‘What people don’t realise is that they batter you – but then there are other people affected’, Phillip Schofield’s ever-loyal wife Stephanie told him before he became a castaway on a desert island this summer.
Mrs Schofield, 59, has been unerringly supportive of her husband in an extraordinary and challenging decade that began with him coming out as gay and then losing his job on This Morning over an affair with a young producer last year.
Gone is his £2 million-a-year ‘golden handcuffs’ contract with ITV as have the lucrative deals with businesses such as Princess Cruises, We Buy Any Car and Waitrose.
But Phillip’s family will never abandon him – and Steph certainly appears to have no plans to divorce him – despite the turmoil in his life in recent years, one insider told today.
In fact his wife and daughters appear to be central to his comeback – with one expert predicting the travel-loving star could be the next Michael Palin, and Steph could even be his on-screen partner again.
‘Phil’s not finished in telly – and his girls are right behind him all the way’, the insider said.
Phillip Schofield: Cast Away airs at 9pm on Channel 5, and will continue on Tuesday and Wednesday at the same time.
The star has spent 10 days on an inhabited tropical island off the coast of Madagascar where he is shown fending for himself – while also settling scores with those who he feels ‘threw him under the bus’, including apparently Holly Willoughby.
Before he leaves he Mr Schofield, who still wears his wedding ring, is filmed at a family barbecue with Steph and their children Molly, 31, and Ruby, 28.
There are jokes about him losing his Wordle streak but Steph also tells him: ‘There’s no question that by doing this you’re popping your head back up above the parapet for the very few horrid people that there are out there.’
Mr Schofield’s daughter also shared her support for her father, whose career she also helps manage.
‘Weirdly everything that’s happened recently has made us closer. When my dad came out, it was, it was very hard for me. It was very hard for the entire family. Mainly my mum, of course, everything was turned upside down. But we talked through it and over time it’s got easier’, Molly said.
She said: ‘I would love people to understand what’s actually happened, and forgive him for a mistake.’
His wife of 31 years Stephanie remains a constant in his life. Both still wear their wedding rings, they have matching puppies and celebrate birthdays and Christmas together as a couple.
The former ITV presenter revealed that his daughters Molly, 31, and Ruby, 28, had not ‘left his sight’ in the aftermath of his This Morning exit.
Molly is also his publicist and has reportedly gone into battle with ITV on a number of occasions – including demanding an apology for the way he had been treated.
Mr Schofield and his wife Stephanie have been together for approaching 40 years – around 31 years as a married couple – and both are determined to remain married.
‘After so long together, Steph and Phil co-dependent. They would rather be a united front and stay together’, the insider said adding that if they broke up it would ‘create even more drama’ for them and their daughters.
Another friend of a friend said: ‘They still love each other. It’s that simple’.
Phillip is represented by his daughter Molly who also worked for him at the YMU agency until January this year. Now she is now running her own firm called MMS Projects, with her father its top client.
His youngest daughter Ruby is an accountant, who is also a huge support to her famous dad and appears in Cast Away, which begin tonight, at a family BBQ with her mum and sister.
Mr Schofield says that ‘his girls’ had ‘saved his life’ in the aftermath of his exit from ITV and This Morning.
‘s source said: ‘He’s been a really good dad to them – and they have profited off him as a parent. Molly worked at YMU, which he part-owned, and was a massive part of their success so she will have been paid well and also paid off when he left, and she left.
‘I think that they could help him and his career’.
The insider has questioned whether this will be his last TV appearance.
He said: ‘I’m sure the ratings will be amazing’, adding that he may do more travel shows for Channel 5 and try to be ‘the new Michael Palin’.
‘The general public still have a lot of good will towards him. He’s a favourite with housewives and grannies’.
In 2017 Phil and Stephanie had a three-part travel series, called Schofield’s South African Adventure.
Steph and Phil’s adventures on a South African safari showed a couple perfectly in tune with each other, and the closest of friends.
The source added there is still ‘potential’ for his daughters or even his wife Stephanie to join him on TV if he pursues a series about travel, a known passion of his.
‘But I think audiences may find it hard to accept the dynamic of a gay man and his wife – but that in itself could make it more interesting’, they added.
In 2020 Phillip Schofield came out as gay on live TV.
Speaking to former friend Holly Willoughby, he revealed there was something ‘nagging away at him’ before his wedding to Stephanie Lowe 27 years ago.
He spoke of how ‘incredible’, kind, wonderful and supportive Steph had been through that period.
‘She’s amazing, she’s incredible . . . as a wife the way she’s supported me . . . she’s astonishing,’ he said.
The star claimed he thought he ‘might be bisexual’ and even sought therapy on his sexuality, and added he was ‘naive’ to think he could suppress it when he married Stephanie in 1993.
He and Steph met when he was 25. Phillip had just landed a job on the BBC’s flagship Saturday morning show, Going Live, and she was a researcher.
The young couple moved in together in Chiswick, West London, and married six years later.
