Anyone at ITV who thought the Phillip Schofield drama would all blow over quickly was living in dreamland. Late last Friday afternoon, just as we were all putting down our pens for the Bank Holiday weekend, the man who had just left This Morning in a hurry after two decades on the sofa used a lengthy mea culpa to confirm what so many had believed to be a rumor for so many years – that he had had an affair with a much younger colleague during his lengthy stint on the daytime stalwart. Media eyes had already been trained on This Morning and Schofield’s public-not-public spat with former co-host Holly Willoughby but this was reaching new levels. This week has been about damage control amidst fierce escalation. While Schofield has been dropped by ITV and his agent YMU, the network is now facing difficult questions over how much it knew and how much of Schofield’s behavior spilled into outright toxicity. Former colleagues such as Eamonn Holmes and Dr Ranj Singh have been airing their grievances on social media and the events culminated in an ITV-announced review on Thursday, which will be conducted by an external lawyer.Nothing gets the Deadline juices flowing like hundreds of submissions to the UK government’s draft Media Bill consultation. Jake dug through a few and found Netflix pulling no punches, as it threatened to preemptively remove films and TV shows from its UK library to avoid falling foul of the proposed regulations, which will introduce new requirements such as “due impartiality” for streamer shows in the nation. Staying on the right side of this rule will require Netflix to keep its giant catalog of content under continual review, ensuring that it is “purging titles on a regular basis” regardless of when a show or film premiered, it said, in a submission that throws fire on the current debate. In slightly more neutral language, Disney made a similar argument, finding that “it seems inappropriate to apply uniform rules on all VoD services, whether that is strict content rules or mandated ratings.” The government will now take a look at the submissions in depth before coming back with a form of legislation that will likely pass later this year. Elsewhere, Warner Bros. Discovery and Fremantle used their submissions to weigh in on the Bill’s controversial plan to allow Channel 4 to make its own shows.
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