It took me all of five minutes to start feeling sorry for Phillip Schofield in Cast Away . Sitting in a sun-dappled garden eating dinner with his family – daughters Ruby and Molly, ex-wife Steph, dog Alfie at his feet – he was surprisingly self-effacing about the public humiliation he’d been through in the past year. “There’s a lot of people who hope I’ll suffer horribly,” he laughed.
In a few days, he would be travelling to his new home: a deserted island off the coast of Madagascar where he would be surviving alone for 10 days. In a pre-island sit-down interview he told the camera, “I’m not doing this as a ‘poor me'”. Yeah right.
The opening episode of the three-part reality show-meets-endurance test was a self-indulgent pity party that punished anyone curious enough to watch with manipulative, plaintive attempts at redemption. Schofield has become a national joke following his resignation from This Morning (along with all his other ITV jobs, including Dancing on Ice ) in May last year after it was revealed he had lied about having an affair with a younger member of production staff. The controversy came not from the relationship itself, but from the fact that when the man was 15 years old when Schofield first met him – and that Schofield had organised his job interview at This Morning.
Schofield denies grooming the man and said their relationship was “unwise but not illegal”. This island self-seclusion is the presenter’s TV rebirth, a relaunch.
