‘The reaction has been brutal – I hope he’s got a thick skin’: Phillip Schofield’s Cast Away secrets

Was he truly alone? How many crabs did he eat? And was he ready for the reviews? The producers behind the embattled star’s return reveal all

Earlier this year, producers happened on the perfect candidate for the next series of Channel 5’s Cast Away: national treasure-turned-pariah, Phillip Schofield. There was just one problem – they couldn’t get hold of him. For three months Clive Tulloh, executive producer of Burning Bright Productions, struggled to make contact with the agentless Schofield, who had seemingly been cut off from the trappings of celebrity life a year earlier, when his affair with a runner at This Morning (who was 15 when they met, and 20 when they began a sexual relationship) was exposed. 
When Tulloh finally got a message through – via Schofield’s daughter, Molly – “he did take a bit of convincing… he didn’t jump at the idea” of being sent to an island off the coast of Madagascar to fend for himself for 10 days. “He properly thought about it for ages.” 
Producers went a-courting to the presenter’s family home in Henley in June. Inevitably, he would have to address his spectacular fall from grace – but they weren’t prescriptive about the “arc” Schofield’s story would take, explains Guy Davies, commissioning editor at Channel 5. Signing him was a gamble for them, too: Cast Away is “a process that you go through in solitude, and we don’t know what’s going to come out the other end either,” he says. “It’s a location and a process which does allow you to look inside your head a bit, and to explore and challenge yourself, as well as try and survive. And I think that he felt that that was an interesting challenge to do, both physically and mentally.”
And so, after watching prior episodes and more ruminating, he decided, “I do want to do it; I’ve turned everything else down. But actually what really appeals is that I’m on my own, and I’m filming, and I love that.”
In Schofield’s mind, this was the ultimate chance for redemption: a way to monologue – unchallenged – about the perceived ills that have befallen him since being dropped from This Morning last year. (Plus, as proven by I’m A Celebrity, subjecting unpopular public figures to a harsh clime or two does wonders for their appeal, and their bank balance – Schofield’s fee was “absolutely in line” with former castaways like Ruby Wax, Tulloh says.) 
The expedition began in late August, when Schofield and Tulloh took a mammoth 32-hour journey (via Paris, to avoid paparazzi, plus a five-hour wait on the runway in Jeddah due to fog) to get to the remote east African enclave. Producers stayed on a nearby island, 15 minutes away by speedboat, dispatching Schofield with three cameras, and their well wishes.
Qualms about the footage they might get were instantly expunged. “He’s a proper TV nerd,” Tulloh says of Schofield’s filming prowess; the programme’s editors “can’t get over how good his footage is.” The cameraman tasked with sending drones over Schofield’s island to capture him scaling a mountain, or fishing, “was almost unnerved about how good Phil was at filming.”
That abundance of tape has made for “compelling television”, according to this newspaper’s review – a lone positive in a sea of critiques that dubbed the show “a cross between self-abuse and self-promotion,” drowned by the “colossal scale of his self-aggrandising victimhood.”
Along with whether he should have been allowed to star in his own hero story 15 months after falling from grace, there has been one big question: was the solitude and hunger schtick for real? 
But Schofield “really did” go it alone, even turning down a bag of rice from Tulloh (the producer says that if he would have accepted it, this would have been disclosed on the show). In fact, while we see Schofield disappointed in the final episode after failing to secure a catch, his 10 days on the island triggered a serious crab habit. On leaving, he told Tulloh that he had eaten 10 crabs – and they’re “quite big,” Tulloh says. “I think he was quite lucky he didn’t get any indigestion… if you get washed up [there] now, it would be harder still, because he’s seriously depleted the crab population of that island.”
Though he reported no crustacean-induced gastric distress, Schofield did make a call to producers at around 7am each day. “Every morning, he had to phone in and do a health check, because we wanted to make sure he got through the night,” Tulloh says. On that call, he’d also fill them in about his plans for the day, so the drone could be teed up.
Schofield had a walkie-talkie with him at all times for safety reasons, using it only when he thought he had discovered the footprints of a big cat in the sand (he is advised to build a big fire, which then unfortunately burns his camp down). Physical peril wasn’t the only concern. “Mentally, he was very strong, but obviously, we were worried and Channel 5 were worried,” according to Tulloh. “He could call his therapist if need be.”
The “riskiest moment” came when Schofield decided to climb the island’s mountain on the seventh day. He had originally told Tulloh that he planned to do so on day two or three, while he was still strong enough. “I’ve climbed it myself, it’s almost sheer in places; it’s a scramble, and it takes a couple of hours,” Tulloh explains. But “he put it off and put it off. And I was just worried that he would… we’re all in the hands of the gods of these programmes, in that somebody only has to slip, and then it’s dangerous.” Doing so after a week, when his energy was seriously depleted, “was the biggest danger of it,” says Tulloh. “I think he had an extra crab the night before.”
The mission was a success; Schofield was released from self-inflicted captivity three days later. (His celebratory meal was a “big beer” and a humble omelette as he feared his stomach couldn’t handle much, likely from ricocheting between starvation and seafood dinners.)
Then came perhaps the biggest challenge for the show’s makers: getting the three episodes ready for the masses in as many weeks. “It’s crazy, we’ve never made a programme like that,” Tulloh says (normally one hour of film takes almost two months to edit). But after a summer of the Olympics, Euros and Paralympics, where viewers had “been watching BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, everyone will have forgotten about Channel 5 again,” went the logic of Ben Frow, the channel’s chief content officer. His view, per Tulloh, was: “I want something that comes out at the end of September that reminds people that Channel 5 is still there. So I think it definitely did that.”
For Frow, he adds, the channel’s shows should always be “about people who are loved, or were loved, by the British public.” Schofield, now decidedly in the latter camp, thus seemed an obvious fit. But did he really deserve the platform? The programmes are less a mea culpa than a series of embittered diatribes about the many Schofield believes have wronged him. “I don’t have any questions about whether we should have done it or not,” Davies says of the “controversial” events that have engulfed the presenter since last year, adding that Cast Away “felt like a good place for him to tell his story.” It “certainly has been a conversation starter. It’s obviously made a lot of noise.”
Tulloh admits to being surprised by the strength of public reaction. “I’m hoping he’s got a thick skin, because it’s pretty hard. I mean, the reaction to the show is the reaction to him, really, isn’t it?… It was quite brutal, how [reviewers] approached him. I thought people might be a bit more forgiving, but they don’t seem to be.” 
They are happy with the ratings (the first episode pulled in 1.5m viewers); the experience has confirmed to them that the format should return. “We’ll certainly be looking at it again,” Davies says, “but I wouldn’t like to say at this stage who we might have our eye on.”
Both have recently been in touch with Schofield, who Tulloh says is “a much stronger, happier person for having made this programme… It’s helped him personally move on. Whether that’s the role of television programmes, I don’t know. But for Phil, I think it’s been a great thing to do.”