Where’s Phillip Schofield gone? Are we even allowed to ask?

If you make people live in a world of pure imagination, don’t be surprised when they start believing absolutely anything, writes Tom Peck

If you can’t just say the truth then sadly someone else will (Getty)

It could hardly be more like something out of a dystopian novel. A bright warm day in May and the clock strikes 10. The music plays, the titles roll but suddenly missing from the video tape is the man who’s been there for 23 years.

His co-presenter’s not in the pre-roll either. Both of them have been replaced by some weird graphic text written across various buildings.

Where’s he gone? Well, as is probably known by now, he agreed to “step down with immediate effect”, over the weekend. And so, after more than two decades of hosting one of the country’s most watched TV shows, his passing is marked by a 30 second tribute, delivered by the relief presenters, drafted in from the weekend slot to try and pretend everything’s fine.

He is, they say, “one of the best live broadcasters the country has ever had” and they “wish him all the best for the future”.

So where’s he gone then? He’s brilliant you know, we wish him well, but all you need to know is that he’s gone and he’s not coming back. Well, hang on, actually, he is coming back. He’s still got a primetime show to come and various high profile awards gigs to host. At least for now.

And where’s the other one? His apparent best mate for 10 years or more? Well, she’s gone on her “half-term holiday”, they explain – even though it’s not actually half term. But at this point, there’s at least a bit of you that starts to wonder whether if you dare to say it’s not half term then maybe they’ll send you wherever they sent him.

But anyway, that’s that for now. All dealt with. The Phillip and Holly saga really might not matter very much, and there are a very great many people who quite rightly do not care. Nevertheless, it encapsulates in its own unimportant (but still important) way this new sense of living in the age of unreality; a land of make believe. Just get everyone to say a load of things that aren’t true, and that we know they know aren’t true (and that they know that we know they know aren’t true), brazen it out for a bit, and wait for everyone to stop caring.

Why’s Phillip Schofield really lost his job? I’ve absolutely no idea, but absolutely everyone involved is adamant he’s done nothing wrong. The internet, naturally, is fizzing with speculation, but I wouldn’t believe too much of that if I were you. Certainly, I wouldn’t repeat it. You know where that kind of thing ends? It ends with a TV presenter putting a piece of paper in a prime minister’s hand on live television, and telling him it’s a list of paedophiles in his own party and asking what is he going to do about it.

That turned out to be complete bollocks; course it did. The presenter in question who performed that particular stunt – Phillip Schofield, in case you can’t remember as far back as 2012 – had to apologise.

“I was not accusing anyone of anything,” he said at the time. No, not accusing anyone of anything, just writing down their name on a list of child sex offenders that you’ve pulled together from the dregs of the internet and then personally delivering it, on air, to the actual prime minister.

Schofield didn’t step down for that, though. The fact that some of the names of the people he definitely wasn’t accusing of anything could be very easily read by the viewer if they squinted hard enough was just an oversight, a “bad camera angle”. That wasn’t his fault. There were still 11 years to come, of every politician in the country taking their turn on the sofa with Phil and Holly, some of them coming away extremely badly wounded. But even in the last mad decade, I can’t think of any politician ever doing anything quite so execrable as the Schofield paedo-note.

There is a rapidly growing media ecosphere out there, enthusiastically welcoming anyone who’s sort of had enough of feeling like they’re being made to live in a land of make believe. Eamonn Holmes used to sit in Phil and Holly’s chair. He’s over on GB News now, and it took him about 10 seconds to state the extremely obvious.

“Oh please, just stop this,” he said. “He was sacked. All this nonsense of ‘I’ve decided to step down’. I’m sure you did – ‘here’s your P45 now step down’.”

And as for Holly Willoughby? “Well, she wanted him not there, so what is she moaning about?”

All of which seems to me to be very obviously true. And if you can’t just say the truth then sadly someone else will. At which point you have to wonder quite how it came to be that the voice of reason is being provided by the guy who himself lost his job on ITV for claiming – live on ITV – that the “mainstream media” don’t know it’s not true that 5G masts cause coronavirus.

There are, of course, many lessons to learn, in the rise and rise and rise and rise and rise and very sudden fall of Phillip Schofield. But maybe, if you make people live in a world of pure imagination, don’t be surprised when they start believing absolutely anything.