We’ve led each other astray...
They were the goody-two-shoes of daytime TV until that day they turned up drunk on This Morning. Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield reveal how they got away with it...
ARE you two having sex?’ Holly Willoughby laughs as she remembers the question that Ian McKellen asked her and Phillip Schofield on This Morning, turning the tables on the funniest, flirtiest couple on daytime television. ‘He said it live on telly,’ says Willoughby, a warm, friendly presence in a pink blouse, pink skirt and pink shoes, munching biscuits immediately after the end of another edition of the hugely popular show. ‘He was convinced, so you’re not alone,’ she says, admitting that others have asked the same.
So is it true? ‘Oh God!’ she shrieks, shaking her head. Schofield, the silver fox beside her in the dressing room at the show’s London studio purses his lips and says: ‘Oh no. I am incredibly lucky – I am the envy of most men in the land. I sit next to, I work with – I know well – a very beautiful, bright, sharp woman who is incredibly good at her job, but she’s like my younger sister.’
They do go on holiday together, though, and were photographed playing in the surf in Portugal this summer wearing white vests with big hearts on the front saying, ‘I love PS’ and ‘I love HW.’ Okay, it was a mickeytake of the way Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston declared their love to the paparazzi recently, but they do have such extraordinary chemistry on screen that pranks like that do make you wonder if they ever share more than a script?
‘She makes me feel younger, because we have led each other astray,’ says Schofield, a trim, rather cool character of 54 in a blue checked shirt with a beautifully barbered shock of white hair, but he’s talking about their giggling fits and other antics on screen rather than off. ‘We’ve been good, we’ve been bad, but it’s always been great fun.’
THEY are about to return to This Morning after the summer break, having presented the show together for seven years and won Best Live Magazine award at Britian’s National Television Awards back in January. That was when they were at their most ‘bad’ – or at least outrageous – daring to present This Morning in their crumpled, stained evening wear after staying up all night celebrating, drinking champagne, tequila and, in his case, whisky. ‘We were having far too much fun,’ says Willoughby. ‘You get to the point where there is no point going to bed, because to have an hour or two [of sleep] will make you feel worse, so you might as well go through.’
They made headlines that day, but this is the first time they have revealed what happened in detail. Schofield was actually heading home in a taxi from London’s O2 Arena with his wife when he got a text from his screen partner. ‘Holly wrote, “Don’t be the dull man that goes home. Do not be the professional, just this once.” I didn’t even have to answer.’
The taxi was diverted to the house of Ant McPartlin of Ant and Dec in west London, where they all ended up playing the silly game Pieface, getting plastered in a foul pie of cream, mustard, horseradish and pickle.
‘You’ve got to celebrate those moments. Those are the bits that make your life,’ says Willoughby, who had stains on her white ballgown as a result. ‘Phil walked through the studio door looking like Peter Pan had got run over!’
It’s one thing to stay up all night and another to go on camera straight afterwards, so why did they feel they could? ‘Because the viewers had voted for the award and it was a big celebra-
tion for everybody in the team, it just felt all right.’ Schofield agrees: ‘We could’ve come in and changed, there was just about time, but we were laughing so much back here, it was such a funny morning. Fifteen seconds before we went live we were in screaming fits, we looked at each other and said, “What the hell are we doing? We should not be let loose on TV like this.” We were both stinking of booze. Ant had got the Laphroaig whisky out – I can never turn that down.’
The first 15 minutes of the show were hilariously loose, but they changed into clean clothes during a commercial break and began to sober up. ‘We realised it had been fun but we now had to get ourselves together,’ he says. Willoughby was glad when the show was finally over. ‘I went home and died. I slept for 14 hours after that. Then I texted our press man and said, “Am I in trouble?”’
The answer was no. They had taken a big risk, but the viewers loved it. That’s because to many of the million or so people who watch This Morning, these two feel like a couple of clever, glamorous, slightly-more-together-than-us mates chatting away in the corner of the living room of a morning, occasionally asking the questions we wish we could. ‘When you’re in someone’s home for two hours a day, people do feel that they know you slightly,’ says Willoughby.
