Variety: Disgraced Morning Show Anchor Phillip Schofield Plots Comeback With Channel 5 Special ‘Cast Away’

Story from Variety:

Disgraced Morning Show Anchor Phillip Schofield Plots Comeback With Channel 5 Special ‘Cast Away’o an affair with a PA, is planning a return to television.

Schofield has filmed a new show for U.K. PSB Channel 5 called “Cast Away,” in which he is marooned on an island near Madagascar for 10 days. The three-part series will reportedly see him talking about his precipitous fall from grace, from one of ITV’s best-known faces to industry outcast.

“Now you know how I spent my Summer! Alone for 10 days, no food, no water, no crew. My story of survival, both on a desert island and off it,” the TV anchor wrote on Instagram on Wednesday morning.

The show, which is produced by Burning Bright Productions, is set to air in the U.K. for three consecutive nights from Monday, Sept. 30. Burning Bright’s Clive Tulloh and Louise Quayle at exec produce while the producer-director is Ewen Thomson.

“This isn’t just a survival challenge, it’s chance for Phillip to look back over the last explosive 18 months of his life, and explore what happened,” said Channel 5′ Guy Davies, who commissioned the show. “The audience will learn how he feels now about television and the future, as well as the past. And it will be Phillip Schofield as we have never seen him before – unguarded, emotional and brutally honest.”

Until his downfall, Schofield was a mainstay of magazine format show “This Morning,” which he had fronted for over 20 years, the last decade or so alongside his co-star Holly Willoughby. After a public misstep around the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral — the duo were accused of jumping the 13-hour-long line to see her coffin; they claimed they were there for work — animosity towards the pair began to grow, resurfacing old rumors about Schofield’s affair with a young colleague.

After Schofield’s younger brother, Timothy, was convicted of sexual offences involving a child, which saw the anchor disappear from screen for three weeks, the rumor mill crescendoed, especially after it emerged Schofield had been made aware of Timothy’s crimes before he was arrested but had not gone to the police. Willoughby was said to be “blindsided” and their once close friendship crumbled, making their professional one untenable. Schofield stepped down from “This Morning” the following month before finally admitting to an “unwise but not illegal” affair with a young PA on the show, whom he’d helped get a job at ITV when the PA was 19 years old.

The fall-out was seismic for Schofield, who was dropped by his agency as well as ITV. ITV went on to conduct an external review to determine whether they should have been more proactive in dealing with the workplace affair as well as a reportedly “toxic” atmosphere on the show’s set.