War!

Paramount Pictures

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I experienced many professional encounters with celebrities. As an entertainment journalist and, later, a press officer, I became immunised to the fragility of egos and the invariably capricious nature of volatile personalities.

When I wrote for a living, it was not uncommon to walk away from an interview thinking, “Well, they were nothing like their on-screen version.” That’s not to say that they were two-faced, but it was invariably priced in to dealings with some celebs that what propelled them to present, act or perform was often inverse to their real-life selves. 

Not to single anyone out, but Lenny Henry was a prime example: I got to meet him as a teenager, when my father was at the BBC working on the comedy show Three Of A Kind with Tracey Ullman, and David Copperfield. Henry was pretty much the larger than life loon who’d made Saturday mornings a laugh on Tiswas. Years later, now as a writer, I interviewed him at The Groucho Club and it was like pulling teeth. Perhaps he was simply having a bad day. We all do.

I assumed that some interviewees went into encounters with the press with their guards up. But so often there were reminders that whatever they did for a living was an extroversion, and underneath it all, many were fundamentally quite shy. The worst mistake to make was thinking you were about to become a mate (an idiom of showbusiness reporters, perfected by John Blake when he was the editor of The Sun’s Bizarre column, and continued by the likes of Piers Morgan in that role). Because you weren’t. Your relationship was purely transactional, designed to flog their record/film/show/book. 

I should point out that not everyone was a monster. Lorraine Kelly, I recall, was every bit the genuinely likeable person she appears on daytime TV. Jools Holland was another (I interviewed him on the day of his return from suspension from The Tube in 1987 and he couldn’t have been any more accommodating). But there were also marked contrasts: months before that trip to Newcastle, I visited the BBC’s then-new daytime TV show Open Air in Manchester. Its chief presenter, the late Pattie Coldwell loudly blanked me, apparently taking umbrage over a feature on swimsuits in the magazine I was working for (deeming the piece sexist). Her junior co-presenter, a young Eamonn Holmes, took pity and gave me a splendid interview.

When I moved to the other side of the notebook, and became a TV press officer, I encountered ego fragility from a more bruising perspective. There were tantrums (by presenters, not me) directed at the first lackey to stray into the wrong spot at the wrong time (mentioning no names, but he was also on Tiswas…), and no shortage of awkward moments, requiring the sort of diplomatic acquiescence of the kind so brilliantly satirised by obsequious promoter Artie Fufkin (played by Paul Shaffer) in This Is Spinal Tap.

Drop The Dead Donkey (Hat Trick Productions)

Treading on egomaniacal eggshells was an occupational hazard, and nothing more trepidatious as dealing with those threatened by rivals. When Channel 4 launched its sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey in 1990, poking fun at life in a fictional satellite TV newsroom, eyebrows were raised in Isleworth where Sky News had gone on air in February 1989. Suspicions were already raised as to where writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin were getting their ideas from, and fears weren’t helped by the fact that the show’s art department had sourced the exact same time of desk phones and vending machines that Sky had in use. One episode, when a TV awards dinner got out of hand as rivalry between Globelink News and a rival broadcaster spilled into a punch-up, appeared to be dangerously familiar, having attended a black tie awards event myself in which some ‘banter’ was exchanged between competing tables. 

Later in my time at Sky, I arrived at work one morning to be informed - by a current presenter on the channel - that a pair of anchors (I think that was the phrase used…) had, the evening before, been involved in an actual punch-up in the newsroom, resulting in the two rolling down a corridor in a tumble likened by one witness to “a clothed version of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed’s naked wrestling bout in Ken Russell’s Women In Love”. 

As soon as I was informed of the event I knew exactly who it would have involved: the incident had been brewing for some time: as I recall, it had begun when one took umbrage to the other’s claim, in their PR biography handout, that they’d been on air the moment Nelson Mandela had walked free from his Robben Island prison cell. The other claimed that, no, they were on air at the time. The truth was that one had indeed been broadcasting live at the exact moment of Mandela’s release, while the other was merely on air that evening. Over time, this built into a passive-aggressive conflict similar to that between Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito’s rival ’aluminium siding’ salesmen in Barry Levinson’s hilarious Tin Men (a feud that begins with a minor car accident before turning into a full-scale war of attrition). In the case of the Sky presenters it manifested itself in things like one childishly occupying the other’s (undesignated) chair in the newsroom, purely to wind them up when they arrived for their shift..

