You hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over professions in the near future – and I think television presenters should be particularly worried. Think about it. Robots wouldn’t expect salaries of hundreds of thousands of pounds. They wouldn’t jump queues. They wouldn’t have lurid headlines about paedophile brothers casting a pall over their shiny facade. And they wouldn’t show a cheery Doctor Jekyll-bot to the public and a nasty Mr Snide-bot to those they considered their inferiors.
I’m thinking, of course, about Phillip Schofield. Amusingly, when you go to his Wikipedia page you find a line at the top saying: ‘This article is about the television presenter. For the medieval historian, see Phillipp Schofield’.
Schofield has literally spent his entire adult life becoming a ‘personality’
What must life be like for this other P.S. – the professor at Aberystwyth university, whose thesis was entitled ‘Land, family and inheritance in a later medieval community: Birdbrook, 1292–1412’ – whenever he wants to book a restaurant table? The same might have been said of the novelist Kate Mosse (‘A taxi driver said, ‘You’re not as tall as I’d expected’’) and the late novelist Elizabeth Taylor (‘Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini’). But even these examples of mistaken celebrity identity are surely not as poignant as a man who has devoted his life to the gaining of knowledge ever possibly being mistaken for a man who has dedicated his life to chasing fame and fortune in the most meaningless manner imaginable.
Schofield has literally spent his entire adult life becoming a ‘personality’. When a person writes a great book or paints a great picture, we can perhaps see the point in all the fretting and sorrow and side-lining of private life so common in the case of creatives. But if one’s only ambition is to be perceived as ‘chatty’ and ‘likeable’ what drives a person? Was it all for the money? A heart-shaped hole?
Whatever, the pursuit of X has been the all-consuming passion of Schofield’s life, ever since, after years of pestering the BBC, he won the position of Broadcasting House tea-boy at 17. Some cruel souls might muse that he had already found his niche (‘One lump or two? Little bicky?’) and that further ambition could have been a chronic case of delusions of adequacy. Regardless, he glided on through the prime-time heights of Dancing On Ice, finally coming to rest on ITV’s breakfast show This Morning in 2002, for which he was remunerated at a salary of some £600,000.
At the weekend, it was announced that he would step down from this role, his relationship with his co-presenter Holly Willoughby having become so frosty that no one could have blamed Schofield had he summoned a minion to anoint his private parts with Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream live on air.
There have been quite a few mis-steps from this legendarily light-footed man in recent years. Queue-gate, which unfolded as the Queen was lying in state last September, is thought to have been the start. Willoughby allegedly wanted to address the story sooner, but Schofield initially applied a queenly ‘Never explain’ attitude. After that, many enemies jostled to break through the chink in the armour.
Stories of his unpleasantness – especially towards women – became commonplace. But it was his ‘coming out’ as gay in 2020 and the subsequent fawning over his ‘bravery’ which summoned the nasty taste in the mouth. Being gay in showbiz is brave? Far from being risky, if anything being gay probably helped Schofield’s career limp on for a few more years; as the brilliant comedian David Sedaris once said:
‘I’m giving a commencement speech at the most PC school in America, Oberlin College. Because I’m a white middle-aged male, it made me wonder would I have been doing it if I wasn’t gay? It has been a good career move.’
But no matter how hard he applied the fake tan, Schofield couldn’t hide the fact that he was a stale, pale male, to use the woke term. Furthermore, a presenting team in which the male partner is 20 years older than the female half now looks woefully old-fashioned to the point of antimacassars on the This Morning sofa. They may be irritating, but there’s no doubt that the gal-pal partnership on Strictly Come Dancing of Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly (sounds like a TV detective show) seems fresh and attractive in comparison; who could blame Willoughby for eyeing up the jolly Alison Hammond?
Whatever one thinks of how overpaid Schofield was, there is one key thing in his defence: the fact remains that ITV are not holding the average citizen – even the very poor ones – upside down and shaking the change out of their pockets. The BBC are. Hearing the presenters of the Today programme grilling ministers over the cost-of-living crisis, and the choice the poor must make between ‘eating and heating’, is hard to swallow. One wonders why picking between ‘cooking and looking’ is never brought up, as the BBC’s bully-boys pursue our poorest compatriots for the wretched licence fee.
Part of the reason Schofield finally had to go was because plummeting viewing figures for This Morning made it pointless for his bosses to fight for him. Can we hope to see the BBC be similarly strict with the likes of Amol Rajan? His whopping £325,000 salary appears to be a reward – from our pockets – for failing. The audience of Rajan’s Today programme on Radio 4 is in free-fall comparable to that of This Morning. Unappetising as the Schofield story has been, compared to the real sins of the BBC presenter racket, it barely scratches the surface. Let’s get that Amol-bot booted up soon – and save ourselves some serious money.
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