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Louise Thomas
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Phillip Schofield has claimed he was betrayed by those close to him when details of his affair scandal emerged.
The former presenter, 62, left ITV last year after admitting he had lied about having a consensual relationship with a younger man, who worked as a runner on This Morning.
Schofield has alleged other TV presenters have done “exactly the same thing” as him and said he could “drive the same bus over so many people”.
Speaking on the forthcoming second episode of his comeback series Cast Away, which sees him trying to survive on an island in the Indian Ocean for 10 days, Schofield expresses his love for working at the Television Centre, the filming studios in London.
“It was my greatest dream to walk into Television Centre,” he says. “At the age of 19, I became a bookings clerk at the BBC and I got a pass that got me into all of the BBC buildings.
“It was so magical to walk through those gates.”
He explains: “I loved being there. Which meant that when what happened to me happened to me, it screwed up my favourite building in the world. It pretty well blew away all those happy memories. Suddenly the place became hostile to me. And that was heartbreaking.”
Schofield left ITV last May after apologising for lying to the media, his friends and his colleagues about an affair with a younger man. The presenter said he helped the teenager secure work experience with the channel when he was around 19 but denied having any form of sexual contact with him until he was around 20 years old.
In the Cast Away episode, Schofield continues: “The people who did it to me know how important that building was to me. They know that when you throw someone under a bus, you’ve got to have a really bloody good reason to do it. Brand ambition is not good enough.”
The former This Morning presenter admits it has been “hard to come to terms with the fact that the people you thought you knew were not the people that you thought you knew”.
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He adds: “They had completely different agendas. Man alive people can be fake. They can be so fake when it’s all going well and [then] sudden utter betrayal... And I thought, how many friends do you need? I don’t need 200 fake friends.
“I’ve got, what? Ten, 15 friends that I would die for, they would die for me.”
Schofield also claimed that the relationship would not have mattered if he was not gay, and suggested an affair with a woman would have meant a “pat on the back”.
He said: “I think another TV presenter or two might have done exactly the same thing, difference is heterosexual, it’s not an unusual thing in the gay world, for there to be a difference in age groups.”
His comments arrive shortly after the first episode of Cast Away, during which Schofield said he would never work with ITV again.
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 by Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly.
“I’m apparently four to one [odds] to do the other jungle programme,” Schofield said 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 added of his relationship with ITV. “There are just some people you won’t work for.”
Cast Away airs over three nights beginning 30 September.
