IIf Piers Morgan was a bouncer in a nightclub, he would try to start fights. Ahead of the launch of his latest TV run, on Rupert Murdoch’s Talk TV, a screen-run brother of the mogul’s Talk Radio and Times Radio challenged The Guardian on Twitter to come and take him on if we were stereotypical enough.
“The only way the @PiersUncensored PR campaign could get any better,” Morgan scoffed, “is if @guardian reviews it and says it’s terrible, unwatchable, and the end of civilization as we know it. Do not disappoint me, you weepers who have woken up!
All right, spruce up pugilist publicist, let’s see what we can do.
Surprisingly, even for such an established egoist, Morgan began by comparing himself to one of the most important figures of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“As Nelson Mandela might have said, it has been a long road to freedom of expression!” Morgan opened the show, his voice louder than usual suggesting nerves that would have touched someone with less industrial self-confidence. Morgan was also cavalier about the potential audience: “If [Putin] is watching… and will be!”
A lengthy opening monologue promised that Piers’ show would herald a television “no-cancel zone” that would be an “island of sanity” in “a world gone mad.” So totalitarian are the “fun cops” that someone, like Morgan, who dares to tell the truth has multiple newspaper columns and a new TV station built around them.
This splendid soliloquy also showed the weakest part of his personality as an announcer: the Jeremy Clarkson tribute act revealed when he is allowed to speak uninterrupted for too long.
But, as has been widely reported (and not just by himself), Morgan’s debut coup was an interview with Donald Trump, whom the host characteristically introduced as “the most famous and divisive man in the world, barring the company!” Present!”.
Taped at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, this heavyweight orange-skinned narcissist world title fight generated publicity and clicks for Talk TV, but lacked news value due to Trump’s current status as a golfer. hobbyist in Florida.
As it turns out, this is the second media release in a row, following Andrew Marr’s switch to LBC last month, which was clearly hoping to start with an interview with the Prime Minister (either Boris Johnson or a successor).
However, the rarity of 10 Downing Street being occupied by a politician who rarely submits to questioning and then by the police meant that Marr opened with Michael Gove and Morgan with Trump.
The host has also bragged about his closeness to Joe Biden but, for reasons other than what might come out of his mouth, the president is no more likely to give a lengthy interview than Johnson.
True, Trump is the first defeated White House incumbent since Grover Cleveland in 1888 who could plausibly seek a second term (Cleveland did and won). The strongest news line Morgan received was a strong hint that Trump will get another chance, though it could have made it clearer to viewers that the politician’s refusal to testify at this stage is related, as he hinted, to financial scrutiny of the campaign. which starts on the first day of an official race.
But then, Morgan, not for the first time, seemed more interested in his own contributions than in his guest’s: the conversation was irritatingly cut into fillets with before-and-after commentary from the host, instead of trusting it to flow like conversation. .
The Sunday papers that heralded the debut of Talk TV also carried prominent advertisements for Marr’s LBC show. The strikingly similar sales lines (Piers Morgan Uncensored, Marr Gets His Voice Back) mean these shows will sidestep the paltry editorial balance suffered by presenters at the BBC and ITV.
In fact, both hosts remain subject to Ofcom regulation, as does another loudmouth newcomer, GB News, so claims to say the unspeakable are marketing bluster.
And, as the regulator cleared Morgan’s Good Morning Britain interviews with government ministers during the lockdown – the most offensive forensic crackdown ever seen on British television – it’s unclear how much further he could go in a studio. The only line drawn on ITV was about him being yelled at on-air by a colleague and the subsequent storming of the studio.
If Morgan flies off this set, they’re packed, and that’s not the only downside to a solo show. Morgan’s most similar broadcast venture, his CNN afternoon talk show from 2011 to 2014, flopped, though that can be put down to him being seen as a British asshole in the US, only one of the objections applies. in the United Kingdom.
But for all of Morgan’s obsession with himself, the highlight of his television career, the six years on ITV’s Good Morning Britain from 2015, which truly transformed breakfast television, owes a lot to co-host Susanna Reid, adept at goading or controlling him as needed. . Talk TV may find out it’s better at a double act.
Although Murdoch’s Sunday Times listed a full Monday schedule for Talk TV starting at 6:30am, it doesn’t actually start until Tuesday, with Julia Hartley-Brewer’s breakfast show.
On launch night, before Morgan v Trump, viewers were treated to The News Desk, airing weeknights at 7:00 p.m. birth of GB News last year.
Newton Dunn is a fluent broadcaster who probably would have had a career at the BBC if he hadn’t been demonized for being a political editor of the Sun. From a desk in a studio, he links reports primarily from Murdoch newspaper reporters on Zoom.
The tone throughout was on the populist end of the spectrum. The PM’s threat to unleash “the terrors of the earth” on whoever made misogynistic accusations against Labor Vice-President Angela Rayner was discussed as if it were a shocking Johnson coinage without a footnote that it is a quote from the King Lear.
A closing “news panel” avoided mentioning the threat to the prime minister for his breach of the law, which was perhaps wise since one of the commentators was James Slack, now deputy editor of the Sun, whose going-away party in Downing Street is one of the events investigated by Sue Gray and the police.
On this early evidence, Talk TV is much more resourceful than GB News, but much less rigorous and resource-intensive than Sky News (a Murdoch brainchild it no longer owns). They obviously concern corporations or Ofcom, although the return to television (4-7pm Tuesday) of Jeremy Kyle, controversially retired from ITV over allegations of lack of duty of care to contestants, will be closely watched.
Launch night seemed short on commercials, some breaks between segments filled with promotional clips. In an increasingly saturated broadcast news market, will there be enough funds to pay Morgan’s salary or viewers to satisfy her ego?
Sorry if that’s not wakeful or whiny enough for him. But he’s going to have to do much worse than this to keep liberals from waking up to his agenda.
Reference-www.theguardian.com