The finale was perfect – right down to the last, minute detail. All HBO’s screenwriters and Sky’s producers could not have written a dirtier crime, a more surprising villain, or a faster fall from grace. Nor could the scene before the fall have been more perfectly set, a TV double act painted in the softest colours, hardened in our minds over twenty years, each line oozing happy mornings and gentle edges. And nor could the dominoes have been knocked by a more perfect British faux pas than skipping the queue at the Queen’s funeral.
The story – Phillip met a teenage boy. That boy became a runner on his show and, once the boy was twenty, Phillip claims, their affair began. On Thursday nights they would have ‘playtime,’ going out and coming back together, the boy – man – arriving early at ITV studios the next day in a taxi from Phillip’s apartment. Some years later, the affair went sour and, at the National Television Awards in 2019, the man had a few drinks and spoke to several ITV stars of his loneliness and worries. ITV had him moved from This Morning to Loose Women. Soon before that point, the affair had ended and so, as rumours grew, in early 2020, Phillip came out as gay in an effort to seize the narrative. Around this time, Holly began to distance herself from him. She split from his management company; they stopped holidaying together. Rumours grew further after queue-gate in 2022. His colleagues began to whisper around ITV towers, dripping stories of Phillip’s dirty business, but also of his high-handedness, his distance from crew members, and his two-faced approach in dealing with guests on and off-air. It seems that none of them liked him. Without Holly’s backing, the drips became a stream, which became a river, which burst its banks last week.
So – it turned out Phillip was a dirty rotter. This Morning, the castle on the hill, is a collapsed wreck and the ITV empire is shaken as a result. Phil is dead and Holly is fatally wounded. In the distance, the GB News breakaway republic, through endless ‘shocking!’ interviews, is letting out a piercing cry. The screaming banshee of Kim Woodburn comes howling over the hill, wild eyes popping in the twilight. Eamonn Holmes rises from the ashes, lips curled and licking fire – “believe me Pip if u r looking for a fight , u have picked on the wrong person !.” Katie Hopkins’ corpse jolts upright out of bed. The undead remains of Nigel Farage, resurrected, stumbles confused into showbiz gossip, swinging and clawing madly and almost fitting in.
This reminds me of the times in football where, in a slightly tense match, one player goes in a bit hard, then someone else charges and knocks them over, and suddenly the gloves are off and everyone is just scrapping madly on the floor. The commentator will say something like “Oh, well, these are terrible scenes, you really don’t like to see that” – when really, it is exactly what we all want to see.
In the same way, that image of happy families and gentle telly, so delicately built, has shattered into chaos, and become more entertaining than it ever was. It is actually a heartening fact to reflect upon that, underneath the seamless gleam of success and fame, it was fake all along. Phillip was living a lie and everyone hated him. There have been a lot of truisms said about the This Morning duo: that they’re the nation’s sweethearts, that they’re a part of our ‘morning routine,’ the perfect TV couple. The truth is that they’ve just always been there, and have always seemed happier than us, better looking than us, more famous than us and also more successful. And now, we hear, they’re ‘two-faced,’ Phillip is ‘chief narcissist,’ ‘delusional’. Holly is an ‘enabler’ who knew all about Philip and said nothing. Eamonn Holmes, clambering onto GB News to revive his career, casts himself as the mid-morning George Orwell: ‘a lie unchallenged becomes the truth…not on my watch it doesn’t’. All of ITV’s crew, spinning away into space, an illusion blinking in the distance.
In the mess, there’s a niggling sense that some important questions have slipped through. Is it ok to come out as gay to hide your bad behaviour? Was it wrong that everyone supported that? Why did ITV let Phillip move the man to another program? And then pretend to investigate, but let it slide?
But it’s nicer to ignore those questions, because the pile on is so much better than This Morning ever was – this is the crocodiles getting the wildebeest, Caesar in the Senate, Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Oscars. The veil is off – they’re just monkeys, scrapping in the mud. What news, to find out that a perfect hairline, winning smile and enormous fame does not actually make you a good person. That you still have to be honest to people you work with, be nice to new ones, and not abuse power for your own dirty ends. And what telly, to find that the sweetest mid-morning man was actually the dirtiest monkey of them all.
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