The tragedy of Phillip Schofield

Robinson Crusoe on Mas a Tierra; Napoleon on Elba; Schofield on Nosy Ankarea. Island exile is an opportunity for man, that bare-forked thing, to confront his essence in solitude. Yet where Crusoe explored theology, economics and the nature of human civilisation, and Napoleon brooded on his world-historic destiny, Schofield is bellyaching to the viewers of Channel Five about losing his job for schtupping one of the runners on his daytime telly show and fibbing about it to management.

Commentators are using phrases like ‘redemption arc’ to describe the action of Cast Away. Schofield insists that this isn’t a route back to the limelight so much as ‘me having my say as I bow out’. He has no intention, he declares on TV, of returning to TV. 

He said as much when all this blew up last year, mind you; and here he is. Now he says darkly, ‘there are some people I won’t work for again’, inveighing against the ‘cowards’ and ‘shits’ at ITV: ‘I’ve been chucked under a bus.’ And no sooner do we learn that he’s quitting TV for good (‘I’ve said my piece, and anyone who’s bitter about that, honestly, you can f*** off ’cause I don’t give a shit. I quit. Mic drop.’) but claims emerge that earlier this year his people set up a meeting to ask if he’d been blacklisted from ITV. File, perhaps, under ‘finger, bandaged’ and ‘back to the fire, wabbling’.

We can laugh, too, at the pomposity. ‘They’ve taken pretty much everything,’ he complained. ‘Reputation, dignity, legacy …’ Dignity? Legacy? I don’t think co-presenting children’s television with Gordon the Gopher, having a rapport with Holly Willoughby, warbling ‘Close Every Door To Me’ on the West End stage or hosting the British Soap Awards really deserves so magniloquent an epithet as ‘legacy’. These are fine and good and worthwhile things, but you’re Phillip Schofield, not Abraham Lincoln.

Once we’ve had our fun laughing, though, isn’t it also appropriate to shed a tear? The anguish is undoubtedly real. Does he lack self-knowledge? Oh boy, yes. But so do King Lear, Oedipus and Ulysses. One strand of tragicomedy – perhaps the greatest and truest – treats with people who feel themselves to be tragic heroes but don’t realise they are characters in a comedy. They’re belting out their heartrending arias, not realising that the sound the audience hears is cartoon chipmunks squeaking out a novelty song. That’s all of us on some level – ‘main character syndrome’ is a global pandemic – but it goes double for those afflicted by the special sort of brainworms you get by making your living as a celebrity.

I found myself wanting to write that this was Oedipus at Colonus for the TikTok generation, but then it struck me: no it’s not. The TikTok generation will have no idea who Phillip Schofield is. That gives a specially poignant torque to his situation. Schofield is, in some respects, a distinctly modern figure: he’s someone who, as former colleagues testify, doesn’t really know how to exist without a camera on him, someone for whom celebrity is a basic ground of his existence. But he’s also a creature of linear television. It’s not just that the formatted television career which gives his life meaning has been taken from him, and that he seeks to exact revenge or find redemption by… appearing on formatted television. It’s that the whole formatted television thing itself starting to look antique: the type of celebrity that Phillip Schofield is is itself on the brink of obsolescence. The lurid sofas and canned banter of breakfast television is going the way of the Findus Crispy Pancake and Jane Fonda’s Workout. 

He isn’t just marooned on an island. He’s marooned between two cultural eras. He’s Norman Desmond. He’s a dying dinosaur roaring weakly in a post-meteorite impact winter while small furry mammals scurry from their underground burrows around his ankles, ready to inherit the earth.

I’m enthralled, then, by the thought of this show. Of Schofield raging away on his desert island, longing to recover his vanished place in a vanishing culture. It has the feel of a cultural moment like David Blaine doing his hunger artist routine in a glass box above Tower Bridge in 2003. Or like Eden, that 2016 reality TV show where they abandoned competitors to survive in the wilds of Scotland for a year, but stopped broadcasting the show after episode four (didn’t get enough viewers to make it worthwhile) and didn’t tell the participants.

Schofield Agonistes. Angry, absurd, tortured, redundant, heroically un-self-aware. Honestly, he’s doing his best work. It would be even more moving, wouldn’t it, if nobody bothered to tune in?