Self-pitying interview shows that lies catch up with you in the end

Daytime television is home to the confessional interview, but Phillip Schofield is usually the one asking the questions. In Phillip Schofield: The Interview, it was his turn to deliver a wretched mea culpa.

What miserable viewing, to watch a man who has lost everything and knows he only has himself to blame.

This was not Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis on Newsnight, an encounter so disastrous that it strayed into the comical.

Schofield told Amol Rajan that the love of his daughters was the only thing that has saved him from suicide.

“I don’t see a future,” he said. There were no tears, which somehow made the interview more alarming.

So why do it at all? Presumably, Schofield’s advisers told him that it would be a good idea to do the interview and a companion piece in

It’s hard to call it reputation management when the man arguably had no reputation left to salvage.

Schofield said he was speaking out because the young man with whom he had his affair is “an innocent person who is vulnerable and didn’t do anything wrong”.

But his former lover has attracted nothing but sympathy and no one has accused him of wrongdoing.

It felt as if the true purpose of the interview was to tell people, as Schofield did in the opening minutes, that “you come to a point where you just think, ‘How much are you supposed to take?’ All those people who write all of that stuff, do they ever think that there’s actually a person at the other end?” Meaning: himself.

He has been painted as a monster and wants to put the record straight. He cut a pathetic figure but it was noticeable that his voice became stronger, and his manner more forceful, when confronting allegations of bullying and toxic behaviour on the set of This Morning.

Schofield may be a broken man, but he hasn’t lost all of his pride. He insisted that his friends did not recognise that portrayal and had contacted him to say, “I loved working with you”. But none of those people has said so publicly.

But the bullying claims are neither here nor there.

The issue is Schofield’s relationship with a 20-year-old runner, a 15-yearold schoolboy when they first met – although he insists that nothing inappropriate happened during the intervening years.

Schofield apologised to those he had hurt. He said that the affair was wrong. But he also defended himself. The 45-minute interview was part selfflagellation, part self-preservation.

He did not seem to accept the inevitable abuse of power in the relationship and claimed that the reason this story has become so big is “predominantly homophobia”.

While he set out the anatomy of a lie – that first denial that anything was going on, which he then repeated to his co-host and friend, Holly Willoughby, and a cursory investigation by ITV management – Schofield is still lying, to himself.

The only thing we know to be true is that the young man involved, Schofield’s wife and daughters have been damaged. If the interview told you anything, it was that lies catch up with you in the end.