Blimey, I knew she was cross with him but I wasn’t expecting Holly to be quite that blunt.
“Phil’s very strange indeed,” I heard her declare, in the keenly anticipated statement with which she opened This Morning.
Her first day back after all this fuss and clearly she wasn’t going to mince her words. Fair enough,
I suppose.
Except, of course, I’d misheard her. A swift wind-back of my Sky Q box and I realised what Holly had actually said was “FEELS very strange…” Not “Phil’s”.
That’s not to say she didn’t believe both but I guess this wasn’t a good time to stir things up further.
No, this was the time to “heal, for the health and wellbeing of everyone”. Which sounded suspiciously like tellyspeak for: “We’d like everyone to shut up now.”
And yet I wasn’t entirely convinced Holly was ready to do that herself. She still wanted to make her point, it seemed.
“You, me and all of us at This Morning gave our love and support to somebody who was not telling the truth,” she announced, in her finest “disappointed teacher” tone.
The “you” seemed particularly significant. Her pain, it implied, was our pain. We, the viewers, had been drafted on to Team Holly, even if none of us actually remembered agreeing to that.
Apparently, we’d been as traumatised as Holly had been by recent events, and without even a £730,000 salary to cushion the blow.
“I imagine that you might have been feeling a lot like I have,” she suggested. “Shaken, troubled,
let down…”
Seriously? I’ve been a lot of things, Holly, but “shaken”?
Give over.
As for starting your statement by asking us: “Are you OK?” – what was that all about?
Us? Of course we’re OK. Why wouldn’t we be?
It was a speech that spoke volumes about TV’s ludicrous self-importance.
That, and how desperately this programme’s producers want this all to go away. Or, in Holly’s words, to “start this new chapter and get back to a place of warmth and magic that this show holds for all of us…”
It’s this insistence on projecting a flawless image, of putting itself and its presenters on the highest of pedestals – slipping from which can only result in the most crushing of falls – that surely exacerbates so many of these problems.
Once Holly had said her piece, co-host Josie Gibson moved in for a hug. “All we can do now,” Josie declared, “is be the family that
we are.”
And then it was on with the show. First up, resident GP Dr Sara.
“Hi Doctor,” I wanted to call and say, “Something’s left me feeling rather queasy. Any thoughts…?”
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