This Morning’s secret? It’s right when it goes gloriously wrong!
Hell hath no fury like a celeb slighted. While the rest of Telly land was celebrating on This Morning — 30 Unforgettable Years (ITV), Kerry Katona was spitting daggers.
The one-time Atomic Kitten pop star was going through one of her periodic attempts to ramp up her career when she appeared on the show in 2008, slurring her words and apparently roasted to the gills.
In case we’d forgotten what this looked and sounded like, hosts past and present of This Morning watched repeated showings of the clip, while pulling faces.
During their interview, presenters Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield had wondered aloud whether she had a teensy problem with alcohol. The nerve! Miss Katona flung her nose in the air like larry Grayson, with an expression that said she had never been so insulted.
Ten years on, she wanted to put on record how she felt at the time: ‘Hate you, Fern! Hate you, Phillip!’ With barely a half-hearted attempt at sincerity, she added: ‘But I love you now.’
What Kerry, like most celebs, fails to understand is that This Morning doesn’t exist to bump up her fame and plug her latest album. It might do those things, but that isn’t the main aim. Unlike the One Show or the Jonathan Ross Show, which are driven entirely by the dictates of publicity, This Morning belongs to its viewers. They want entertainment — and they love it when things go wrong.
That’s why Phillip and current co-host Holly Willoughby can get away with reeling in to work hungover after an awards ceremony, why TV execs didn’t pull the plug when a Chippendales male stripper routine got very touchyfeely with the audience, and why we’ll never tire of seeing actress Brenda Blethyn’s excitable dog humping her leg.
Since this ‘birthday tribute’ was really just a glorified collection of TV highlights, we got all those moments and plenty more. The most fun was clocking the changes in the stars over the decades.
Richard Madeley, who co-hosted This Morning with wife Judy Finnigan for its first 13 years, sported sunshades and a sports jacket with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows, the Miami Vice look, 30 years ago. These days, he dyes his hair blond.
Simon Cowell judged a talent contest on the show before The X Factor and long before spray tan and Botox gave his face the texture of a microwaved jacket potato. Viewers notice these things. And they love them.
Onscreen celebrity is supporting a New Zealand family-of-four who invited Ben Fogle to try their nomadic lifestyle on New Lives In The Wild (C5). Andy and Amber Cleverley upload video blogs about their adventures in a converted bus, with their children Daisy and Jake, aged four and six. The online advertising pays for food and petrol.
It seems a precarious existence, though one with fabulous views. New Zealand’s coastline looks like Cornwall with a bigger budget, and this episode could have been sponsored by the country’s tourist industry.
But it wasn’t a great advert for uprooting your life and living on a bus. The rural roads weren’t built for such a big vehicle, and local byelaws meant the family were never able to linger in one place for long.
Both the adults were quick to tears, traumatised by memories of the Christchurch earthquake seven years ago, but also apparently overwrought with the challenges of life off-grid.
As so often with this show, their escape from modern life seemed just another sort of prison.