‘Are you okay?’
Three little words, so loaded with inference, and sharpened with Trump-ish brevity to go viral. Holly Willoughby’s now infamous inquisition interacted directly with audience emotions, a This Morning speciality since the dawn of kindly, wizened agony aunt Denise Robertson. To be a virtuoso This Morning presenter is to act as a calm, trustworthy conduit to the chaos of audience lives. This is the unspoken pact between anchor and viewer. You have problems. We have solutions. Let’s do this.
The real conundrum in the wake of Schofield-gate? Is This Morning okay? The presenter’s professional public execution exit, sprung from an affair with a young runner, has prompted unusually noisy public debate, interrupting the trust pact. Now they have the problems. Those three words were written to try and mend it, keeping the illusion afloat that This Morning is more than TV, it is your friend.
The intimation of This Morning as a happy, warm, shared space, a family no less, has entered its dystopian era, as many families do. The fourth wall has shattered. What is left is a two-and-a-half-hour TV show crafted specifically to reach OAPs, students, ill people and an ample audience on universal credit. For two weeks prior to Willoughby’s return, the live render of This Morning zig-zagged back and forth between unvoiced tensions. It has felt a little like the light entertainment Lehman Brothers, one vast institution with implications for us all.
‘Are you okay?’ is the kind of invitation This Morning excels at, guiding you toward its firm grip then sedating you with innocuous chatter on celebrity gossip, medical know-how, a sprinkling of hard news and domestic hints for kitchen, bathroom and bank account. It is a highly disciplined operation, a live magazine format with multiple moving parts. Its great triumph is in the vast orchestration of ideas, not in its tone, which must remain benign to the point of bland.
Since debuting on 3 October 1988 from Liverpool’s Albert Dock, presided over by no-nonsense national mum and dad figures, Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley, the show has stayed looking ostensibly the same, turning it into a plumb line for national identity. To be British is to somehow know what happens on This Morning.
In fact, the show has outlived many presenters, a move to London, the advent of streaming TV, a shoplifting charge against Madeley (for which he was acquitted) which still circulates around the freezer aisles of East Didsbury’s big Tesco and the sinking of its floating weatherman, Fred Talbot, by imprisonment for indecent assaults against minors.
This Morning is nevertheless indivisible from ITV’s wing of terrestrial television. What was once a cornerstone of broadcasting has leveraged some of its power to tech giants. The unique access to middle-England has been dented by the data-mining of Facebook. Laptop viewing of This Morning is minimal. The ironic student audience dwindled, replaced by the witty, caustic armchair critics of Gogglebox.
The show has felt like the light entertainment Lehman Brothers, one vast institution with implications for us all
Catering to an encumbered audience, it underwent a stealth turn in tone to the gushy This Morning family, accentuating bonds of friendship onset. Schofield and Willoughby leant convincingly, if heavy-handedly, into the mood shift, the most discernible difference from the establishing Richard and Judy decade, making This Morning a BFFs home for hugs, tears and public consolation, a Jeremy Kyle Show in reverse. These scales of showy, demonstrative goodness are tricky to maintain and the fine line between caring and cloying would frequently blur. Yet still it endured.
Because it operates so nimbly, with a legacy we all know so well, it is impossible to recalibrate. Like no other morning TV show, This Morning has capitalised on and grown into its oven-ready audience who are not at work. Somewhere between Gyles Brandreth’s vivid knits and Gino D’Acampo’s incongruous Cornetto vernacular, it has hit gold, repeatedly. It is still the place where prospective prime ministers go to test their personal likeability ahead of general elections.
Amid the Schofield stories, a moving target depending on what version of them he’s telling on what day and how much anybody believes him, there was a clear question remaining under the face-tilt concern of Willoughby’s ‘u okay hun?’ inquiry. Is time up for the old institution? And would we even miss it if This Morning went? If the brand is so easily damaged by the flimsy premise of (so far, at the time of writing) sex between presenter and runner, what future does that augur for the staff grafting to make Lorraine, BBC Breakfast and Matt Tebbutt’s cookery high jinks appear so effortlessly affable on screen? Is this the end for ‘nice’ TV? And how nice was it all anyway? Being told, repeatedly, that This Morning is staffed by family, not an array of unconnected, highly skilled professionals working tightly together in extreme circumstances to take the temperature of the country five days a week, isn’t helping.
If This Morning wants to continue playing surface nice, they’re going to have to clear the decks and get a new actual family to front it, preferably one who’ve been around the block a bit. Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch would be fabulous but are both cool and rich enough to need neither the money nor the exposure. Tess Daly and Vernon Kay are the obvious natural tonal successors to Finnigan and Madeley, though both have freshly inked contracts at the BBC.
Those couples feel true, the component part of This Morning’s machine which drifted away with each progressive Schofield backtrack. We know they’ve lived a little and can weather skeletons airing out of their closet. We can guess that they’ve screamed at one another, made up, shown actual human emotions outside of the automaton virginal niceness that comprises This Morning’s shaky veneer.
The scandals circumnavigating This Morning scratch at this brittle sheen of virtue. People are into truth now, as the outrage over Schofield and Willoughby skipping the queue to snoop at the Queen’s coffin so amply demonstrated last year. Nobody minds flaws, so long as you own them. Nobody expects TV presenters to have answers, unless they’re Chris Packham or Attenborough. With actual friends and family on screen 24/7 on socials, nobody needs them to be that, either. The most immediately identifiable theme tune on terrestrial telly is now that of The One Show, which is one Rishi Sunak sofa visit short of stealing This Morning’s sideline political weight. What viewers don’t like is watching blame being flung around from party to party, like some insane media boxing bout to see who bruises easiest.
Carrying on regardless no longer feels like an option for This Morning. A whole house of cards may tumble quickly after. Phillip Schofield is toast. We know this. Holly Willoughby is hanging by a thread. We sense this. Nobody really emerges well from a question like ‘are you okay?’ because eventually somebody turns around, says, ‘No, I’m not, and what are you going to do about it?’