She has been married to the television producer Dan Baldwin for a decade and they have three children: Harry, six, Belle, five, and Chester, who is 18 months old. Schofield has been married to Stephanie Lowe, a former production assistant, since 1992 and they have two grown-up daughters, Ruby and Molly. Incredibly, the families go to the same resort in Portugal every year, staying only a few streets apart.
‘We are in each other’s pockets the whole year, so you’d think we would be sick of the sight of each other and couldn’t wait to have a break, but it doesn’t really work like that, because it’s different when we’re away,’ she says. ‘We are with the families. It enriches and makes our working life better, because it’s a friendship.’
Their T-shirt stunt came after reports they might be going off each other as colleagues, but he says that’s not true either. ‘You can dig as much as you like, but it’s just that we get on really well,’ he says. ‘As a foursome we have a ball. We are at our most relaxed and normal.’
Both started out as children’s television presenters, Willoughby on CITV and Schofield on BBC a generation before her with the anarchic Going Live! He tried his hand at musical theatre with Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the Nineties but has since stuck to telly, presenting the likes of Test The Nation with Anne Robinson and The Cube.
They were first brought together as a pair in 2006 for the spangly Dancing On Ice, an odd pairing of glamour and experience that worked really well.
BACK then, Willoughby got a huge amount of attention for what the tabloids liked to call her hourglass figure and bountiful chest. Does she feel the pressure of being a woman on television, with her appearance put under scrutiny every time she goes on air? ‘I’ve got a team of people I have worked with for a very long time who help me, and I totally trust them, so that takes some of the pressure off. My focus on the show in the morning is about writing the scripts, thinking up questions.’
Schofield and Willoughby took over This Morning in 2009, when the show was revamped. ‘This is like Saturdaymorning TV for adults. It’s a gift of a show to do,’ says Schofield. ‘I hate the fact that people just label it daytime TV because we do so many varied things: the fun and the serious, the heavy, a little bit of politics, lots of news, lots of real life. There is nothing else like this on television.’
Schofield is the restrained, analytical one with a twinkle in his eye, who likes to wind up his partner. Willoughby is the enthusiastic, empathetic one who puts people at ease but is equally capable of delivering a killer question. Both have a habit of going off script or talking to the viewer like a friend. This Morning is an unusual show that can leap from a fashion parade to a deeply moving interview with a cancer survivor; from gutting a fish in the kitchen to giving a world leader a grilling on the sofa. It can even bring ministers to heel and get them to change their policies.
Both love to make headlines: confronting Kerry Katona with the way she slurred her way through a previous car crash of an interview or demanding to know why Noel Edmonds had said that a negative attitude can give you cancer.
Katie Hopkins made her name as an outspoken commentator on the show until the day in 2013 when she started going on about how she would never allow her children to play with working-class school mates with names like Tyler and Chardonnay. Both presenters challenged her.
‘It was so strange, what she was saying, I couldn’t not,’ says Willoughby. Schofield adds: ‘In the early stages of Katie coming on the show she was the panto villain, which was great fun. Then she got cruel. Then it’s not funny any more.’
Some guests make the mistake of being horrible to the team, he says, giving the example of one relatively unknown actress who had ideas above her station. ‘The great thing is that when she walked out of the door we knew she would never be walking back in again. You do notice that it is people from smaller shows who are the ones who get difficult. The major Hollywood A-listers are always delightful.’
Samuel L Jackson was one of the friendliest, while Hillary Clinton was eager to please. ‘She had her picture taken with everyone. Rylan [Clark] was calling her babe.’
They clearly get a kick out of their work but how long can they go on? ‘As long as he will,’ says Willoughby. ‘We’re in this together. It would never be the same with anyone else.’ As for Schofield: ‘It’s a great show and it would be very hard to give up. I think I’m swimming with sharks when we go back on air,’ he says, sounding surprisingly casual about that. ‘It’s quite hard to frighten me. I’m excited about that, though. I’ve never been face to face with a Great White. Oh wait, I have, ’cos I worked with Anne Robinson...’ They both collapse into another fit of giggles...
Phillip and Holly return to This Morning on Sept 5, 10.30am on UTV Ireland