Dysfunction, diversity and Phillip Schofield: what's really behind the drama at This Morning

Last week was a difficult week for fans of acerbic duos who like teasing the limits of lockdown rules. First Dominic "Barnard Castle" Cummings and Lee "shambolic messaging" Cain stalked from number 10, then married couple Eamonn "I normally walk my dog two to three times a day" Holmes and Ruth "I honestly haven’t been to a hairdresser" Langsford appeared to be reallocated from their weekly presenting slot on This Morning, replaced by Alison Hammond and Dermot O'Leary. To lose one opinionated rule flouter may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.

To be fair, the shock moves at This Morning had all the surprise value of a boxer taking a 50-metre run up to deliver a punch – reports back in September suggested the couple were for the chop as producer Martin Frizell began a reshuffle - and when your presenting talent is a team of four, reshuffle odds are never good. Meanwhile Hammond, who’s black, and O’Leary, of Irish stock, combine youth with appearances in reality television and had viewers literally begging for more when they co-hosted the show in October.

There’s since been a stream of speculation about the reasons Holmes, who this year alone has excelled as a real life Alan Partridge with on screen backing for 5G conspiracy theories, regular interrupting and shushing of Langsford, being accused by his wife of being "drunk" on air and the kind of bantz that provoked a walk out from This Morning chef Phil Vickery in October, might be considered replaceable.

Some suspect a diversity agenda, while others speculate about on-screen tensions. After a range of interviews with former This Morning staff, it would appear both are right.

“So recently there was a day when there were no black faces on the whole of ITV daytime and Martin Frizell thought that was no good,” one former staffer explains. “ITV is on a bit of a mission to change that. At the same time, over this year Philip has been increasingly irritated by Eamonn – when Philip came out on the show in February, Eamonn made a couple of on-air comments that weren’t homophobic but weren’t exactly supportive. Something like ‘I did wonder why your wife didn’t mind you sharing a hot tub with Holly.’”

In daytime TV, this sort of slur rarely goes unchallenged, my source points out. “In Phillip’s new book, he’s spelt Eamonn’s name wrong and no-one thinks that was an accident. So, if the winds of change are blowing through This Morning, there’s an obvious seat to be blown clean – and Phillip has form in this. He nixed Amanda Holden sitting in for Holly when she was on I’m a Celebrity back in 2018.”

ITV and Schofield have previously denied the Amanda Holden rumour, despite her public declarations of its veracity, whilst on Eamonngate the broadcaster remained coy, saying merely: “We have a stellar presenting line up on This Morning in Holly & Phillip and Eamonn & Ruth. Any additions to this line up will be announced in due course."

Whilst it’s considerably more fun to imagine Schofield and Holmes facing off in a studio corridor, the hard business reality is – if it’s not about diversity, then something’s not right at ITV. The broadcaster’s audience is older and whiter than the UK population and that’s no longer a great business plan. (Holmes has admitted to worrying that he's too "pale, male and stale" to keep his job.)

“ITV faces the same changing environment as all broadcasters - the younger audience moving online and streamers gaining ground,” explains Tom Harrington, TV analyst at Enders Analysis. “There’s an untapped non-white audience for commercial TV who aren’t on board with streamers, so it’s an easy way to stem the decline. Overall, ITV is hitting its diversity targets – but it’s expensive to see how the audience responds to diversity in drama. Moving an already popular presenter like Alison Hammond into daytime is an easier and cheaper way to diversify onscreen talent.”

The point is, audience attitudes are changing. Every five years, broadcasting watchdog Ofcom conducts extensive research including polling, interviews, workshops and focus groups on what audiences find offensive – “this supplements,” the Ofcom report notes drily, “the tens of thousands of audience complaints we receive each year.”

In April 2020, the latest survey found concerns around swearing have fallen – by 45 per cent since 2015 – while worries about race and gender discrimination have soared by 224 per cent and 148 per cent respectively. “Discriminatory content against specific groups is more concerning than other offensive content, such as nudity and swearing, and should be prioritised,” Ofcom reports. “Many participants point out that TV programmes in previous decades included language, storylines and behaviours that are now perceived as discriminatory.”

Holmes and Langsford are hanging on in there, like This Morning’s very own Donald and Ivanka, firing off cryptic messages about trust on air and pointing out their fame owes nothing to reality shows. Like the Republican Party, ITV must be nervous about the couple’s base – it’s not quite deep state but it doesn’t look great. Rumours of QEamonn appearing on Reddit appear to be unfounded, although someone did change the name of Embankment underground station to Eamonnbankment, presumably in protest.

For the rest of us, there’s so much joy to be had in knowing that, just like in the movies, cosy innocuous TV shows with cheerfully smiling presenters are almost always the most dysfunctional thing on TV.