Eamonn Holmes has expressed his frustration about his treatment in the media landscape as a “white man in his sixties” in a new interview.
The broadcaster, who is an anchor on the GB News weekday morning programme Breakfast with Eamonn and Isabel, reflected on moments of his career in an episode of the podcast How to Be 60 with Kaye Adams.
Speaking about his exit from his Radio 5 programme in 2009, Holmes, 63, claimed that while his listenership ratings were “excellent”, an executive told him that the show was “attracting the wrong type of people”, and that they were pursuing a younger audience.
“You’re attracting older people, and we don’t want that,” Holmes claims he was told during a meeting with a production boss.
He continued his story by saying that he ended the meeting in an explicit fashion.
“I basically told him to f**k off, and that was the end of that,” Holmes stated on the podcast, released on Friday (17 February).
Later in the conversation, host Adams referred to a description of Holmes being “male, pale and stale” and asked him: “Is it a hard time to be a white bloke in your sixties?”
Holmes replied: “Oh gosh, yeah. Absolutely, without a doubt.”
“No one’s interested in casting you, no one’s interested in planning a programme around you, no one’s interested in your experience. You do not tick the right boxes for them in terms of your sexuality, your ethnicity.
“You’re bottom of the list, I think, when it comes to choices.”
Holmes shared hosting duties on ITV’s This Morning with his wife, Ruth Langsford, for 15 years, until they were dropped in November 2021.
They were replaced by Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary.
Kaye later pointed out that there was a shift that was allowing groups of people who had been previously excluded from opportunities to be involved and “change the equilibrium” of the workplace.
Last month, Holmes hinted that some of his former colleagues were “dead” to him in a discussion with his GB News co-host Isabel Webster.
