Starting on Monday, Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard are taking over as the new main presenting team on ITV1’s This Morning. After the ignominious departure of first Phillip Schofield and then Holly Willoughby last year – after they’d spent 20 years and 14 years respectively as hosts of the most-watched breakfast TV show – this heralds a significant changing of the morning TV guard. But what is Deeley letting herself in for, and does coffee-breath Britain even deserve her?
Deeley has warmly hailed her new presenting home as a “national institution”. Still, it’s reported she originally turned down the job. Then, that she wanted to co-present with Rylan Clark, not Shephard. None of which points to Deeley exactly gagging for her new opportunity. Is she on to something? Is it time to ask: what does morning television do to women?
This Morning first broadcast in 1988, but the febrile arena of UK breakfast/morning television has been half a century in the making: its surprisingly long history has a tail that stretches back to the 1970s. With this in mind, any female newbies would be wise to analyse the bizarre, complicated situation they find themselves in.
When it comes to quintessential British morning TV, some may automatically think of “king of cringe” Richard Madeley, now co-hosting ITV1’s Good Morning Britain with the preternaturally patient Susanna Reid. Madeley has a long, astonishing history (encompassing This Morning from 1988-2001, with his wife, Judy Finnegan) of Partridge-isms and industrial oversharing (“Remember when you had thrush, Judy? You had a terrible time of it”).
However, anyone who watches it knows that morning TV is much more varied (and even stranger) than Madeley. As well as the blizzard of faces, there’s also the endlessly recurring morning TV keynotes. The clunky segues between news (war; disaster; politics), showbiz scandals, vasectomy phone-ins and the like, and fashion items (culottes coming back in!). The wildly vacillating tone: part village fete, part red carpet, part hospital waiting room, part gladiatorial arena. The presenters have to deal with all of it live, and on limited sleep. How do they get through? One can only imagine a mixture of makeup refreshes, Yorkshire Tea and hidden steel.
I’ve marvelled before at the endurance of the creepy, archaic “wifey/hubbie” co-hosting set-up. Currently there’s a veritable battalion of presenters scattered across the channels, including Naga Munchetty, Charlie Stayt, Jon Kay and Sally Nugent on BBC Breakfast, and Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary presenting This Morning on Friday.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it comes across like a televised Relate session with added links. There’s also no denying the inbuilt weaknesses of too much morning TV. The pale facsimile of human warmth. The militant cordiality, the embedded staleness. The determined banality. The feeling, at times, of entering a zombie broadcasting zone (“After looking for the 40th time at the weather, we’re going to eat your brain”). Even the fabled cheery sofas can seem like upholstered tombs where hope and reason go to die. Arguably, morning TV has been stuck in a rut for years and is in dire need of a glow-up.
Mind you, in recent times, This Morning hasn’t been dull enough. Rather it’s served as a lightning rod for controversy. The scandal of then-hosts Schofield and Willoughby queue-jumping to see the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022. Not long after, the palpable frost between them. Schofield then resigning after an affair with a much younger colleague. Willoughby returning from an extended break, with her deathless opening salvo to viewers: “Firstly, are you OK?”. Then, the news of serious, grim kidnap and death threats directed at Willoughby, resulting in her own departure.
A shocking series of events, unheard of in morning TV. Or is it? In the late 1980s, there were reports of former BBC Breakfast Time’s Frank Bough taking cocaine and wearing lingerie at parties attended by sex workers. Selina Scott, Bough’s sofa co-host, said in a 2020 interview that Bough would deliberately interrupt mid-question to undermine her. Piers Morgan left Good Morning Britain after saying he didn’t believe Meghan Markle’s claims in her 2021 televised interview with Oprah, including allegations of racism. Real-life husband-and-wife team Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford have enduring beef with the manner of their expulsion. Only last week, in ITV1’s Celebrity Big Brother, housemate Fern Britton said she would leave if (her former sofa mate and now sworn enemy) Schofield entered the house. There would appear to be a world of darkness slash toxicity lurking beneath morning telly’s cushion-plumping camaraderie. Is there still time for Cat to make a run for it?
After all, no shade on Shephard (a morning TV-lifer and much-praised “rock” for Reid and Kate Garraway), but clearly the bulk of the focus will fall on Deeley. It will be her ringing in the changes. Her hopefully cutting out the Stepford sofa-wife baloney and ushering in a fresher, cooler, more sisterly tone – a brave new era of Morning TV Woman.
Her UK TV career started with kids Saturday morning TV shows SM:TV and CD:UK in the 90s and noughties; Deeley has a more leftfield history of goofing about with Ant and Dec, interviewing pop stars. Raised in the West Midlands, her many hats have included actor, producer, model, author and patron of Great Ormond Street hospital. Bafta-winning and Emmy-nominated, her lengthy successful sojourn living and working in the US, mainly presenting So You Think You Can Dance, could constitute a racy new vibe for This Morning viewers.
Moreover, Deeley comes across as composed, unshowy, private. What do we really know about her and her husband, the Northern Irish comedian and presenter Patrick Kielty (they married in 2012 and have two children). Not much. Which is revealing in itself. Whatever Deeley muses about on-air, chances are we won’t be hearing about Kielty’s thrush.
Above all, her superpower seems to be “nice”. It’s been reported she has already invited fellow This Morning presenters Josie Gibson and Alison Hammond for a girls’ night out. If you wanted to be cynical you could view this as a classic “girl’s girl” soft power move, calibrated to win over (passed-over) colleagues. Or maybe, just maybe, Deeley is actually a nice person. Which makes for a refreshing change from Willoughby’s image of the Queen Bee of the morning schedules. All those reports of Willoughby being spoiled, demanding, haughty, clique-y… Oh, but hang on, was any of that actually true?
Did Willoughby deserve to be lumbered with that sulphurous reputation? Come to think of it, wasn’t Willoughby herself once hailed as a wonderful, fresh new presence on morning television?
It seems likely that Willoughby merely suffered the fate of many female morning TV presenters. For aren’t these women routinely attacked? Munchetty is constantly upbraided, for everything, from her clothes to her “aggressive” interviewing style (is she supposed to sit in demure silence?). The likes of Hammond and Gibson are denounced as bland/overbearing (delete where appropriate). Bless morning TV GOAT, Madeley, but it’s hard to imagine Reid getting away with all his gaffes. When Garraway was struggling with caring for her critically ill and dying husband Derek Draper, she still couldn’t seem to escape the wrath and censure of certain online newspaper comments sections.
It’s likely that the problem isn’t the presenters, it’s those (viewers; media) who watch them. The unofficial British law that, after an initial (optional) period of love-bombing, certain female presenters must henceforth be hounded and attacked. That there’s something about women having the audacity to sit behind those desks or on those sofas that brings forth the sexist, misogynistic vitriol. Almost as if the nation sees them on TV in the morning, so it thinks it owns them.
Certainly, it’s interesting that some female morning television presenters attract sustained levels of criticism, abuse and unasked-for advice comparable only with England football managers. Will this fate befall Deeley? Will her TV-honeymoon soon be over? Maybe it’s time for us – the audience – to calm down about who sits on our mid-morning sofas. Maybe, it’s not about whether Deeley can buck the morning TV trend. It’s about whether we can.
• This article was amended on 10 March 2024. It was Good Morning Britain that Piers Morgan left in 2021, not This Morning as an earlier version said. And So You Think You Can Dance is not the US version of Strictly Come Dancing (that show in the US would be Dancing With The Stars).
