Technicolour nightmare: the inside story of Phillip Schofield’s shocking downfall
For more than four decades, the former ‘This Morning’ presenter was synonymous with bulletproof affability, writes Ed Power. It’s only made his cataclysmic fall from grace that much more surprising
The Phillip Schofield who sat down with the BBC a few days ago to discuss his exit from This Morning was unrecognisable from the wholesome figure who has charmed television viewers for the past 40 years or so. His features were sunken, the pallor of his skin suggested sleepless nights and spiralling thoughts. “I have to talk about television in the past tense, which breaks my heart,” he said in his first interview since his high-profile departure from the show he’s fronted for 21 years. “It is relentless – day after day after day.”
He was evoking the memory of the late Caroline Flack, who took her life after becoming the subject of a social media pile-on in 2020. Schofield, 61, who resigned from ITV after admitting to an “unwise but not illegal relationship” with a man in his mid-twenties who once worked on This Morning with him, felt he was in a similar social-media crosshairs. A national treasure had become a national disgrace, and it was too much for him to process.
The extent to which the controversy had caused him to unravel was clear in the new interview. Schofield was a broken man who implied he had entertained thoughts of suicide. He said that had his daughters not supported him, he “wouldn’t be here. They’ve guarded me and won’t let me out of their sight.”
British light entertainment has not seen a rise and fall so dramatic since the downfall of Michael Barrymore, whose career was destroyed when a man was found dead in the swimming pool of Barrymore’s £2m mansion after a party in 2001. The circumstances are very different, but Schofield’s downward trajectory has been no less cataclysmic.
Schofield said it was difficult to speak “because there is an innocent person here who didn’t do anything wrong”. He was referring to his former lover, whom he first met when the man was a 15-year-old boy at drama school. Schofield said he had followed the individual on Twitter “totally innocently” and that the relationship had started when the man was in his twenties and working at ITV. “We’d become mates,” he explained. “In my dressing room one day, something happened, which obviously I will regret forever, for him and for me – mostly him.”
It’s always a shock seeing a figure from the jolly and upbeat world of daytime television in a darker context. In the case of Schofield, the change in his demeanour has been astonishing. From the start of his career, he had cultivated a persona of bulletproof affability. With his perky hair and quick, mischievous eyes, he came into our living rooms in the guise of the slightly naughty friend who made us feel better about ourselves. The cliche that we think we know TV presenters almost better than our own family was never truer than with Schofield: he was the nation’s best mate, always ready with a kind word and a quick joke.
He arrived on the airwaves with that persona fully formed. With Schofield, there was never a feeling of watching a work in progress. This is clear looking back to his early broadcasts on BBC children’s television – long before the CBeebies era – where he got his big break after returning to the UK from New Zealand (and a stint on TV there).
Schofield was always game for a chuckle: or such was the impression. Hosting children’s TV from a studio so cramped that he christened it “the Broom Cupboard”, he was in his element. In his first BBC gig, presenting kids’ TV links alongside Gordon the Gopher, he looked like he was having the time of his life. Many presenters would have felt it beneath them to trade one-liners with a semi-decaying puppet: Schofield jumped in feet first. He saw only the positives. “If you can introduce Newsround with a fluffy gopher squeaking next to you, you can handle anything,” he later said.
Schofield brought showbiz sparkle to a corner of the BBC long regarded as fuddy-duddy and unglamorous. With his boyish side-parting, loud sweaters and ever-present smile, he looked more like a pop star than someone whose job was to tee viewers up for Blue Peter. His talents were obvious to commissioners at the BBC. Within two years, he had been bumped up to the higher profile world of Saturday morning TV with Going Live! alongside Sarah Greene, the first in a succession of female co-hosts.
But it was only a matter of time before he left behind children’s television entirely. By the early Nineties, ITV had come knocking. Suddenly that hair and that smile were ubiquitous. He was on Schofield’s Quest, Schofield’s TV Gold, and the game show Talking Telephone Numbers. That so many of these properties had his name in the title was a testament to his ambition and ITV’s belief in his bankability.
Nor was Schofield one of those presenters who only shone in one medium. He branched into radio, hosted awards shows for Smash Hits (and later the British Soap Awards), and in 1991 succeeded Jason Donovan as the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat – a bells and whistles musical heavily dependent on the charisma of its star. His Joseph was a huge success – vindicating his likeability and ambition. He wasn’t a natural singer, yet such was his charm, his lack of vocal prowess was made to feel irrelevant.
“His television persona stands him in excellent stead here: he enjoys being a bit silly, whether timidly trying to attract Pharaoh’s attention or snake-wrestling in a pit, but his japery is always in the service of the show rather than at its expense,” said the Financial Times of his Joseph. “Schofield’s singing voice is not terrific – his phrasing frequently betrays either breath problems or a touch of the club singer – but it is eminently serviceable, and the sheer mateyness of his performance transcends such failings in this context.”
He was at a point when everything he touched turned to gold. Naturally, advertisers beat a path to his door. At various points in his career, he was an ambassador for The Prince’s Trust, the public face of We Buy Any Car, and had his own “Phillip Schofield Food Range” with Boots. It was all leading up to something. And then, in 2002, when John Leslie was dismissed from This Morning, he was parachuted in as a presenter of what was already ITV’s flagship daytime show. The irony, of course, was that Leslie was let go amid accusations of sexual impropriety. Twenty years later, Schofield would find himself denying similar allegations.
