‘Staggering levels of deference’: What I learnt from watching TalkTV for a week

Rupert Murdoch is 91 years old. Though he comes from tough stock (his mother lived to be 103), it’s probably time to start imagining that soon the sun will set on this overlord of a vast empire – a globe-spanning slew of companies he’s tirelessly built into a $21bn (£17bn) fortune, having conveniently inherited a chain of Australian newspapers from his dad. While it’s impossible to know if his unique world view will survive after his death, when his beloved News Corp enters Succession mode, after this week one thing is clear: if Rupert Murdoch were to die tomorrow, his obituary will state that his last act as a media baron was to start a boring, pointless and laughably ineffectual TV channel that employed a presenter so stupid he thinks you can grow concrete. Welcome to the first week of TalkTV.

It might seem insensitive to riff on the death of an old man at the start of an article. I usually wouldn’t. But the station – a mix of news and opinion, which launched this week on Sky and Freeview, and which features simulcasts with the Murdoch-owned TalkRadio – is based on the idea of free speech, pulling no punches and saying how it is. As a voiceover stated on Monday, TalkTV is “the home of straight talking”.

Despite it being a coming together of lots of parts of the Murdoch empire – contributors sourced from News UK papers such as The Times and The Sun, and shows syndicated to Fox Nation and Sky News Australia – few people have talked about Murdoch or News UK’s chief executive Rebekah Brooks (yes her from the phone-hacking scandal – not the only ignominious name you’ll hear in this piece) in connection with the launch. That’s because it is very much pegged to the conjoined brand and ego of one Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan.

For most viewers, Piers Morgan will be the only recognisable journalist involved with this new venture. He is very much the zygotic centre of what feels like a news Scotch egg: something familiar in the middle, yet wrapped up in stuff that’s weird and kinda gross. Piers Morgan Uncensored wasn’t the show to lead off the station, however. That honour went to the former political editor of The Sun, Tom Newton Dunn and his weekly News Desk show. Looking uncannily like he’d turned up to audition for Prince Philip in season three of The Crown, this was Newton Dunn’s first outing as a news anchor. He described his new employer as “a bold channel”, a place for “straight talking and straight reporting”. Yet the career print journalist seemed so unfortunately petrified that his darting eyes looked divorced from their optic nerves. If the autocue had told him to shout out his PIN number in a Dutch accent, I’m sure he absolutely would have done it.

To its credit, the station delivered very few production f**k ups. This would have disappointed anyone tuning in for a repeat of the launch of GB News – the ideologically identical station, where initial hype turned quickly to hilarity, as viewers mercilessly mocked its Acorn Antiques production values. But as I noted when I watched the first week of GB News back in June last year, TalkTV and its tribe of right-wing commentators are so painfully addicted to Twitter that they seek to make it a constant editorial priority, even though only a quarter of the country are on the increasingly divisive platform. News of Elon Musk’s corporate takeover proved a godsend however. Pretty much every show expressed hopes that Donald Trump would return to the platform, the way a militia might celebrate one of their number being busted out of jail. This fellow feeling for the American right is implicit in TalkTV’s existence, with the spectre of it becoming a cheaper twin of Murdoch’s US channel Fox News, and its rabid reigning demagogue Tucker Carlson. Has Morgan been hired to fill exactly that role?

Many other similarities between GB News and TalkTV prevailed, including a crutch-like reliance on words like “wokies”, “cancel culture”, “fun police” and “Londoncentric” – a phrase which daytime host Jeremy Kyle managed to use to admonish someone while in the TalkTV HQ, located next to the Shard in London Bridge, in the heart of the capital. It should be said, for balance, that Kyle was in fact born in Reading, studied in Surrey and, according to Hello! magazine, lives in a £3m town house in Windsor – a full 20 miles from Westminster. All, to be fair, not in London.

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Newton Dunn’s mainstream media background is not an anomaly on TalkTV. While pundits across the spectrum routinely decry politicians who have no real world experience, this applies starkly to TalkTV’s team. Take Mike Graham, whose 10am-1pm TalkRadio show is simulcast on the network. The relentlessly opinionated 61 year-old worked on Fleet Street for 25 years. He was also the man who claimed you could grow concrete in a much-memed interview with a climate activist in October last year. (He later tried to justify the comment in an interview with an “applied futurist”, who told him it is possible to “turn carbon dioxide into a variety of stone-like materials”). Graham spent the launch week admonishing people for working from home, without once nodding to the fact that almost all the network’s guests were Zooming in like his despised WFH wokies. Even that icon of progressive thought, Anne Widdecombe, took him to task on that one. Fellow daytime host Julia Hartley-Brewer has similarly spent her entire career in journalism, ditto Newton Dunn and Morgan. Sharon Osbourne has spent her life in entertainment. In short, if you’re looking for opinions rooted in real world experience, jog on.

