Phillip Schofield has spoken in an emotional TV return of how “dark” life became in the aftermath of leaving This Morning.
The presenter opens up during filming for Cast Away, a Channel 5 show which follows celebrities as they are marooned on a desert island for 10 days.
It marks Schofield’s first appearance on television since he left ITV show This Morning after 21 years, following an “unwise but not illegal” affair with a younger male colleague. “In the last 18 months my life has totally unravelled,” the 62-year-old says in the opening credits. “I locked myself away from the outside world.”
The three-part series sees Schofield take up residence on the remote Madagascan island of Nosy Ankarea, with no company: only the cameras he uses to self-record his attempt to survive the elements, completely solo.
During the first episode, he also opens up about the toll of the scandal on his mental health, which saw his name splashed across newspaper headlines for weeks before his abrupt departure from This Morning. “When it came to a sudden end, I’d spend days just in bed, watching the news, just in a daze,” he says.
“It got as dark as it is possible to get. A year ago I got so, so close. I had everything in place, everything was set up and everything was ready and it was [daughter] Molly that was looking after me.”
“Molly said, ‘Do you imagine what this would do to us if you actually managed to pull this off? Can you imagine what would happen and can you imagine what it would do to me if you did this on my watch?’”
“And that was just enough, just enough, to take a step back from the edge. And I could have been hospitalised. I had the option to be hospitalised, but then I thought, that is going to get out. So I just raced to the family home and shut the gates and I was in there.”
He went onto explain that he then didn’t leave the house until his mother became critically sick – which meant he had to “pluck up the courage” to leave and drive down to Cornwall.
During the episode, Schofield also talked about coming out as gay – which he did on an episode of This Morning, with co-presenter Holly Willougby, in 2022. For him, he says, “the wheels came off” at that point.
“I know that coming out for so many people is liberating, and it's freedom on a plate, absolutely be yourself, live your life to the absolute full,” he says in a piece to camera.
“That's the saying, just live your best life. But for me, doing it later in life, at the moment it's just given me more anguish than joy because I'm fully aware of the damage that it leaves. I still have the love of my family, never wavered.”
Later, he adds that there had been “such a chunk of my older life that I've just been sad, locked myself away, put myself into my own personal lockdowns over and over and over again.”
An emotional Schofield then adds that he never thought he would “do this, discover something new every day.
“It’s nice to discover new things about yourself, like for you, for you personally.”
Phillip Schofield: Cast Away begins airs at 9pm on Monday on Channel 5
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