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.
