“I’M so sorry Piers,” read the text from a major TV star minutes after my abrupt exit from Good Morning Britain was announced two years ago. “Hope you’re OK mate, it’s outrageous what’s happened to you, and you have my total support.”
This touching message of private solidarity, never repeated in public, would have carried slightly more weight if the same star hadn’t – as I later learned – also just texted a senior ITV executive applying for my job.
I chuckled to myself at the brazen duplicity of this halo-clad household name who’d throw himself into my grave if he thought there was a Hello! magazine cover shoot possibility from it.
But I wasn’t remotely surprised.
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I’d bet good money the exact same thing is happening to Phillip Schofield since he was sacked as This Morning presenter.
Ironically, it was his long-time co-host Holly Willoughby who summed this mindset up perfectly when pranksters once fired off requests to celebrities for ‘advanced obituary tributes’ about me, supposedly for ITN.
“Are you OK?” messaged a panicky Holly. “I’ve been asked to record an obit message about you?”
“It’s a fake,” I replied. “Out of interest, what would you have said in your tribute?”
“I’d have said you were a wonderfully beloved part of the loving ITV daytime family who will be sorely missed,” Holly replied, “and that I’m available to take over presenting Life Stories.”
She was joking.
At least, I think she was joking.
Holly’s a friend of mine, but beneath the benign butter-wouldn’t-melt grin and touchy-feely motivational Instagram posts lurks a tough, ambitious, brand-protective cookie, which is one of the reasons why I like her.
I like Phillip Schofield too, despite a 25-year rift between us that developed after I wrote an unofficial 1992 biography about him entitled ‘To Dream a Dream – the Phillip Schofield Story’ and which only ended when he took me out for a long, drunken, and very entertaining lunch.
Phillip’s not the evil monster he’s being painted as, nor is he the angel his previously halo-clad reputation suggested.
I know a lot of people who loathe him for the way he’s treated them, including my good friends Amanda Holden and Eamonn Holmes.
But I also know some of his colleagues, current and past, who speak highly of him and feel genuinely sad that his career is going up in smoke like this.
One thing’s for sure, what’s happened to him is further evidence that the abyss-like depths of ruthless backstabbing in the world of daytime television makes even the seething cesspit of Westminster politics seem like an oasis of loyalty by comparison.
One minute Schofield was undisputed king of morning TV and fast heading to bona fide national treasure status – the next he’s a dethroned, shamed, vilified, national disgrace and social media laughing stock.
And many of those people he mistakenly thought were faithful friends and colleagues have been happily tossing him on the bonfire in a blizzard of lurid leaks, smears, and damaging headlines.
It’s been brutal to watch, but again, entirely unsurprising.
When I was asked about his sacking yesterday, and described daytime TV as being “infested by a pack of savages”, I got an email from a former senior ITV executive saying simply: “You’re not wrong. Absolute nest of vipers with zero loyalty!”
I can certainly attest to that, as can my TalkTV colleague Jeremy Kyle who was also summarily dismissed from his long-running and hugely successful ITV morning show and suffered serious anxiety issues from the vitriolic fallout, none of which seemed to remotely bother the network’s many mental health virtue-signallers.
In fact, I soon worked out there was a direct correlation between the size of a daytime TV person’s beaming smile and unctuous ‘love your work, Piers!’ sycophancy, and their sneaky duplicity.
These two-faced wastrels would billow constant adoring smoke up my a** to my face and bask in the reflected glory of the soaring ratings and awards that I brought in, but behind my back many of the same smiley, happy, nicey-nicey people were pouring toxic buckets of foul-mouthed manure over me.
They just didn’t realise I knew.
You can always tell the real weasels by the way they gleefully trash every other presenter in your presence – but deludedly assume you won’t think they’re doing it you too.
Obviously, not everyone in daytime TV is like that.
I met a lot of good, decent people when I worked in that environment, and took some of them with me when I joined TalkTV.
But there are more than a few I would now cross continents to avoid, like GMB’s deputy stand-in weatherman Alex Beresford who begged me for media advice than tried – and failed – to make a name for himself taking me down on my last show with a pre-rehearsed attack speech.
Or the likes of Loose Women’s Denise Welch, a vile, spiteful hypocrite who makes a fortune from preaching about the need to ‘be kind’ but likes nothing better than spewing hateful foul-mouthed abuse at people on Twitter.
Or those executives who regularly told me how much they loved my outspoken straight-talking and forthright opinions, and the ratings and money they attracted, right to the point a fork-tongued Princess decided to test their free speech resolve and they wilted like tulips at the first sign of ice.
Then there were those who just disappointed me with their fair-weather shallowness, like the TV star who I’d helped through his own difficult career times, and who texted me all the time to say how much he loved watching me on GMB, but who I then didn’t hear from for a year months after I was ousted because he didn’t want to upset Meghan and Harry.
I don’t know the full story behind Phillip Schofield’s downfall, but where I feel personal empathy with him is over the manner of his sacking.
For ITV to not even give him the chance to say a proper goodbye to his large, loyal audience after 21 years struck me as needlessly churlish, and I know he’s utterly heartbroken about it because he told me himself.
I, too, was deprived of saying goodbye to my GMB audience and that hurt after putting so much effort into gaining their trust.
But he can at least console himself with the fact that he got publicly thanked by his employers.
“Phillip is hands down one of the best broadcasters of his generation and we thank him for his two decades worth of absolutely terrific television on the This Morning sofa,” said Kevin Lygo, ITV’s Director of Television.
By contrast, I didn’t get a single word of praise or gratitude, despite trebling Good Morning Britain’s ratings in five years and making it the No1 breakfast show in the country.
“Following discussions with ITV,” read the company’s Siberia-cold statement about my departure, “Piers Morgan has decided now is the time to leave Good Morning Britain. ITV has accepted this decision and has nothing further to add.”
Obviously, I hadn’t wanted to leave at all, but I was told to publicly apologise for disbelieving Meghan Markle’s unsubstantiated bullsh*t about the Royal Family, or I couldn’t come back to work. So, I left.
Bizarrely, ITV’s chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall keeps insisting Ms Markle had nothing to do with my departure, which is strange because Princess Pinocchio wrote personally to Dame Carolyn the night before I was forced out, demanding my head on a plate, and even emphasising the fact they’re both ‘women and mothers’ to pressure her into getting rid of me. To clear up any unfortunate misunderstandings of the ‘recollections may vary’ variety, perhaps Dame Carolyn should just put that letter into the public domain?
To be fair to Kevin Lygo though, he did later pay a touching tribute to me at an annual ITV ‘Palooza’ event for advertisers, comparing me to Harry Potter villain Voldemort, then saying ‘We miss Piers’ before making a crude ‘w**ker’ hand signal, to raucous cheers from a star-studded audience full of my former ‘loving daytime ITV family.’
Aww, shucks. Thanks guys!