While GB News had the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, as its glitzy, first-week guest, TalkTV went one better by bagging the biggest tool in the Westminster workshop: Boris Johnson. Yet in scenes reminiscent of Frost/Nixon, Newton Dunn let Johnson drone on and on, unable to interject or control the situation at all. The host then left the biggest subject – Partygate – to the very end of the chat, seemingly embarrassed to bring it up at all. Despite having more time than most get with the PM, the host’s inability to extract any gold whatsoever points to another profound problem with TalkTV: its staggering levels of deference. As a sign of just how weak and ailing Murdoch’s anti-establishment ethos has become, TalkTV saw more soft balls flying around than a creche.

Though there was plenty of external coverage of Trump’s huffy “walk out” at the end of Piers Morgan’s headline interview, people who actually watched the broadcasts saw that, in fact, Morgan’s last question was a slightly bum-kissy inquiry about a golfing hole-in-one the former president recently hit. Later in the week, Morgan told Tyson Fury he was “a deep thinker… highly intelligent” but didn’t ask about the fighter’s relationship with alleged drug cartel boss, Daniel Kinahan. Newton Dunn had James Slack as a guest (the former No 10 worker whose leaving party occurred the day before Prince Philip’s funeral), but again the so-called “journalist” didn’t ask about Partygate. Remind me: how is this the home of straight talking?

Through its hard-edged marketing, TalkTV gives the outward impression of being more vicious than frenemies brawling after a bottomless brunch. Weirdly though, it can often be oddly genteel: witness Osbourne and Kyle’s recollections of painting the town red the night before, like a pair of Fifties debutantes. It didn’t lend Kyle’s opinions on the “heat or eat” crisis a huge amount of credibility. The disconnect between the team’s trenchant opinions and the lack of any intellectual conflict on-screen is symptomatic of the station’s lack of plurality. Everyone basically agrees with each other, meaning the station has the lazy energy of gladiators in repose. It’s more ball pit than bear pit.

It’s a profound failure of the format, because individually the ensemble cast of TalkTV pundits are a formidable bunch of culture warriors. Like a roguish group of mercenaries, too wild and ferocious to get work within conventional media any more, these salty seadogs have all been collected onto a pirate ship helmed by Captain Morgan. Hosts in the first week have included James Whale, hauled off TalkRadio twice before (once for explicitly telling his audience to vote for Boris Johnson, once for humiliating a rape victim on air by laughing at her while she described sexual abuse). There’s Kyle, whose long-running TV show has become synonymous with the phrase “a culture of cruelty” and which ended with a guest killing himself. Sharon Osbourne was fired from her role on American show The Talk for using racist language to describe a colleague. This extends to guests too: TV host Ant Middleton was dropped for comments about BLM, while historian David Starkey apologised in 2020 after “clumsy” comments about slavery, to name just a couple.

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Having delved into every possible bucket to find this cast of bad apples, the channel seems intent on – as Morgan explained on his debut show – “cancelling cancel culture”. But is anyone buying this any more? If Morgan is as “censored” as his show’s name suggests, how was he able to give interviews in the past week with The Times, Radio 4’s The Media Show, Press Gazette, Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast and ITV’s Lorraine, as well as bang out his columns for The Sun and the New York Post? Piers may be many “c” words – “cocky”, “challenging” (why, what were you thinking?) – but “censored” is not one of them.

Aside from the tanking ratings, which saw Morgan’s show go from 316,800 viewers on Monday to 117,900 on Thursday, two things give TalkTV a doomed air. First was the spectacular sinking of GB News’s own human flagship, Andrew Neil. Like Morgan, Neil was a pedigree journalist accustomed to big, terrestrial TV-sized audiences. Yet just weeks after his foray into the frontiers of right-wing news, he was excoriating the channel’s management while breaking down in tears as he recounted the saga to journalists. Morgan of course is familiar with turning a flamethrower on his former bosses, which brings me to point two: he is unpredictable, maybe too unpredictable to base an entire station around. He was fired from the Daily Mirror for running faked pictures of abused Iraqi prisoners. He was criticised in the Leveson Report into phone hacking. He walked off a live TV show and never appeared on Good Morning Britain again. And then also fold in the many baffling incongruities, like claiming in 2012 that he’d never met Jimmy Savile, only for a 2009 quote to surface in which Piers stated: “As I left, Jimmy Savile came up to me. ‘Your TV shows are BRILLIANT!’ he exclaimed. ... I’ve always loved Jimmy Savile.”

Time and again in interviews to promote the station’s launch, Morgan has stated that his involvement was motivated by a grievance at his previous employers, Good Morning Britain. If revenge is a dish best served cold, then full credit to Morgan: he’s delivered something that feels stone cold dead on arrival.