Phillip recently told a friend of mine that he had known ‘within three weeks’ that she was the woman he was going to marry, and had indicated that they were deeply infatuated with each other in the early days.
Steph was at his side, then, when he realised his career dreams
Phillip was raised in Cornwall: his late father Brian was a French-polisher and his mother worked in a care home for the elderly, but young Phillip was obsessed with being on television. He sent his first job application to the BBC when he was ten years old, and by the time he was 17 had sent 100 more. He would type them in an effort to disguise his age.
His bedroom was turned into a studio, with spotlights and a stage, and younger brother Tim was interviewed incessantly about every aspect of his life. Schofield once joked that little Tim’s first words were: ‘No comment.’
At bedtime he would ‘sign off’ into his mirror.
He said: ‘My parents must have thought I was crazy but they were amazingly tolerant. Apart from a brief moment in infants’ school when I thought I wanted to be a gravedigger, I never had a thought about pursuing another career.’
After four years in New Zealand between the ages of 17 and 21, he returned to the UK and began doing links for children’s shows transmitted from what seemed to be a BBC broom cupboard.
Then he landed a job on Going Live, where his clean-cut looks drew comparisons with stars of the day such as Jason Donovan.
At one point he received 500 fan letters a week, chiefly from love-lorn teenage girls who found him absolutely desirable.
Early on he was romantically linked to Caron Keating, the Blue Peter presenter and daughter of TV icon Gloria Hunniford, and she was said to have been devastated when it didn’t work out.
Then came Stephanie Lowe. In an interview before they were married, he said: ‘I tend to be monogamous because I am quite loyal. I like having someone to come home to and discuss things with. I like coming home when the lights are on in the house, bread is being baked and the garden is mowed.’
Daughter Molly was born when he was 31, followed by Ruby two years later.
It was 2002, when he was 40, that Schofield hit the big time. This Morning presenter John Leslie was sacked after he was named publicly on TV as the person who had allegedly raped Ulrika Jonsson.
Into his shoes stepped Schofield, who would become the longest-running presenter in the show’s history.
But he departed ITV in May 2023 in the wake of his secret affair revelations, after leaving This Morning that same month.
After the furore over Schofield’s admission of an ‘unwise, but not illegal’ relationship with a younger male colleague, former This Morning doctor Ranj Singh hit out at a ‘toxic’ culture on the programme.
Dr Ranj claimed he raised concerns about ‘bullying and discrimination’ while working at ITV – and afterwards felt like he was ‘managed out’ for whistleblowing.
Schofield said there was ‘no toxicity’ on the programme at the time, and his allegations were about the ‘same handful of people with a grudge against me or the show who seem to have the loudest voice’.
On the second episode of Channel 5’s Phillip Schofield: Cast Away, where the 62-year-old spends 10 days alone on a small island off the coast of Madagascar in his first return to a TV series since leaving ITV, he addressed the claims again, saying at first it was ‘utter boll**ks’, before saying that ‘there wasn’t (toxicity) when I was there’.
‘I found out after I left that there are a few people in there that might be a little bit toxic,’ he added.
‘I never saw it … when (you’re) on the telly, you don’t see stuff like that, you’re protected from it, people don’t tell you, so I had no clue.’
Schofield also said that morning TV has a lot of ‘amazing’ people, before taking aim at what he called ‘three shits’.
He called two of them cowards – one for not defending him over ‘queuegate’, and the second for not ‘stepping up’ over another matter, which he did not clarify.
The final person, he said, was ‘just brand-orientated’.
Along with his then co-host Holly Willoughby, Schofield faced a backlash over claims the pair skipped the queue for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s lying in state. They were defended by the chief executive of ITV, Dame Carolyn McCall, who stressed the pair had been attending as members of the media to film a segment for This Morning.
Schofield was also upset that there was ‘absolutely no loyalty shown’ to him during the furore over his affair, despite his 20-plus years on This Morning, and added: ‘I know what I did was unwise, not sensible, but is it enough to absolutely destroy someone, literally destroy someone?’
When he was dropped by his talent agency YMU on the same day he resigned from ITV after more than three decades with the company, he says he was ‘suicidal’.
Schofield added: ‘They sent me what looked like a cut and pasted text, (saying) ‘this time we’ll have to let you go’.’
The 62-year-old former This Morning presenter then tasked his daughter Molly, 30, with working as his manager.
The presenter says on Cast Away he knows people will claim he is having a ‘mad rant’, but he does not ‘care any more’ as he has ‘nothing to lose’.
He added: ‘They’ve taken pretty much everything – reputation, dignity, legacy, everything – anyway. I’m not bleating, I’m just getting it off my chest.’
An external review, carried out by Jane Mulcahy KC on behalf of ITV found the channel made ‘considerable efforts’ to find out the truth about an alleged affair between Schofield and a runner in 2019, but was not able to find evidence about the rumours.
Schofield ‘reluctantly declined’ to take part in the probe because of ‘the risk to his health’, the report in December 2023 said.