There were so many things wrong with Phillip Schofield ’s TV comeback. The timing. The premise.
The assumption that people would be tuning in for any reason other than idle curiosity. And a barrage of negative press has immediately followed the first episode of his new Channel 5 show Cast Away, which aired last night. The Standard gave his first episode two stars; The Guardian called him “an incredibly bitter man” and The Times branded the whole thing “tedious.
” And who’s surprised? Schofield has been absent from our screens ever since he left ITV’s This Morning (in the special, he deadpans that he was fired) following an “unwise, but not illegal” affair with a younger male colleague on the set. A media feeding frenzy followed the story. His face was splashed across front pages for weeks, in relation to the affair, the alleged feud between himself and This Morning co-host Holly Willoughby, the toxic allegations of bullying at the show.
But Schofield himself never talked about them. Never even appeared on television. Until now: this three-part documentary series in which he is stranded on a desert island for 10 days with nothing but some expensive camera equipment.
The public celebrity comeback has form. He joins an ever-expanding list of celebrities who seem to think that the way to public redemption is through relaunching their image live on national television. Matt Hancock did it with I’m A Celebrity.
More recently, Ellen DeGeneres sought to reclaim her.