Their dispute was perhaps the most notorious that I encountered, but it wasn’t alone in the organisation. And because I was dealing with working journalists, all of whom knew journalists in Fleet Street, it didn’t stay internal for long. By the following Sunday, one of the presenters called me at home in a panic, unable to leave his front door because a pack of photographers was outside. Quite bizarre, now I think of it: Sky News at the time was hardly front page news, given that its audience was relatively small (as it is now). But the media likes to eat itself, and none more so when a rival organisation is  involved (Sky, being Murdoch-owned at the time, rarely earned any favours from other media groups). Journalists like gossipy stories about their own. And somehow, newspaper editors seem to think the public does too.

Hence, yesterday’s front pages, dominated by Phillip Schofield’s “stepping back” (when did that phrase replaced “sacked”?) from ITV’s This Morning, following weeks of a supposedly growing feud between him and co-presenter Holly Willoughby. 

In case you’ve been holidaying on Mars with dodgy 5G coverage, morning TV’s ‘golden couple’ (as they are always branded), have seen their once “brilliant chemistry” eroded by…well, no one is fully sure what. The common narrative is that public flak the couple faced after seemingly queue jumping at the Queen’s lying-in-state last September (i.e. ‘Queuegate’, of which it has since been positioned that they were there for editorial reasons) started to drive a wedge between them. There has been the additional element that the paedophilia conviction for Schofield’s brother Timothy put further strain on their working partnership. That, so we’ve been fed, is the cause of a feud that grew over several weeks to a tabloid crescendo (and not just the ‘red tops’ - even the notably highbrow broadsheets have weighed in on it).

Schofield - who I interviewed when he was still presenting children’s TV on the BBC with sidekick Gordon The Gopher, and was every bit as affable as his on-screen persona - had enjoyed a 14-year screen relationship with Willoughby that seemed genuine. But something has gone irretrievably wrong. When Schofield issued a statement on Saturday afternoon, admitting that “the last few weeks haven't been easy for us” as the tabloids had been giving daily updates of behind-the-scenes frostiness, Willoughby was said to have been blindsided. 

After last Thursday morning’s show - the pair’s final scheduled appearance of the week - Schofield was apparently informed by This Morning editor Martin Frizell that his contract would not be renewed in the summer. Schofield’s statement confirmed that he was leaving the show, giving the politician’s resignation message that he was becoming too much of a distraction, that the dispute with Willoughby had “become the story” and that he wished to “protect the show I love”. 

That’s telly for you. And none of this is exactly important. As plenty of people have noted, following the blanket coverage of the affair yesterday, that surely with Ukraine, the cost of living crisis and plenty of other topics worthy of attention, a pair of TV presenters falling out is hardly essential. It’s not. But I think that, perhaps snootily, ignores the fact that television plays a greater part in people’s lives than those who denigrate it are prepared to admit.

I can’t say that I’ve ever watched an episode of This Morning, and can only attest to Schofield and Willoughby’s chemistry from frequent clips of the couple giggling uncontrollably at something one of them said or has happened in the studio. Not my kind of informative TV, but plenty have loved it. And will continue to, whoever sits on the sofa. 

Eammon Holmes who, since my encounter in 1987 went on to present GMTV, Sky News’ breakfast show, This Morning itself and, latterly the reactionary GB News (where his apparently conservative politics have found a home), made a somewhat caustic remark about the Schofield-Willoughby falling out (for the record, Holmes and wife Ruth Langsford were dropped by ITV as This Morning’s Friday presenting team). After the BAFTA TV awards, at which neither Schofield or Willoughby appeared, Holmes was quoted as saying: “I think there should have been a special award for Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby for best actors.” Ouch. He did, though, go on to make the salient point that This Morning is something of a daytime TV institution. “It will carry on no matter who presents it and anyone can check the viewing figures, there’s no difference between whether they present it or anyone else.”

That, though, doesn’t appear to be ITV’s view of it. In the wake of Schofield’s announcement, “friends” of the presenter have claimed that he’s been “hung out to dry”, that This Morning’s producers had to make a choice: if the supposedly perfect chemistry between their hosts was broken, do they discard both or retain one, and if so, who do they keep? It would appear that would be Willoughby. And core to all this is the actual business of commercial television: ratings. At one point This Morning was getting an audience of 1.4 million - relatively large for daytime TV - but in recent weeks that number has dropped considerably, with just 726,720 tuning in this time last week, as the war between the presenters played out relentlessly in the press. Once viewers start tuning out, so do advertisers. And when that happens, there’s always a casualty. That, then, will be Schofield. Oh, and the dignity of anyone who takes this stuff too seriously.

