Even before Phillip Schofield stood down on Saturday, most of us had our “Phil and Holly” tipping point. For me, it was PMQs, when deputy PM Oliver Dowden described opposition leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, as “the Phil and Holly of British politics”. “We all know what’s going on with her and her leader,” said Dowden, “it’s all lovey-dovey on the surface, they turn it on for the cameras, but as soon as they’re off, it’s a different story. They’re at each other’s throats.”
It was official: the nation was gripped by the escalating froideur (estrangement, darkness, conjecture) between the previously BFF-presenting team of ITV’s This Morning. Even the denizens of Westminster were agog at the pair’s rictus-grinned “Bette and Joan” mid-morning cabaret of enforced contractual proximity. So much has been going on it’s difficult to keep up. The background murk (Phillip Schofield’s brother has just been sentenced to 12 years for child sexual abuse offences). The 2022 Queen’s coffin queue-jumping furore. The speculation. Would Holly Willoughby leave? Would Schofield be ousted? What was fact and what was rumour? And how long could they go on co-presenting under such circumstances?
Schofield’s announcement that he had agreed to step down “in the hope that the show can move forward to a bright future” has turned up the spotlight on a longstanding televisual convention that’s increasingly looking absurdly dated. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll lump it all together and call it the “Breakfast TV Couple” (This Morning actually airs mid-morning). Could it be time to call an end to the very concept of the BTC, or is it too late – it’s burrowed too deep into popular culture?
It would be churlish to denigrate morning TV hosts: the job looks as tough and skilled as any other presenting gig and with those debilitating early starts on top. Still, what is it about “Coco Pops O’clock” that makes TV bosses feel that presenters need to emanate that singular sofa/desk-bound faux-married “chemistry”? It isn’t a diktat running all the way through broadcasting. You don’t get Newsnight presenters routinely required to mimic the needy over-chummy couple you deeply regret keeping in touch with after a disappointing staycation.
The first-ever British breakfast show, Breakfast Time, aired on BBC1 in 1983, and was presented by Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross. This sphere of TV has since settled into the somewhat Americanised “wifey/hubby” screen-formula now so normalised it’s taken for granted. It’s only when you look at it – really look – you realise how odd it all is.
Exhibit A: the styling. Though this has improved. Naga Munchetty (teamed with Charlie Stayt at BBC Breakfast) has clearly put her foot down about how far into the “Next-separates” fashion-quicksand she’s prepared to sink. In the past, breakfast TV has been much more Stepford-adjacent. Chirpy “wedding guest” clothes. Inch-thick “Avon Lady calling” make-up. Stiff hair to match the creaking links (fluffy to serious; gossipy to tragic). It’s perhaps significant that morning presenters have so often been styled like minor royals: they are television royalty (royalty-AM, if you will), and, while on-air, those primary coloured sets are their personal fiefdoms.
What they represent for the viewing public seems complicated: continuity (again, like the royals); ersatz parent figures (“Mummy Holly and Daddy Phil are fighting!”); friends; company. Perchance, a breakfast-themed opiate for the bleary-eyed masses? Why there’s any need for presenters to work from within hoary (generally heteronormative) faux-marriages is another question. One that makes even less sense now that, in the real world, people no longer expect, demand or even want idealised nuclear family units.
In the modern television era, there’s space for more non-white faces. And while there is an LGBTQ presence (Schofield came out as gay on This Morning in 2020), why are there no gay couples as fixtures? This is not to claim that the presenters are all the same, but rather that they tend to emulate different kinds of married realities.
There are the real marriages: Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan; Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford; Rochelle and Marvin Humes. Sweet marriages: Kate Garraway and Ben Shephard. Fiery marriages: Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan worked up a brilliant “exasperated wife trying to quieten irascible husband” routine, before he left to spend more time ranting about Meghan Markle. There have even been trendy counterculture bunk-ups: on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, Chris Evans and Gabby Roslin broke the mould by coming across as cohabitees who’d get married in Las Vegas if they felt like it – but still, that’s a kind of pre-marriage.
Then there are the TV marriages on the rocks, the nuclear bust-ups and crazed fissures, of which Willoughby and Schofield are merely the most recent example.
The arena of morning co-hosting is littered with the reviled corpses of past partnerships. Scott blasted Bough as “a sex-obsessed nightmare”. Holmes labelled former co-host Anthea Turner “Princess Tippy Toes”. And so it goes on: the backbiting, the scheming, the schadenfreude. What is all this if not a starrier version of the imploding “office husband/wife” dynamic?
While the Schofield/Willoughby relationship looked complex, do we generally demand too much of early-rising presenters? Considering sleep deprivation is a recognised form of torture, should there be more respect for their relentless (albeit brittle) bonhomie (the determined smiling, the endless enthusiasm)? After all, every morning, there they are, a universal metaphor for human survival under duress.
Aside from that, in the 21st century, you’d hope it would be recognised that the creepy outmoded faux-marriage presenting template is several broadcasting aeons past its sell-by date. That, before the next couple starts kicking off or “divorcing”, it might be possible to pre-emptively break them up, and the whole cosy/uncosy shebang with it.
Or, more likely, four decades on, is it all too deeply entrenched in British broadcasting-DNA to ever budge? Who needs Game of Thrones when you’ve got Game Of Sofas?
