It’s a cruel fate: Phillip Schofield, once the toast of morning television, must now scavenge around a Madagascan island for food, water, and shelter. He is totally isolated, his facial hair out of control. His only friends are the Channel 5 cameras dotted around the island, documenting his ordeal for the new three-part series Phillip Schofield: Cast Away. It represents the 62-year-old presenter’s first TV role since being axed from ITV’s This Morning last year, amid a scandal over his affair with a far younger colleague. It’s the comeback nobody wanted, on the channel nobody watches, starring a man who doesn’t seem to know why he’s doing it.
The ex-This Morning host’s downfall was one of the more gleefully reported publicity crises in recent memory, ending with Schofield manically vaping his way through a series of candid tell-all interviews. Had he actually committed any crime? No. In lying about his dalliance, he had done something (in his words) “unwise but not illegal”. Was there an undercurrent of homophobia to the circus? Perhaps – wade through the sea of social media comments about Schofield, and it’s shocking just how much of the hatred towards him is homophobic in nature. Could people have distanced themselves any faster? I should think not. One thing’s for sure: we’re still not quite sure how to talk about the whole ordeal, and on Cast Away it’s no different. Schofield discusses at length the fallout from the scandal – what he describes as being “cancelled” – while largely skating the particulars of his behaviour. There may be an unacknowledged elephant in the room, but that doesn’t stop Schofield from loudly pointing out the elephant tracks and tusk marks along the walls.
So why exactly is Cast Away happening? For Channel 5, the reasoning is clear enough. The broadcaster – long driven into irrelevance with its rigid ethos of all-tat programming – has used Schofield’s sullied name to curry more discussion and media coverage than it’s seen in months, possibly years. To this extent, the programme is already a success, even though the reaction from viewers has been uniformly negative.
More baffling, though, is just what Schofield hoped to achieve with the thoroughly Alan Partridge-coded programme. Is it an attempt to revive his career? You might have assumed so, though his comportment in the series has less the air of a stirring comeback than a last, croaked goodbye. Or perhaps it’s just an airing of grievances. (“I don’t care any more, this is me having my say as I bow out,” he says at one point.) It had been speculated previously that Schofield was being tapped for I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, ever the death knell of celebrity credibility – but even I’m a Celeb would surely have been better than this. Here in this insular, low-rent man-vs-the-elements bout, Schofield still has to go hungry and defecate next to a tree, only without the giant ITV-sized paycheque or the bantery chats with Ant and Dec.
In the transparently rehearsed scenes featuring Schofield and his family, filmed before his excursion on the island, the programme truly takes on the feel of a PR exercise – an attempt to reconstruct the presenter’s reputation by positioning him as a benevolent victim of a cruel and pernicious hate campaign. (Problematic celebrities have increasingly turned towards reality TV as a means of rehabilitating their image – with recent examples including Matt Hancock and Nigel Farage.) Later on in the first episode, a tearful Schofield opens up about considering suicide last year. It’s serious stuff, and not something to be glib about – even if it does feel rather calculated in its inclusion.
But it is impossible to look past the sheer vain pointlessness of the whole programme. At one point, Schofield laments the press intrusion into his life following the scandal. “Bugger off, and let me get on with the quiet life you’ve all given me,” he cries, down the lens of a TV broadcaster’s camera.
The programme is, I suppose, an interesting insight into what being “cancelled” means for someone who has spent their life shouting competition phone numbers at the morning TV crowd. Actors who’ve been cancelled can usually continue to act – in Europe or independent productions, if nothing else. Novelists can continue to write. Musicians can continue to perform and record music. Schofield, though, does not have an artistic conviction to cling to. He was a presenter, through and through: his skill was simply being on TV, and being an affable host. Now he is no longer seen as affable or trustworthy in the eyes of the public – hence the Jet2 holiday from hell.
Because for all the skill of the cheery morning host, part of their appeal is how interchangeable they are – look at the nuclear-level blandness of new This Morning duo Cat and Ben. And surely he will know this. So in a lot of ways, Cast Away actually makes sense: it’s a vehicle for a man who knows nothing else but being on television, and who never seems to give any thought to the whys and wherefores. If this is indeed the last we’ll see of Schofield on TV, that’s one thing. But I’ve watched the Tom Hanks movie – sooner or later, he’ll surely be back.
‘Phillip Schofield: Cast Away’ continues on Channel 5 at 9pm on Tuesday 1 October