During a trailer for his TV show Cast Away, Phillip Schofield tearfully admitted he was ‘unwise’ to have had an affair with a junior male employee, but argued that this shouldn’t be enough to ‘destroy someone’.
Maybe he had a point, I thought. Maybe we should give him a break.
Now, having seen the first episode of the three-part series, I’ve completely changed my mind.
Instead, I am asking myself: ‘How could I have got it so wrong! How could I have fallen for his pathetic pleadings?’
Because he gives us a very different side of Schofield in this show – he’s ranting and vengeful, delusional and self-pitying.
Phillip Schofield in the Channel 5 show, in which he moans: ‘I’ve been chucked under a bus’
And, in his view, not accountable for his actions, which is why he blames everyone but himself.
He moans in the first episode: ‘I’ve been chucked under a bus and I could drive the same bus over so many people,’ before adding sanctimoniously: ‘But I’m not that sort of person.’
Excuse me? In the subsequent episodes, he reportedly does just that, describing colleagues as ‘three sh**s of showbiz’ according to The Sunday Times, and dropping hints that one of them is Holly Willoughby.
That’s a whole fleet of buses you’ve chucked your former best friend and co-star of 14 years under, Phil. It’s unforgivable.
The couple were once so close they’d spend their holidays together. She held him near when he finally came out as gay on This Morning in February 2020, saying she was so proud of him for his honesty.
Now, while not specifically naming Ms Willoughby he seems to be badmouthing her by claiming one of the ‘sh**s’ is ‘brand-oriented’, which has been taken as a reference to her lifestyle empire, Wylde Moon, and her lucrative clothing collaborations which have boosted her fortunes to an estimated £10million.
Then there’s the way he appears to mock Ms Willoughby’s first words when she appeared solo on the show after he had quit last year. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked the shell-shocked viewers.
And here’s Schofield in this new series, sitting around in the garden with his family – his wife of 30 years Stephanie Lowe and their two daughters – and they’re laughing and repeatedly asking each other: ‘Are you OK?’ And replying: ‘Yes, I’m OK’. That’s just mean.
I was waiting for him to describe the moment he broke the news to his wife that he had been having an affair with a male junior member of staff.
Schofield with his former colleague Holly Willoughby on ITV’s This Morning
The couple were once so close they’d spend their holidays together. She held him near when he finally came out as gay on This Morning in February 2020, saying she was so proud of him for his honesty.
When she first heard of the affair, she was ‘very, very angry’, he admitted afterwards. But there was no mention of this in the programme, no elaboration on reports she was ‘devastated’.
The couple reportedly no longer live together, although they remain on good terms. But the scenes of them all together as a happy family in the new show – scenes that were shot before he went off to his deserted island – were cringe-making and, to my mind, misleading. Because they never addressed the elephant in the room – his affair.
‘I hope people see him how we see him,’ gushed his daughter Molly, ‘because he’s just amazing!’ She failed to add she’s now also his manager.
Schofield concedes his relationship with a much younger runner – who was 15 when they first met while he was in his mid-fifties – was both ‘unwise and unprofessional’. Although not illegal, for he points out the affair started only when the young staffer was 20.
‘I will be for ever sorry. I screwed up. I made a mistake and hurt the people around me,’ says Schofield in the programme. That’s the closest he gets to admitting the lasting pain he also caused his young lover.
There is a refrain that he is the victim of homophobia. He says that if he’d been having an office affair with a much younger woman as opposed to a young man, he would not have lost his ‘reputation, dignity and legacy’.
He adds: ‘Had it been a young woman, [it would have been] pat on the back, well done, mate’.
One ITV insider told The Sunday Times. ‘He kept saying it was ‘unwise but not illegal’ – it’s not about that, it’s about the power discrepancy.’
Quite so. But what really stinks is Schofield’s hypocrisy. Him building his reputation and earning a fortune on the family show This Morning, portraying himself as a happily married husband and devoted father of two daughters while secretly seeing a young colleague.
There’s the hypocrisy, too, of his constant denials when confronted by ITV executives. As one told The Sunday Times, he ‘repeatedly told execs, looking them in the eye, that he was not having an affair (with a much younger man), always denying it when asked’.
Barely a year after his departure from ITV he pops on primetime show Cast Away
The problem for Schofield after the fascination for his Channel 5 ghoul-fest is over, is whether anyone will want to employ this tarnished star on TV ever again
There’s no doubt the months of headlines badly damaged This Morning and lost ITV millions of viewers who felt deceived by Schofield’s ‘happily married’ pantomime. It didn’t help either when news broke that his paedophile brother Timothy had been convicted and sent to prison for sexually abusing a young boy.
It was shameful that Schofield refused to take part in the internal KC-led inquiry into the affair, citing his mental health. Yet he was well enough in June last year to give an hour-long interview to the BBC’s obsequious Amol Rajan.
With his hands shaking he insisted he and the unnamed lad were ‘not boyfriends’ and had ‘only five or six romantic encounters over a few months’.
‘I see nothing ahead of me but blackness, and sadness, and regret, and remorse, and guilt,’ he said, then: ‘I did something very wrong and then I lied about it consistently.’ He added he could not see any future ahead for his TV career.
Yet little more than a year later, up he pops on primetime Channel 5’s Cast Away still vowing his family are everything to him, that he’s a changed man, a fighter not a quitter, glad he’s out of the closet and will soldier on to restore his reputation.
The problem for Schofield after the fascination for his Channel 5 ghoul-fest is over, is whether anyone will want to employ this tarnished star on TV ever again. Time to cast him away off our screens for ever, I’d say.