Off camera, too, he also seemed to be thriving. In 1993 he had married his long-term girlfriend, Stephanie Lowe, whom he had met at the Children’s BBC when he was 25 (“You’d have thought someone wouldn’t be attracted to a man with a puppet and dodgy jumpers!” he had joked). With two daughters coming along, the impression was of a presenter whose domestic life was almost as charmed and blissful as his career. But now and then, there would be hints of something darker behind that boy-next-door smile. Fern Britton, his first This Morning co-host, quit in 2009 halfway through her contract. Schofield had described Britton as his “onscreen wife” and, foreshadowing comments he would subsequently make about Holly Willoughby, said they shared a unique chemistry.
Yet she was suddenly gone. There was muttering of a feud between the two. One rumour was that Britton had left upon discovering Schofield was better paid to the tune of £250,000. She denied this, saying she had no idea of his wages. Nonetheless, she was conspicuously absent when This Morning celebrated its 25th birthday. Five years on, during a 30th anniversary broadcast, the atmosphere between Britton and Schofield turned frosty when Britton said she had been excluded from a Bafta event honouring the programme.
“Congrats on the Bafta,” she had said. “That was absolutely wonderful and brilliant. I would have loved to have been there, but I didn’t get an invitation.” Schofield noted that she was on stage in Scotland at the time of the event. Britton replied: “I wasn’t on Monday night – I would have come but I wasn’t invited.”
By the time Britton left, Schofield was king of the couch, and This Morning was his domain. That was confirmed when ITV allowed him to hand-pick his new co-presenter. He asked for Holly Willoughby, his junior by 19 years, after hosting Dancing on Ice with her. “We had such fun on DOI that when the position became vacant on This Morning I said, ‘Holly is the only person I want. If I can’t have her I am not playing’.”
He and Britton had been equals on Britain’s most watched settee. Initially, though, the dynamic with Willoughby was altogether different. He was the early morning elder lemon, she the newcomer basking in his shadow. With time, the dynamic changed. Schofield had tarnished his golden boy image in 2012 when, in an Alan Partridge-esque meltdown, he confronted then prime minister David Cameron with a list of alleged Conservative paedophiles he had found online. The list was nothing more than tittle-tattle gleaned from Google – and several of the names were visible to viewers. Cameron was stunned. He, like viewers, couldn’t quite believe the display of ego he was witnessing from a presenter who had carefully presented himself to the nation as one of the good guys.
That Schofield might have a nasty, impetuous streak was also hinted at in rumours that he had blocked Amanda Holden from taking on high-profile roles inside ITV. It was suggested that he had described Holden as “difficult to manage”, and “actively campaigned” for former pop star Rochelle Humes to be appointed a guest presenter on This Morning instead.
There were also whispers that he could be demanding and didn’t suffer fools on set. The atmosphere had been much more relaxed, some staffers said, when Dermot O’Leary and Alison Hammond stood in. Eamonn Holmes, who had presented the Friday slot with his wife Ruth Langsford until February 2022, went further, publicly labelling Schofield “passive-aggressive” and guilty of “snubbing people”.
Willoughby, meanwhile, was thriving. Her charm and friendliness made her irresistible to advertisers. Hired to be the face of Marks and Spencer, she became the nation’s big sister: glamorous but also wise and down to earth. She had undoubtedly become Schofield’s equal in terms of earning power. In 2017, it was reported that she received a pay rise to match Schofield’s £600,000 salary. Up to that point, she had supposedly received £200,000 less than her co-host. That she was the true star of This Morning seemed confirmed when she was hired to stand in for an absent Ant McPartlin on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
There was another bombshell in 2020 when Schofield came out as gay. It was an emotional moment both for him and Willoughby, who had hugged him as he wept on the This Morning sofa. “You never know what’s going on in someone’s seemingly perfect life, what issues they are struggling with, or the state of their wellbeing,” he said. “And so you won’t know what has been consuming me for the last few years.”
Willoughby wasn’t above controversy, either. Both she and Schofield put their feet in it last year with “queuegate”. As members of the public waited through the night to see the late Queen lying in state, Schofield and Willoughby were seen as disrespecting both the late Elizabeth II and their This Morning public by using their VIP privilege to waltz to the top of the line. The official excuse was they were filming a segment for their show – which didn’t cut much ice with people who’d been freezing their mittens off waiting through the night to see the Queen.
If anything, though, the furore cemented the impression of an unbreakable television couple who would rise and fall together. Then in April, the illusion was shattered. Schofield took time off the air after his brother Timothy was convicted of 11 sexual offences involving a child (the presenter has publicly disowned his brother). In the aftermath of the conviction, rumours circulated of a falling out with Willoughby, which Schofield denied, saying: “We’re the best of friends – as always, she is an incredible support on screen, behind the scenes and on the phone. Holly has always been there for me through thick and thin. And I’ve been there for her.”
But the controversy snowballed. On 20 May it was announced that he had left This Morning. Six days later, he was out of ITV altogether after admitting to that aforementioned “consensual but not illegal” relationship. His agents also dropped him, and Willoughby said he had lied to her. A presenter who had thrived as the nation’s best mate was now alone and without friends – the career he had worked so hard to build over four decades was reduced to rubble and rumours over a few ruinous weeks.
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