Opinion: I won’t shed tears for Phillip Schofield – but our interest in his sex life is destructive

Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield at the National Television Awards in London on October 13, 2022. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

The Phillip Schofield business says less about a light entertainer on narrow ground than it does about ourselves. It has held a mirror up to our collective faces, and the reflection isn’t flattering. In a national beauty contest, Caliban would fare better.

In the past few days, revelations about Schofield’s personal life, involving a relationship with a younger man, have eclipsed the death of Martin Amis and the war in Ukraine, while the agonies of his one-time co-presenter, Holly Willoughby, a careful construct of guile and plastic, have dominated the newspapers.

Forget stage fright; I am beginning to get page fright. Since when have we become so trivial? Since when have we become so nasty? I cannot jerk out tears for Schofield, an unctuous dissembler, whose lack of professionalism and evident bile led to his embarrassing then-prime minister David Cameron by handing him a list of alleged Tory paedophiles on live television, seemingly ensuring their names were visible.

One of the people on that list, former Conservative treasurer Alistair McAlpine, was a dear friend of mine. He had serious heart problems at the time and the false accusations of sexual wrongdoing destroyed what little health he had left. Alistair died two years later. So, no, I am not sorry for the Shakespearean irony of it. Or is it just plain karma?

And yet, I cannot help thinking that the interest in Schofield’s personal life is destructive. We are tainted by our obsession with the sex lives of the famous, and our desire to devour them when they inevitably topple from the vertiginous plinths on which we place them, like banana republic statuary. Our society has become so rotten that its only honest impulse is the urge to punish those of whom it has become agnostic. So Schofield must be erased, Soviet-style.

But for what, actually? For an “unwise” affair with a younger man? It was indeed foolish, and we may yet find even worse adjectives to describe it. And what of his employers at ITV? I have met television executives. They are incorrigible gossips and as capable of hunting with the hounds as running with the fox. It is unlikely that Schofield’s behaviour was a secret. Or is he to be put in the stocks for “hurting” the feelings of National Sweetheart Holly? Excuse me while I take a loo break.

I have encountered Willoughby, or Little Miss Sunshine; television’s answer to Doris Day. I met her before she was Doris Day, and am unable to recall our journey with anything approaching sentiment. A newspaper on which I was working at the time asked me to interview Willoughby on her elevation to This Morning. It is safe to say, that like many women whose fame is based on the superficial splendour of being pretty, she combined a determined ignorance of the world, with the conviction of the humourless that she was always right. During our two-hour meeting, I contradicted her in a jovial way and her mouth shut like a steel trap. Then I dared to tweak her nose in print, and suffice to say a disagreement ensued.

I now describe myself as a Holly “survivor”, and on the advice of my therapist have tried to avoid seeing her on the screen. Now, her former colleague and bel ami, Schofield, has hurt her. Why should she be hurt at all? The only people with a right to be hurt are Schofield’s wife and children, and, possibly, his younger partner. Yet it took Little Miss Sunshine over 24 hours to “process” her pain to the extent she could issue a public statement.

But the problem lies with our culture, or lack of it. Tyranny comes in different guises and Britain has become a sinister country. At the root of democracy is a hatred of the elite, which inevitably becomes a hatred of excellence, clean tradition and anything that is not associated with the pursuit of profit. The only human striving we understand is the striving for money and gratification. We have developed a raging libido for the ugly, and our sensibilities are constantly and dangerously attuned to social media. As a result, we end up producing Phillip Schofields and Holly Willoughbys, when we should be producing Robin Days, Joan Bakewells and more David Attenboroughs.

I sometimes hope that people like Schofield are a self-limiting disease. But we are the Petri dish in which he was created. Society is in a giant convulsion of ignorance, stupidity and self-destruction. Of course, every age thinks theirs is worse than the one before. But it would take a deaf and blind person to deny we have lost most of our intelligence, public spirit, generosity and courage – above all courage, which stands under no bond of obligation to a master. Just look at the dark world of light entertainment.