return to host This Morning’.

This crashing juxtaposition between the grave and the trivial was reminiscent of This Morning itself, which has a habit of cutting between grotesquely disproportionate items, but this particular clash was of a scale I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

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