How might a celebrities find redemption after a major scandal? Through humility, sincere apology and giving back to their community? Through making great, better work? In the 2020s, the answer is more straightforward: through high-budget, high fee-paying reality television. On TV, even the worst public image can be rehabilitated via supposedly unscripted moments of soul-bearing honesty – and performing fun challenges on camera.
Over the last several years, the viewing public have become aware of what celebrities are doing when they sign on to reality shows after bumps in their career. But, despite that awareness, this method is still effective. The disgraced MP Matt Hancock was a viewer favourite who made it to the final of the 2022 season of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, after a lockdown rule-breaking sex scandal forced him to resign as health minister the previous summer. Nigel Farage was elected as an MP just seven months after finishing third in his I’m A Celeb appearance, following decades of failed attempts. Paris Hilton overhauled her brand with a docuseries; the Kardashians harnessed reality TV to shift the public perception of them from desperate fame-seekers to business titans. We may not be blind to what these celebrities are doing, but we have to admit that it’s working.
Can it work for Phillip Schofield? This week, in the most transparent PR rehabilitation attempt yet, the former ITV This Morning presenter launched a one-off, three-part series on Channel 5, Phillip Schofield Cast Away, in which he will spend ten days alone on an remote island near Madagascar, living off the land and documenting his experience on camera. The show is the second Cast Away series from Channel 5, after airing a similar programme instead featuring the comedian, Ruby Wax, last year. It is an obvious response to the Schofield scandal last spring, when the TV presenter admitted to having a sexual relationship with a younger member of the This Morning staff. Schofield met the young man – who has not been publicly named – when giving a talk at the boy’s school when he was 15-year-old drama student, and later exchanged messages with him online. He eventually began a work experience placement at This Morning and then, later, started a job on the show. Schofield said their sexual relationship began when the man was 20 and, in an interview with the BBC, denied accusations of grooming, saying that the relationship was, at first, completely innocent. It was later reported in February that Schofield had paid a “six-figure sum” to the young man as a part of a non-disclosure agreement.
In a tactical departure from many of these other reality shows, Cast Away is pitched as an explicit bid to counteract the public criticism Schofield has received in the last year. “I can say whatever I want about whatever I want. It’s my chance to tell my side of my story,” he says in the promo for the show. “I know what I did was unwise, but was it enough to absolutely destroy someone?” This implicit invocation of cancel culture echoes Schofield’s original statement about the scandal, where he described his relationship as “consensual” and “unwise, but not illegal”. The word “unwise” is repeated constantly in place of terms viewers might be yearning for, like “wrong” or “an abuse of power”. The metaphorical allusions to the emotional hardship Schofield says he has endured since leaving This Morning are frequent and laboured. “Phillip Schofield faces life on a remote island, learning to live in the unforgiving wilderness,” Channel 5 tweeted, announcing the show. On Instagram, Schofield billed the series as “my story of survival”.
In the first episode of Cast Away, Schofield is asked by producers what would happen if he had to quit. He responds, eyes wide: “It’s inconceivable… I don’t quit.” At another point, he insists: “I will not be defeated.” And, after he arrives on the island and explains that he was “cancelled” for his relationship, he says sincerely – in the middle of his highly publicised prime-time TV show – “if you’re cancelled, you’re dead”.
So Cast Away admits its purpose to rehabilitate Schofield. But it’s unlikely to work. His star power isn’t close to that of Hilton or the Kardashians, and even before the scandal, This Morning’s ratings were dipping, suggesting his popularity was fading before he became nationally synonymous with workplace misconduct and sexual transgression. And unlike other reality TV rebranding attempts, viewers have to tune in specifically because they want to see Schofield himself – on shows such as I’m A Celebrity, viewers tune in for a familiar format and other famous names, and find themselves slowly warming to a disgraced figure. (In Cast Away, Schofield refers to speculation that he might appear on “the other jungle show”, but says of his former workplace ITV: “There are just some channels, some people you won’t work for.”) Equally, these other shows spend only a marginal amount of time contending with criticism or past scandal – so far, Cast Away viewers have been almost exclusively subjected to ramblings hyper-focused on Schofield’s scandal from last year. More is yet to come.
Schofield initially seems keen to avoid self-pity. The show opens with a series of clips from his loving, tearful family singing the praises of the “real”, “amazing” man behind the headlines, and at first, Schofield insists he mostly feels “lucky”. But any sense of the gratitude he has for his personal circumstances quickly evaporates. Even before Schofield leaves for the island, he appears to mock his ex-presenting partner Holly Willoughby, asking his daughter over dinner: “Are you OK?”, echoing Willoughby’s question to This Morning viewers in her first appearance on the show after Schofield’s departure.
Despite statements such as “every day I feel my toxicity tanks emptying out”, Schofield is clearly bitter about his public fall from grace. As he speaks to camera about what happened, he evades responsibility. When he says he misses his old job, he adds with a sarcastic, self-satisfied tone that it teaches you the truth about other people. His belief in his own victimhood is clear: when he says, for instance, that some people probably hope he dies while filming the show – or when, in a vulnerable monologue to camera, he says coming out as gay in 2020 brought him “more anguish than joy”, without grappling with the other circumstances that caused his personal and professional catastrophe. Schofield seems to think that the effects of the scandal are not the understandable consequences of his “unwise” actions, but an inexplicable situation in which an innocent man has been thrust into an unforgiving environment for no good reason at all.
Schofield insists in the opening of the first episode of Cast Away that he the show is not a chance for him to say to the world: “poor me”. “I don’t think I have a right – I don’t have a right to a ‘poor me,’” he says. And yet, despite these workds, it’s hard not to come away with an image of a man wallowing in self-pity.
Channel 5 suggests more is to come from the series, which ends tonight: greater, titillating revelations where Schofield lets rip on former colleagues and the British press and public. But this won’t be enough to get a real audience to tune in. If a disgraced TV presenter rants and raves on a desert island and no one is around to hear him, did he even make a sound?
[See also: In defence of the anachronistic period drama]
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