We're not even halfway through 2023 yet it feels like we’ve just been handed two favourites for TV Moment and Question of the Year.
The Moment was Holly Willoughby, dressed head to foot in white like a Ku Klux Klansman on a lynching mission, inquiring of the world: “Firstly, are you OK?”
A profound question followed up by Holly surmising, in a tone last heard on TV in the early ’70s from a matronly figure on Watch With Mother: “I imagine that you might have been feeling a lot like I have: shaken, troubled, let down, worried…”
This was such a historic TV moment it was referenced during a Commons Select Committee hearing, when an MP asked an ITV executive “firstly, are you OK” as parliament tried to get to the bottom of the Schofieldgate scandal.
Or rather, a scandal-free scandal best summed up by French newspaper Le Monde as “a TV presenter confessing to concealing his relationship with a young, consenting colleague of legal age” in which there is “no question of sexual harassment or even inappropriate conduct”.
How, we may ask in December, did we even bat an eyelid? Still, Schofieldgate has thrown up a potential Question of the Year thanks to this response from This Morning editor Martin Frizell, after he was quizzed on whether he was overseeing a toxic culture: “I’ll tell you what’s toxic: Aubergine. Do you like aubergine? Do you?”
Which has led to much soul-searching as a nation wrestles with the definition of toxic. Here’s my take: Toxic is swimming in turds in our seas and rivers because water firms are using our direct debits to reward shareholders, not clean our water.
It’s corrupt states using football teams to sportswash their crimes and governments taking asylum seekers off boats and throwing them onto barges. It’s the violent misogyny of Andrew Tate and the hate that oozes from the trans debate. It’s the profits privatised energy firms make.
Toxic is what the monster Putin is doing in Ukraine and what an unhealthy amount of Americans would like to do by putting Trump back in power.
It is Brexit and the lying author of Brexit’s soon-to-be-approved Honours List (Dame Nadine Dorries, anyone?)
It’s the Commons during PMQs when braying shysters drown out the debate hoping to gain approval from party bosses, and a nation being asked to pay £250million for the coronation of a man worth £1.8billion.
Toxic is people being diagnosed with cancer but not being able to be treated due to years of NHS underinvestment, and it’s the state of industrial relations in this country after years of below-inflation pay rises.
When it comes to food, toxic is not a purple vegetable. It’s living in the sixth richest economy in the world and reading in a recent Food Foundation report that 22% of its households are skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day.
Toxic is a skint mother in 21st century Britain, depriving herself of nutrition so she can feed her kids, sobbing on her couch as she waits to be eligible for another visit to the foodbank, hearing a smug git on the telly presume that they are feeling shaken, troubled, let down and worried...
About something that is as irrelevant to her life as an aubergine.
