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’.
BREAKING: Holly Willoughby says she will not return to This Morning.
— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 10, 2023
In a social media post making the announcement the presenter says “I now feel I have to make this decision for me and my family”.
👉 https://t.co/ZfrxxrUUp5
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/eR78zH8GPq
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. It felt symbolic. The behind-the-scenes term in the television industry for these moments is a ‘junction’ and this was a spectacular one; the crunch of gears grinding from actual, terrible seriousness back to the cheerily mundane that we have luxuriated in for decades.
In the particular case of Holly, the poor woman has had a terrible year
What can we say about Holly? No one can have anything but sympathy for the horrible stalking case that she was recently the victim of. But it’s difficult to think of Holly without thinking of Philip Schofield, which may be a part of Holly’s current problem. Phil and Holly in their early pomp were a joy to behold. They had an easy, genuine affinity and closeness which elevated their partnership to a level something above the normal affability of co-hosts. It was pleasant to be in their televisual company – a Platonic ideal of everyone’s ideal big brother and big sister.
Inevitably, however, as with any close friendship viewed from the outside, it didn’t take long before it started to grate and ‘awww, how sweet’ became ‘oh God, not again’. The first few occasions that their emotions bubbled over felt strikingly authentic. But as the years rolled on, all that began to feel old. Bursting into either uncontrollable giggles or uncontrollable tears is behaviour you expect from alcoholics, not anodyne presenters of daytime television. It all felt too involved, too intense, too febrile.
The encroachment of weighty subjects among the insubstantial, first seen on British TV in That’s Life, began to get more awkward. Those junctions became more uncomfortable; from prostate polyps to potato pancakes, from the deathbeds of the terminally ill to a competition to win the holiday of a lifetime, all of it coming down the same very narrow funnel.
This Morning also started to take on a strangely self-important tone. Hilariously, the tabloids often report that ‘This Morning bosses have been plunged into crisis talks’, as if they were Cobra after a bombing. We can also see this in Holly’s resignation statement; ‘I will forever be proud of what we’ve done together… we only look after the show, and it will always belong to the viewers’. What curious sententiousness attached to absolute fluff, as if she was stepping down from the Archbishopric of Canterbury.
I watched a lot of the women’s magazine shows of my youth – House Party, Farmhouse Kitchen, Bazaar (which was for people on the dole, so half the time it was about filling in claim forms and half the time it was about crafting earrings from washers you’d chanced upon in a skip). Nobody ever thought that they had cosmic significance. Anybody who’d suggested in 1983 that presenting Pebble Mill at One was some kind of sacred trust for the nation would’ve been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
It’s interesting to see the things that stick to presenters and the things that don’t
In the particular case of Holly, the poor woman has had a terrible year – from the queue-jumping scandal, to being caught in the Schofield shockwave, and now a gruesome (alleged) thwarted kidnap and murder attempt. Getting away from television for a bit seems a very sensible move – if she was a friend, I’d turn her own famous words back to her and say ‘Firstly, are you OK?’ I hope she has people around her who are doing that.
And it’s interesting to see the things that stick to presenters and the things that don’t. Adil Ray, regular host of ITV’s Good Morning Britain until fairly recently, has, in the days since the attack on Israel, taken to promoting the ramblings of cranks ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’, repeating their claim that: ‘For the past year, the most racist, fundamentalist, far-right government in Israeli history has ruthlessly escalated its military occupation over Palestinians in the name of Jewish supremacy’. He’s been spreading conspiracy theories about Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women – ‘Sadly there have been reports over the years of Israeli soldiers doing that.’ One of his followers asks, ‘What can you do though Adil? We live in a country that simply turns a blind eye to anything Israel do (sic)’ and his reply is ‘Maybe tweet more, be aware and talk to the people around me.’
This has gone unremarked upon, unnoticed even, because those are the crank racial conspiracies approved of by our middle-class progressive cultural establishment. But it makes jumping a queue seem rather small beer, doesn’t it?
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