Ben Shephard on This Morning: A safe pair of hands after the show’s tumultuous year

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Ben Shephard is lastly getting a bit of a lie-in. After spending the better part of 20 years discussing the day’s headlines at the crack of daybreak on ITV, the GMTV and Good Morning Britain stalwart has landed one of the broadcaster’s largest jobs. From subsequent month, the 49-year-old will likely be setting his alarm somewhat later to current This Morning alongside Cat Deeley. “This really feels like a very special moment for Cat and I to be part of the next chapter of This Morning,” he mentioned when the information was introduced. Will “Cat and Ben” quickly be referred to in cosy first-name phrases like their predecessors “Holly and Phil”?

Of course, this “next chapter” of This Morning follows a tumultuous year for the daytime present, beforehand presided over by golden couple Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. Last summer season, Schofield stepped down after greater than 20 years on the This Morning couch, following his confession that he had lied about an “unwise, but not illegal” affair with a youthful colleague. Former staff mentioned they’d needed to take care of a poisonous work setting (claims which ITV denied). Then in October, Willoughby determined to go away after a person was charged over an alleged plot to kidnap and homicide her. Ever since, the programme has had a revolving line-up of stand-in presenters. 

After all this turmoil, ITV wanted the most secure doable pair of hands – and Shephard is simply that. He is likeable and nil drama, the type of man that grandmas throughout the nation in all probability describe as “you know, that lovely man off the telly”. Although Good Morning Britain typically devolves into shouty contrarianism (the legacy of one Piers Morgan), he’s by no means lower than level-headed. The most controversial he will get is the odd unintended swearing slip-up throughout a dwell broadcast, the type of incident that’s then gushingly written up by the tabloid press as a “hilarious gaffe”. Even his self-confessed “most embarrassing” on-air second is fairly jolly: he as soon as “fell over the back of the GMTV sofa one morning, pretending to be Tom Cruise”. And his workmates appear to like him too. “Ben lifts my spirits,” co-presenter Susanna Reid has mentioned, whereas his X Factor colleague Kate Thornton even named her son after him. There aren’t any skeletons on this closet, it appears. 

Shephard grew up in Chigwell, Essex, however his first brush with fame got here when he was learning dance at the University of Birmingham (right here, he was classmates with the actor Claudia Harrison, who performed Princess Anne in later seasons of The Crown, and met his spouse Annie Perks, an inside designer and author with whom he has two sons). He was scouted to movie an ident for an area climate community, the place he later landed a summer season job as a runner. “A producer there suggested that I should go into television and that I could make a good presenter,” he advised The Independent. “I think at the time I was still secretly hoping that I could make it as an actor.”

His first gig was as a presenter on The Bigger Breakfast, the college vacation spin-off version of Channel 4’s Nineties morning present, the place he appeared alongside the likes of Melanie Sykes and his future This Morning colleague Dermot O’Leary. Next, he moved over to T4. You can nonetheless discover previous clips on YouTube: there’s one thing a bit disconcerting about seeing the often besuited Shephard sporting a large dishevelled hoodie, score the year’s celeb calendar choices and speaking about Fifa 1999. After a couple of year, although, his boss advised him: “It’s not working and I don’t think it’s ever going to.” The firing was “brutal because it came out of nowhere”, he later advised OK! “I was about 25 and thought I was going to be with Channel 4 for a couple of years.” This early knockback has stayed with him since. “I still constantly question if I’m good enough,” he admitted. “Nobody is more critical of me than I am of myself.”

After that, Shephard jumped ships to ITV to seem on the newly launched GMTV as an leisure presenter in 2000. It was a job that even landed him a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Friends, brandishing a microphone at Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani in a single red-carpet scene. He ultimately grew to become one of the show’s primary hosts, paired with Fiona Phillips and later with Kate Garraway. He additionally minimize his enamel on an actual seize bag of gentle leisure exhibits, from Soapstar Superstar to The Xtra Factor, earlier than a stint on Sky Sports and the launch of his long-running, unusually absorbing recreation present Tipping Point in 2012.

Then, in 2014, he was introduced as half of the line-up for Good Morning Britain, the place he reunited with Garraway. The pair have a straightforward on-screen rapport rooted in additional than 20 years of friendship, and Garraway has praised Shephard for his “phenomenal” help throughout her late husband Derek Draper’s sickness. “He has been at the end of the phone and trying to do everything that he can to help,” she revealed in 2020. “Working alongside somebody that you care for and you are worried about, plus also trying to do the job. It’s a huge thing and I’m very grateful that he has been there.” When it got here to taking the This Morning job, Shephard mentioned one of the “hardest decisions” was “knowing that my mornings with Kate, my on-screen wife of nearly 20 years, are coming to an end”. Theirs is the type of bond that makes it appear to be there may be a grain of fact to all the ITV rhetoric about the broadcaster’s “work family”.

Does anybody have a foul phrase to say about Shephard? The criticism that you simply’re almost certainly to listen to is that he’s, effectively, a bit bland, even boring. He doesn’t have the effervescent humour of, say, Alison Hammond. We’re unlikely to see him rock as much as the studio after the National Television Awards feigning a hangover (though that’s arguably no dangerous factor). You would possibly even have combined him up with Stephen Mulhern on event. But after This Morning’s annus horribilis, “boring” in all probability sounds extremely interesting to ITV’s prime brass.