If the answer to a problem is to bring in the Duchess of York to talk about the virtues of “saucy underwear”, the situation must be desperate. Last week, the beleaguered ITV daytime show This Morning made Sarah Ferguson its guest editor and presenter. She did some cooking, talked for too long about cats, made several pleas for kindness and advised two viewers on how to put the spark back into their marriage (essentially: underwear choice). It was bonkers – and not in a good way. The review in this newspaper called it “a publicity stunt designed purely to drown out the show’s obvious death rattle”.
This has to be the worst period in the mid-morning magazine show’s 35-year history. The wheels started coming off in September last year, although there had been trouble simmering for at least a couple of years.
