Spin the wheel and win some heating. This was the premise of a segment on ITV’s This Morning earlier this week. Hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby stood astride a spinwheel contraption, upon which were marked various monetary values and, on some spaces, the promise of four months’ energy bills, paid for by the programme.
The segment was using the impending energy crisis as a topical hook to spice up a routine prize giveaway, but there was something discomfortingly crass about it – made all the worse by the desperation in the phone-in contestant’s voice, his audible relief when the dial landed on “bills”. The clip was rightly condemned; words like “dystopian” have been thrown around without hyperbole. On Wednesday, the “household bills” prizes were removed from the Spin to Win competition. But while This Morning’s cost-of-living-crisis carnival game may indeed have been a low-rent display of socio-political tone-deafness, it should have come as no surprise to, well, anyone who’s ever watched an episode of This Morning before. The series suffers from the same disease that’s running rife throughout our country’s morning television ecosystem: a deathly allergy to political sincerity.
