Eamonn gets C4 apology for ‘cruel’ Gogglebox editing
CHANNEL 4 bosses issued a grovelling apology to Eamonn Holmes last night after he accused producers of Celebrity Gogglebox of ‘idiotic and cruel’ editing which made it look like he had laughed at harrowing footage of a boy trying to resuscitate his father.
The furious TV presenter said he was ‘hurt beyond belief’ following the editing blunder on Friday evening’s episode of the channel’s flagship programme, which shows celebrities watching TV programmes from the previous week and commenting on what they see as they view.
The couple were seen on Gogglebox watching an emotional scene from the BBC series Ambulance, which showed a child taught how to perform CPR on his dad, who had suffered a heart attack.
That was followed by a clip of Eamonn laughing about an occasion when he had driven his wife Ruth to hospital when she had been pregnant.
After viewers complained at Holmes’s apparent insensitivity, he issued an extraordinary rant on his Twitter feed accusing the show of cutting out a segment where he had discussed his own father’s sudden and tragic death from a heart attack in 1991 and using the jokey segment instead.
He wrote on Twitter: ‘I am hurt beyond belief that @C4Gogglebox chose not to use me talking about my father dying from a heart attack at the side of a road and replace it with a funny story following a young lad giving his father CPR. Idiotic and cruel edit.
‘How my father died was a particularly horrible experience for my mother, my younger brother and his friend who were all in the car. The resuscitation in the BBC Ambulance programme was as close as could be to my Dad’s passing.
‘Yet I am the one edited to make it look like a laugh.’
The Mail on Sunday has learned that there were crisis meetings between Channel 4 and Studio Lambert – who make the show – yesterday afternoon after Holmes, 60, threatened that he and his wife Ruth Langsford, also 60, would quit the series if he did not receive a public apology.
In a statement issued last night, a spokesperson for the show said: ‘We have apologised to Eamonn over what happened in this week’s episode.
‘We understand and respect Eamonn’s feelings on such a deeply personal story.
‘We have taken the decision to edit the episode for future repeats and All 4. We look forward to working with Eamonn and Ruth for the rest of the series.’
The row comes as the channel’s future is under threat following a dramatic decline in advertising revenue during the pandemic.
The channel’s programming budget was cut by £150million, with less than £10 million to spend until the end of 2020.
‘How my father died was a horrible experience’