If it is the role of morning telly to soothe and distract us from bad news, then Holly Willoughby, star of ITV’s This Morning, chose quite a week to resign. The 42-year-old, who has been on the show for 14 years, stepped down on Tuesday, a decision made, she said in a statement, “for me and my family,” and which was announced on Sky News by a reporter presenting from Israel. Accompanied by a breaking news banner and with the lights of Jerusalem twinkling in the background, the messaging from Sky was clear: the world is going to pieces, and now this.
I don’t mean to present this entirely facetiously. Like good coffee, good morning telly is one of those ostensibly small things that can play an outsized role in a person’s sense of wellbeing. If what makes it good is oblique, people still know it when they see it. Willoughby was cheerful, friendly, sort of glamorous but not really – like her erstwhile co-host, Phillip Schofield, she’d either never had her teeth done or had them done on a budget – in short, a fundamentally unthreatening woman popping up at a time of the morning when, if a person is at home and in front of the TV, they might need a gentle entry-point into the day.
Compare this with the US morning TV landscape, lovingly and accurately depicted in Apple TV’s The Morning Show, in which, as in so much of American life, aspirational hits heavier than relatable as a target. (The exception to this rule is the NBC Today show’s Al Roker, once memorably described by Variety as the “Clown Prince” of morning TV.) If British morning TV hosts are cast to be ballpark – how any of us might look if we took a shower and found a clean shirt – Americans are a different breed altogether, a fact reflected in the size of their salaries. It is hard to stay relatable if, like Kelly Ripa on ABC’s Live With Kelly and Mark, you are pulling in a reported $22m (£18m) a year. By contrast, Willoughby was reportedly being paid about £730,000, and then only after a pay hike in 2017, when it emerged she was on a third of Schofield’s salary.
Anyway, none of that should distract from the fact that This Morning, in the language one is contractually obliged to use when discussing morning telly, has been rocked by controversy over the last 18 months in ways that must have sorely tested both Willoughby’s sunny nature and the audience’s belief in her guilelessness. Last September, she and Schofield were publicly pilloried for allegedly queue-jumping to pay their respects to the Queen – which they and ITV denied. A few months later, Schofield’s own run on This Morning ended in resignation after he admitted he’d lied about an affair he’d had with a very junior staff member.
At the time, Willoughby said she felt let down by her co-host. Personally, I found her statement to camera after Schofield’s departure to be one of the hands-down best TV moments of the year. With the gravitas of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich, Willoughby asked the audience, “Firstly, are you OK?” But I guess it didn’t help her brand as someone whose responses to things sit within the normal range.
In the background, meanwhile, she has been going through what must have been the very real trauma of learning from the police of an alleged conspiracy. Last week a man appeared in court charged with a plot to kidnap and murder her, the impetus, one assumes, for her departure this week. The statement of resignation and goodbye from Willoughby, which she posted on Instagram, saw her return to her pitch-perfect performances of yore. Evoking the place it all started on This Morning, she quoted Richard and Judy on their own departure from the show in 2001. “We only look after this show, it will always belong to the viewers.” And there it was, the combination we look for in the best morning TV of silliness, pomposity, and a whiff of the “it was then that I carried you” motif of a Christian wall-hanging.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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