Life’s What You Make It

Phillip Schofield Michael Joseph £20 ★★ ★★★

Most people reading this autobiography will be interested in only one thing: Phillip Schofield’s sexuality. That would have sounded like an unpromising subject before February, when he came out as gay in an emotional statement that thanked his wife Stephanie and their two daughters for supporting him.

It was a brave thing to do, and you might hope for more bravery here. When did he realise? Was he scared, when he was a children’s TV host, of being outed? What was it like to be in a straight marriage while coming to terms with being gay?

Unfortunately, none of that is covered. The subject comes up just 30 pages from the end, and Schofield only writes about the mechanics of the public announcement. That leaves

360 pages to tell the story of his life – in agonising banality.

He grows up in Cornwall, obsessed with broadcasting. At 17, he gets his first job at the BBC, where he meets all the old guard of Radio 1, including Jimmy Savile. But the nearest Schofield gets to reflection on the Yewtree era is saying that ‘what is known now wasn’t known then’.

There’s a detour to New Zealand, where his TV career begins, then back to the UK to host CBBC. He plays the lead in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (left) in the West End, moves to ITV and, eventually, gets the This Morning gig when John

Leslie falls from grace. Schofield manages to avoid including a single juicy anecdote as he tells all this, although there is occasional bathos: a boring story about a flight simulator ends in a solemn invocation of 9/11, and a list of his wife’s qualities concludes with the declaration that she

‘had, and indeed still has, great boobs’.

If life is what you make it, Schofield has made his very dull indeed.