Firstly, are you okay? I hope so. All perspective has appeared to leave the building in the wake of This Morning copresenter Phillip Schofield’s resignation from one of Britain’s longest-running daytime talk shows.
You either understand its evergreen roots in Britain’s national consciousness or you need a quick explainer, so let’s recap before we get into the weeds of this. In 1988 This Morning was originally presented by real husband and wife Richard (Madeley) and Judy (Finnigan), who set up the very specific heterosexual-partners dynamic of British daytime presenters. Until very recently, the show was fronted by the marriage proxy of Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, a veteran of live telly who came out of the closet in early 2020 after a lot of onscreen crying and hugging.
Where did things start going awry for the duo? In the run-up to the 2019 general election, Holly and Phil did a selfie with the incumbent prime minister, Boris Johnson, and not with opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn. This might sound incredibly fucking trivial, because it is incredibly fucking trivial, and yet many column inches were devoted to their quote-unquote shameful selfie-ing and apparent Tory favoritism. The second red flag is that Holly and Phil queue-jumped the snaking civilian patriotism to see the queen lying in state. Nothing makes Brits feel safer than an orderly line, and nothing annoys us more than line jumping—the royal funereal aspect making the outrage exponential. Holly was massacred in the press, Phillip less so.
For years there have been social media rumors about Phillip and a showrunner, a man 30 years his junior, having a relationship. It’s important to state that no official news outlets have reported on these whisperings, even when they felt like deafening shouts. Then Phillip’s brother was convicted of sexually abusing a teenage boy and Phillip admitted to knowing about the abuse—this is incredibly fucking not good, absolutely no caveats. More recently there have been rumors about a feud, of Holly hating Phil, a chilly atmosphere on set. Conjecture as to why was rife—speculation is a hell of a drug. Phil put out a statement aiming to brush those rumors aside, calling Holly his “rock.” His TV-wife rock remained notably silent.
In late May, Phillip quit This Morning—the story had become too much about him—and admitted to an affair with the colleague. This is the point where Britain’s wheels really seem to have come off. We have entered a period of disproportionate “This Mourning”—cohost and emerging national treasure Alison Hammond openly wept on live TV, quoting the Bible because…her colleague lied about an affair he had with another colleague. Please remember a presenter on the children’s show Blue Peter went on an (obviously illegal) cocaine rager in 1998 and nobody cried between segments. We’re verging on tabloid and broadsheet mass hysteria. Yesterday saw Holly practically eulogizing the very alive Schofield and speaking to the hurt to the This Morning family.
It does feel as though every ITV strategy to simmer down the pot has been misguided, leaving more cavities for rumors to fester. 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—but I’m trying to deal exclusively with facts here. Allegations of sexual abuse should be taken extremely, unequivocally seriously, but can we try to remember there haven’t been any? There is no concrete proof. Just lots of pictures of Phillip and a boy looking considerably younger and lots of tweets from Twitter users high on the endless supply of things to get angry about.
I want to talk about the elephant in the room, because the sweater of my daily Twitter scroll keeps snagging on this not being a regular scandal but a gay scandal. I don’t think most rational people are too fussed about this daily front-page story—a man in a high position at his work had an affair with a junior member of staff. Big whoop. But the homosexuality element colors the tone. I can’t shake the feeling that a straight relationship within the exact same asymmetrical power balance would feel less tawdry, less scandalous. I know equivalents don’t always help, but what if Phil slept with a female staffer? Would we more easily shrug it off? What if Holly shagged a 20-year-old male runner? Would the outrage feel a tang more titillating? And what if she slept with a female 20-year-old? Can you sense how different these scenarios feel? We’re all functioning under the invisible mental gauze that equates gayness with a particular, salacious shame.
Phillip himself played the gay card, and gays were both rightly and wrongly aggrieved. It’s not fair to cry homophobia to defend yourself against abusing your position of power. People are claiming their own impartiality to the gay aspect of all this, but homophobia is still there; it’s still hiding in the grout of our liberal tiles. We’re mere days into Pride month, and despite our widespread support, genuine progressive legislations and decimalizations, gayness is still implicitly sordid, implicitly other. Societally, we sort of allow, or at least forgive, red-blooded, aggressive male straightness. But we can’t stomach deviations from it. The age gap—as reported, as admitted to—is big, but the age gap isn’t illegal. We joke about it online, but being 20 and fucking whoever you want is the whole point of being 20.
The thing is we can’t separate Phillip from his recently outed homosexuality, from his age, from his understood power fronting TV’s biggest daytime show. His own evocation of the suicide of Caroline Flack after rampant media attention on her private life is not totally far-fetched. He makes a decent point that this sensationalized reporting hurts the subject.
I believe the function of a scandal is to help reporters and readers reinforce their own personal moral high ground. We like to see people make decisions—in this case, legal ones—that we perceive as mistakes we’d never stoop to. We see others doing quote-unquote wrong, and it makes us feel right. But in the case of Caroline, in the case of Phillip, in the case of whoever’s next through the front-page shame mill, it’s important to remember we all muck up.