Here comes Cat!
As she heads for the airport before Monday’s This Morning debut, there’s a last-minute scramble to save the show. Oh, and she hasn’t seen Ben Shephard in years!
POSTING a picture of ‘new girl’ Cat Deeley on n instagram this week, k, Martin Frizell, the editor of This Morning, excitedly y wrote: ‘Four more sleeps s ’til the family gets bigger.’
After ten months of turmoil, a new chapter begins at iTV’s s embattled daytime show.
Cat will take her seat on the sofa fa at 10am on Monday next to morning nly TV stalwart, Ben Shephard.
it’s hoped her arrival will finally call to a halt more than a year of drama on the show, which culminated i-- in october with the sudden n resignation of Holly Willoughby y after 14 years, following an alleged d plot to kidnap and murder her.
iTV was left blindsided by her er decision. Just months earlier, cohost od Phillip Schofield had stepped down amid his shock confession n of an affair with a much younger er member of This Morning’s s production staff.
The show, according to some, e, was in special measures. Ratings gs were in freefall and there were re even fears it would not survive.
But, i can reveal, although the he champagne is on ice for Monday’s long-awaited ‘curtain up’, the next few days are going to be anything but calm.
Cat, 47, doesn’t even land in the Uk until this weekend as the schedule on US reality television show, So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD), which she has hosted for 18 years, has been so tight. Stylists have been on hand to arrange her outfits and there have been conversations via Zoom. But there’s been no time for promotion: there are no billboard photos or adverts flagging Monday’s big event.
Crucially, viewers hoping for a return to the on-screen chemistry of Holly and Phil will be concerned to learn that Cat and Ben haven’t been in the same room together for years, let alone sat next to one another yet on their new sparkly sofa.
Holly and Phil hosted iTV show Dancing on ice together for three years before pairing up for This Morning, of course. Creating the perfect match can take months – sometimes years. it is, everyone admits, a huge gamble. one insider on the show tells me: ‘it is literally unheard of for two people to host such a high-profile show without any screen tests, or even sitting next to one another.
‘These shows live and die by the chemistry between the presenters but the bosses are beyond confident. She’s a pro, they jumped through hoops to get her, moved things around and think that Ben is the perfect safe pair of hands to sit beside her.’
it is undeniable that This Morning’s new duo are very, very different.
While both started out on iTV – Cat alongside Ant and Dec on children’s programme CD:Uk and Ben on breakfast show gMTV, they then took very different paths.
While Ben, 49, continued to be a constant on iTV’s daytime schedule, launching good Morning Britain with Susanna Reid ten years ago, Cat jetted off to Hollywood in 2006 where she became one of America’s longest serving TV presenters on SYTYCD.
While Cat is used to rubbing shoulders with the A-list in LA, you’re most likely to spot Ben doing his local Saturday morning parkrun near his home in a leafy London suburb.
‘Ben and Cat actually, when you think about it, couldn’t be more different,’ says one insider.
Cat, who married her former costar Patrick kielty with whom she has two young sons, was a regular at A-list red carpet events alongside Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
Ben, meanwhile, is credited by some as being the most boring man on the box – in a good way.
Married to his sweetheart Annie, whom he met while studying contemporary dance at Birmingham University, the pair live in a stunning Victorian property overlooking Richmond Park in south-west London with their two children.
Ben enjoys classical music and open water swimming. He’s also a charity fundraiser and passionate home baker.
As one iTV insider tells me: ‘Ben is too boring to cause trouble... He’s exactly what iTV need right now.’ Another source quipped: ‘ it’s quite funny really – he’s lovely, decent and clearly a very good-looking man who looks after himself but it’s kind of hard to imagine anyone really fancying him. But that’s the joy of Ben, he’s lovely.
‘This is literally the perfect ending to the most torrid of times for Martin Frizell and This Morning. People have said that it’s Cat who has got the cream but actually, it’s Martin. And he knows it.’
‘It is a huge gamble’