Stay classy, TV newsland

I remember, distinctly, the scene, 32 years ago, in the Sky TV press office in Osterley. It was late afternoon and Sky’s five channels were due to go on air at 6pm. We kept reminding ourselves that no-one had ever launched as many TV channels at the same time (this was February 1989 - until Channel 4’s arrival in 1982 the UK only had had only three terrestrial offerings). Sky News would be the first “live” channel on Sky with in-vision presenters. Everyone was nervous. Sky’s HQ - three converted industrial units on what was still a muddy site, underneath the Heathrow flight path - was still being constructed around us, which meant that the inaugural news bulletin, presented by Penny Smith and Alastair Yates, had to be fed through an outside broadcast link in the car park connected to a facility in central London. Anything could have gone wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.

The parallels were there this last Sunday when upstart GB News launched at 8pm with a monologue from Andrew Neil (who was Sky’s executive chairman in 1989), promising “to do news differently”. As the newcomer’s chairman, Neil - who still has the huge-shouldered, hunched gate he had when I encountered him in the Osterley boardroom - promised: “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” This, as has been well documented, is GB News’s PR schtick: to draw in the anti-woke brigade and satiate their belief that the BBC and, indeed, Sky News, are now portals for left-wing liberal thinking, and give them a voice (the fact that we’ve had a right-of-centre Conservative government for over ten years, which has delivered Brexit, doesn’t seem to have sunk in amongst those breathlessly endorsing GB News in comments beneath the Mail’s various puff pieces on the channel).

Like Sky, though, the build-up to GB News launching was coloured by a media narrative similar to that we endured in the latter half of 1988 as we worked towards launch day. Being a then-Rupert Murdoch-owned channel, the tone had been somewhere between cynical and hostile, such was the proprietorial tribalism amongst the UK’s various media corporations. As a cousin of News International - home, then, to The Sun, News Of The World, Today, The Times and Sunday Times - Sky News was envisaged as “The Sun on TV”, somewhere between the tabloid’s cor-blimey popularism and a Thatcherist political bent. We were even known as “Tits at Teatime” in rival newsrooms (when Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey appeared, there were eerie similarities - even the desk phones and vending machine in the fictional GlobeLink newsroom were identical, which suggested some well-placed research).

So, despite the political colour that was part of the chatter before GB News’a launch on Sunday, we should, I suppose, give it a chance. It’s opening night technical hitches (Neil’s monologue looking like it had been lit by candle, Scottish academic Neil Oliver’s microphone not working, and so on), may have given it the air of satirical pisstakes, but these were teething problems that could have happened to anyone. As Hugo Rifkind writes in The Times today, the media should give their new competitor some slack, given the rate of attrition that the journalism profession has experienced in the online age: “Any journalists resenting the expansion of their own industry probably ought to be in a different one,” he commented. 

There is a notion, in the old days of printed newspapers, that when you launch a new product - be it a brand new paper or a redesigned one - you do so with a scoop. To some extent, it’s a marketing hook to put you on the map. After a while, everyone - broadsheet or tabloid - soon levels out, covering more or less the same stories in their own particular style. It is, actually, quite a skill to write for a tabloid: trying to cram into 250 words for The Sun what you’d have more than a thousand to make use of in a broadsheet. I can speak from experience, it’s more challenging than you’d think. I’ve also worked with journalists of all creeds, and regardless of their publications’ political orientation, all work to the same objectives. It would, though be horrendously naive to think that all journalism is objective and without nuance. Which is why GB News is, to me at least, a curious experiment. Its debut-edition scoop is to declare a culture war and somewhat cynically tap into the same opposition to political correctness that has Piers Morgan railing about Harry and Meghan’s apparent snowflakery, and ends with footballers being booed for taking the knee at Wembley. There was just a little dog whistle about Neil’s opening: “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name,” he intoned (and from someone who spends much of his time living on the Côte d'Azur…).

GB News knows full well what it’s doing (and the number of endorsements from people with “defund the BBC” in their social media profiles speaks volumes). Certainly, opening night excitement - even with the Euros on - buoyed the channel’s numbers, with 336,000 viewers tuning in to watch Neil’s opening statement, according to TV industry magazine Broadcast. Sky, by comparison, had just 46,000 viewers, but 8pm on a Sunday night was never going to be a big battleground for eyeballs amongst channels not predisposed for mass viewing. Time will tell whether GB News will genuinely prove the challenger it pretends to be. There’s no doubt that it has attracted a strong calibre of presenters to its line-up, poaching the likes of Simon McCoy from the BBC News channel and former ITN anchor Alastair Stewart to a roster of experienced journalists, including several from Sky News itself. What this says about them, politically, is a matter for debate, and the channel’s editorial content so far hasn’t shown any great surprises, with Nigel Farage and Priti Patel amongst its early interviewees.

