Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV launched last night, featuring Piers Morgan’s much-hyped interview with Donald Trump — in which the former president suggested he’d run for office again in 2024 — a cultivated “anti-woke” agenda, and a determination not to repeat the technical gaffes of GB News. Whether the world needs another outlet for the culture wars, where well-paid commentators complain loudly and endlessly about being silenced, is anyone’s guess: but only a fool would bet against Murdoch’s commercial sense and media savvy.
Piers Morgan Uncensored was high on drama and talking points, even if short on substance. Trump repeated his baseless claims that the 2020 American election was rigged, claimed that “a lot of people are gonna be very happy” with the Republican nomination in 2024, and suggested he’d cowed Vladimir Putin during his time in office by flaunting America’s superior nuclear arsenal: “I threatened him like he has never been threatened before.”
On the current war he was reliably awful. “It’s such a stoopid war... You see swings outside, you see playgrounds, you see hospitals,” he rambled, before claiming “all those people are dead because of a rigged [American] election” and urging both sides to “make a deal”. Morgan, a probing and relentless interviewer at his rare best, regularly tried to call Trump to account, but during their 70-minute talk he was also keen to cover as many bases as possible.
Trump duly came up with quotable slurs against Joe Biden, Angela Merkel, Boris Johnson (“he’s getting a bit liberal, a bit green” — sorry, what?) and Morgan’s own bêtes noires, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. “He’s whipped,” sneered Trump. “It’ll end and it’ll end bad.”
He boasted about his own honesty while branding Morgan “not real” and a fool. This contest of egos was like watching two wealthy old, overweight boxers endlessly circling, each trying to land a blow on the other. Except that here the currency is power and vanity, not blood. Or not their blood, anyway.
It had already been leaked that the flagship interview was almost derailed at the last minute when a dossier of all the rude things Morgan had said about his former friend in the past two years found its way into Trump’s small-fingered hands. On air, Morgan laid responsibility for this “sneaky plot that completely backfired” at the door of a rival channel, displaying a photo of Geebeebies regular Nigel Farage. It’s also been trailed that Trump walked out of the interview after 70 minutes, but we’ll have to wait for the second instalment of Morgan’s show tonight to see that.
TalkTV is 91-year-old Murdoch’s first foray into British TV since selling his stake in Sky in 2018. The channel’s slogan is “straight talking starts here” and it is available on Sky, Virgin, Freeview, Freesat, various streaming services, TalkTV’s own website and app, and social media channels. It’s supported by advertising — a decent spread of brands on opening night, given the atomisation of the TV audience.
Much of TalkTV’s on-screen commentariat has been seconded from Murdoch’s Talk Radio or News UK newspapers The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun, alongside starry hires like Sharon Osbourne and Jeremy Kyle. Piers Morgan Uncensored will also be broadcast in the US and Australia, and is part of a reported £50 million, three-year deal under which the former tabloid editor will also write books and columns for Murdoch outlets. Apart from a few times when the vocal track was out of synch with speakers’ mouths, the new channel’s first steps were relatively smooth.
Everyone looks pink and CGI-enhanced, apart from Trump and Morgan — angry gammons about to fight
It’s a forum for news-based pontificating in the now-established Transatlantic style, modelled on Fox News but tweaked for British sensibilities. There are power desks, in-your-face graphics, and logos and headlines constantly crawling across the screen. Everyone on it looks pink and slightly CGI-enhanced, apart from Trump and Morgan, who resembled angry gammons about to take it outside.
The first smooth face to appear was that of Tom Newton-Dunn, former political supremo at the Sun and Times Radio, sometime Evening Standard columnist and now anchor of TalkTV’s nightly 7pm show The News Desk. This is a relatively straightforward bulletin with a UK slant. Top story last night was the horrific Bermondsey stabbings.
Ukraine coverage was dominated by an exclusive interview with the family of a British soldier captured by Russia. There was another “exclusive” chat, conducted by Talk Radio’s Kate McCann, with a female employee who’d been “lunged” at by Prince Andrew, and who’d told her story to the Sun already. Only a panel discussion on Google’s supposed censorship of politically incorrect terms hinted at TalkTV’s wider agenda, and Newton-Dunn ended with a scoop — Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Then it was Morgan’s show, his first since he flounced out of his gig as co-presenter of Good Morning Britain when a weatherman politely challenged his weird vendetta against Meghan Markle. Sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror in 2004, Morgan has previously reinvented himself as an author, columnist, chat show host, documentarian and reality TV mainstay. Now he’s recast himself as a victim of cancel culture, finally unleashed.
The Trump interview was broken into soundbites between which Morgan bigged himself up as both a cruelly wounded martyr and a giant who eats climate change protesters for breakfast. The set, the graphics, and a section called “The World’s Gone Nuts” all looked like they were cut from Armando Iannucci’s news-show spoof The Day Today for being too lame.
He promised he’d have our back in the battle against “woke snowflakes” who want to reappraise history and gender or force us to eat vegan sausage rolls. He’d be voice of truth — “the truth, not your truth” — against “illiberal liberals”, “cancel crusaders… conducting the ‘Banish Inquisition’” and “ideological imperialists waving your snitchforks”. (He has a good gag writer, to be fair).
This crusade seems to involve riding roughshod over the sensitivity that’s desperately needed in the debate over transgender rights, and banging on about statues (of which, lest we forget, only one has been toppled in the UK in recent years). Mostly, though, it requires a resumption in hostilities with Harry and Meghan. Clearly the Sussexes’ relationship, and Morgan’s apparently one-sided beef with them, has been identified as an issue that gets keyboard warriors’ forehead veins throbbing.
Both the Trump interview and the royal couple provided talking points across the channel last night and today. Newton-Dunn quoted Trump’s 2024 hint in advance of Morgan’s show and the newsreader on the breakfast show fronted by Talk Radio contrarian Julia Hartley-Brewer led on it today. Morgan’s second show tonight will not only feature Trump storming out — which both men seem to regard as a coup — but also a “revealing and heartrending” interview with Sharon Osbourne “over what happened to her when she got cancelled after she defended me over the Meghan Markle debacle”. Last night, in panel show The Talk, which followed Morgan on air at 9pm, Sharon Osbourne and Jeremy Kyle… slagged off Harry and Meghan.
The channel so far feels like a weirdly circular echo chamber where everyone recycles the same ideas and complaints, and where most shows have to have the word “talk” in the title. The schedule is full of smug US-style idents in which Newton-Dunn, Kyle, Hartley-Brewer and McCann big up their own straight-talking, no-nonsense shows. Fellow Talk Radio presenters Mike Graham and James Whale are also on the roster.
Is there an audience for a channel where pundits engage in an endless loop of liberal-bashing?
Is there an audience for a channel where host-pundits and pundit-hosts engage in an endless loop of liberal-bashing? Where “a global pandemic, or a war in Europe” — as Morgan put it — will be sidelined in favour of hot-button issues? Where people who’ve been on TV and in print for decades claim that they’re finally voicing the concerns of an unheard multitude who, conversely, dictated the Brexit vote, immigration policy, and the Government’s huge majority?
Rupert Murdoch thinks there is.
