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Louise Thomas
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Phillip Schofield has hit back at reports he quit his role on This Morning following his widely reported affair scandal.
The former presenter, 62, will address the controversy in a three-part Channel 5 series, titled Cast Away, which sees him spend 10 days trying to survive on an island in the Indian Ocean.
It will mark the presenter’s first return to TV since he admitted to having an affair with a younger male colleague he worked with on ITV’s This Morning, which led to his departure from the daily chat show.
In the first Cast Away episode, seen by The Independent, a series producer asks Schofield how he’d feel if he couldn’t cope with island life, to which he replies: “Oh it is inconceivable that I would quit.”
He then seemingly references his This Morning departure, adding: “I’m fired but I never quit.”
Elsewhere in the programme, Schofield discusses the difficulties of filming the Cast Away series without the public finding out.
This August, it was rumoured Schofield would enter the I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here jungle for the forthcoming series, which will be hosted once again by double act Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly.
“I’m apparently four to one [odds] to do the other jungle programme,” Schofield says from his home in London before heading to the Cast Away island. “Now, although my best mates host it, there are some channels you just won’t work for,” he adds of his relationship with ITV.
“There are just some people you won’t work for.”
He adds: “I’ve just got to get out of the country now without anyone thinking, ‘Where the hell is he going?’ Not flying out of Heathrow or Gatwick cause that would be too obvious. So, I’m on my way to get the Eurostar.”
Schofield left ITV last May after he admitted he had lied about having a “consensual on-off relationship” with a younger man, which took place while Schofield was still married to his wife Stephanie Lowe.
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The presenter said he arranged for the teenager to get work experience with ITV when he was around 19. He denied having any form of sexual contact with him until he was around 20 years old, after the man had been working on the show for a few months, and insisted the relationship was “consensual and fully legal”. After the scandal emerged, Schofield apologised for lying to the media, his friends and his colleagues about the affair and immediately left ITV.
Viewers have been left incensed at the news of the former presenter’s TV comeback and have called the move a “disgrace”.
One person said the presenter was “desperate for attention” while dozens joked about the concept of the show which sees Schofield stranded alone as they commented, “absolutely nobody wants to work with him so he’s doing a show that has no cast or crew”.
Another added: “Phillip Schofield on a desert island for 10 days in his TV comeback? The only way I’ll be watching that is if the island is heavily populated with lions, tigers, snakes and crocodiles.”
Schofield addresses the hostility towards him during the first Cast Away episode, saying: “I think there’d be an awful lot of people [who] hope that I never come back. Goodbye. Thank you. ‘What happened? He got washed out to sea. Well, there we go.’”
In the same episode, the former presenter reveals he was on the brink of suicide after his career fell apart. “I had everything in place,” he says. “Everything was set up.”
Schofield admits during the programme that the only reason he’s still alive is because his daughter Molly, 31, talked him down from “the edge”.
He explains his daughter had asked him: “‘Can you imagine what it would do to me if you did this on my watch?’”
“That was just enough to take a step back from the edge,” he explains.
“And I could have been hospitalised… But then I thought, ‘That is going to get out.’ So, I just raced to the family home and shut the gates.”
Cast Away airs over three nights beginning Monday 30 September.