It certainly is trying to do things differently. Television news in America, for example, is a largely homogeneous experience: drop into any TV ‘market’ (i.e. a city or large town), and you will see an identical format: a male and female anchoring partnership, a chipper sports presenter and a mildly amusing weather presenter. Yes, Anchorman. Unlike America, however, television news here does vary, thankfully, and GB News takes its place in a landscape where, say, the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News and ITV’s News At Ten do have distinct stylistic differences. Whether they have any editorial differences is a matter of personal opinion. One thing, though, is that I’ve never had any quarrel with the political orientation of any of the mainstream channels’s news output. That, I know, might inflame those who cast the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, ITV’s Robert Peston or Sky’s Beth Rigby as lefty activists - all three regularly get pelted from both sides, leading to the maxim that they must be doing something right if that is the case.

GB News has opted for something else, editorially, and subtly alternative with its look and feel. It’s breakfast show looks like ITV’s GMB but in a studio painted on a limited budget; it’s mid-morning show could be coming from the comfy sofas in the office canteen. And, two full days in, it was still suffering from sound problems - this morning, I had to have the TV volume turned up to 70 just hear anything Colin Brazier, as he sat on the couch wearing an open-necked blue shirt as if we’d caught him during his coffee break, rather than a news bulletin. I’d ask whether this consciously casual approach is what the occasional viewer actually wants, given that rolling news channels are mostly watched by people dipping in to see what’s going on in the world. 

GB News believes that it is resetting the way news is presented, arguing - not too discreetly - that existing platforms talk down to viewers. I’m not so sure that’s the case, but again, GB has found its schtick. If you believe that the BBC, ITV and Sky talk down to you, then you’ll find news presented by someone hanging out in the canteen works for you, although no one ever complained about John Craven’s jumpers on Newsround lacking gravitas (though in fairness, his demographic was somewhat different to Kenneth Kendall’s on the Nine O’Clock News).

Anchorman: staying classy in San Diego

Rolling news channels have always found their strength during times of crisis. Only saddos like me have them on constantly in the background while they work during normal times. For the most part, as the description provides, they are repetitive, especially on mundane news days. But it’s when the news hots up, and situations become dynamic, that a news operation is fully tested. Before Sky had even launched, it covered the Lockerbie disaster as part of its trial operation, making the industry sit up and notice as word got around the media village that the channel wasn’t, after all, going to be a televisual version of its print cousin. Live reporting from ‘hot’ news stories - be they wars, disasters or political eruptions - are the mark of a news broadcaster, and its reporting (and production) talent. It’s why the publicity biographies of many news anchors are such colourful affairs, proudly claiming to have been on air during moments of global notoriety. I once had to deal with the fallout of two Sky presenters having a punch-up in the Osterley corridor following an ego spat that began with both claiming to be on air at the moment Nelson Mandela walked free from Robben Island Prison. I swear to this day that someone involved in Anchorman must have heard about it, given that it escalated into a war of attrition that ended with the pair “rolling” down a corridor, not unlike Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (though, thankfully, fully clothed). 

GB News will want to avoid any such chicanery, as it seriously dents a channel’s reputation and detracts from the core mission of delivering news as authoritatively as possible. That is when it will truly be worth considering. For now, we can chatter about the gimmicks, the Wokewatch on-air clickbait, and controversialists like Dan Wootton or Michele Dewberry mixing it up for kicks (Sky’s early days had a confrontational debate show featuring Norman Tebbit and Labour MP Austin Mitchell), However, it is when sharp, analytic journalism is required that any news organisation comes into its own. Anyone can read wire copy of what has happened, but it’s a whole different matter being able to objectively explain why it has happened.

In its charter (no doubt, an Ofcom-mandated requirement), there is no mention of GB News’s headline-grabbing intentions. Actually, it’s a pretty standard declaration, pledging to stand for journalistic independence, a fact-based approach but also respect for opinions and freedom of expression. It’s focus is, notably, the UK (the clue is in the name, as Neil stated) and what is “good and bad – it’s about covering what is going on, not just what is going wrong.” That might be a pointed statement about pepping up our lives with feel goodery, but sadly, news doesn’t arbitrate that way. It’ll be interesting how long GB News can remain so differentiated.