Holly Willoughby’s Netflix comeback proves she’s our most resilient TV star

It’s been a tough one.” Holly Willoughby’s recent summary of what has surely been the most difficult year and a half of her life was an understatement, to say the least. In October 2023, the queen of daytime television stepped down from her role as the host of ITV’s This Morning, after a disturbing plan to kidnap, rape and kill her was foiled. The impact on Willoughby, who bravely waived her right to anonymity at the start of the trial, was “life-changing” and “catastrophic”, according to her barrister.

The horrifying ordeal came during an already difficult time in her professional life, as Willoughby had only just been caught up in the workplace drama that engulfed This Morning that summer. Phillip Schofield, her co-star and close friend for almost 20 years, left ITV after admitting to an “unwise but not illegal” affair with a younger co-worker. The fallout was huge, and, perhaps unfairly, seemed to tarnish Willoughby by association.

No wonder she chose to retreat from the spotlight for a while. But in recent months, Willoughby has made a slow but assured return to our screens, returning to her longstanding role as the host of Dancing on Ice and also helming ITV’s primetime reboot of game show You Bet! Now, she’s taking on her biggest job yet, as the host of Netflix reality show Celebrity Bear Hunt, which will be available to stream across world. Somewhat aptly, it’s all about survival. It could hardly be further away from the staid world of UK daytime television – but Willoughby has always been good at reinvention.

Her warm onscreen manner and breezy way of styling out gaffes make it easy to assume that Willoughby was born with easy confidence. But speaking to the nation on camera would have been a nightmare scenario for teenage Holly, who grew up in Sussex, where she attended private school with her older sister, Kelly. “I was not a big talker at school – I never liked people seeing my braces so I walked around with my sleeves pulled over my hands and my hands over my mouth in case anybody saw me smiling,” she told The Guardian. She was also ashamed of her dyslexia, which wasn’t diagnosed until her late teens, and caused her to struggle with spelling.

This diffidence meant she wasn’t a natural candidate for a career in the spotlight. Her first brush with fame came in the time-honoured Nineties fashion, when she was scouted as a model on a trip to the Clothes Show Live. Aged 14, she signed to Storm, the agency that discovered Kate Moss, and then appeared in teen magazines. Modelling, she said, helped her confidence grow, because “I suddenly had to talk, there was no one else to do it for me”.

Her TV debut came about by accident, when she arrived at the audition thinking it was just another model casting. Instead, she was hired to appear in the slightly head-scratching S Club TV. She and six other presenters (including actor Ben Barnes) stood in for the real S Club 7 in a Sunday morning kids’ show for ITV, vaguely themed around the band. “I spoke in a posh telephone voice, and I was so unnatural,” she reflected on those early efforts. “I fixated on remembering lines rather than just speaking.”

She then briefly stepped behind the scenes, doing a stint as a receptionist for a production company and then as a runner for an auction channel. A chance meeting with a producer, while working at a pub in Chelsea, helped her land some more presenting gigs on CBBC, before she was snapped up to host CITV’s Saturday morning show Ministry of Mayhem, alongside Stephen Mulhern.

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This job, with all its ridiculous challenges (often including gross combinations of food and that kids’ TV staple, “gunge”), was a steep learning curve. If things went off-kilter, she and Mulhern would have to make them work. “When you knocked out hours and hours of telly live and things went wrong left, right and centre but you just had to pull it together, it [was] just a really good training ground,” she told The Guardian. The chaotic onscreen atmosphere seemed to permeate behind the scenes. “There were times when we went straight from the hotel bar to going live on air,” Willoughby recalled to the Daily Mail – having “to drink anchovies in custard with some eight-year-old” didn’t exactly help with hangovers. Around this time, she met Dan Baldwin, a producer on the show, who she married in 2007. They are parents to Harry, 15, Belle, 13, and Chester, 10, and have worked together throughout their marriage (Baldwin produced Celebrity Juice, the unruly, lewd game show that Willoughby appeared on for 12 years).

When Ministry of Mayhem wound down in 2006, Willoughby got her call-up to ITV’s major league when she was hired to present Dancing on Ice, her first primetime show. She was cast alongside Phillip Schofield, who had decades more experience, but the pair quickly built up a rapport. They got on so well, in fact, that when Fern Britton left the famous This Morning sofa in 2009, Schofield recommended that his new friend replace her. “Holly was the only person I wanted to replace her,” he told The Sunday Times in 2019. “And at the time, it was a tough sell. But I knew it would work.”

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The onscreen camaraderie of “Holly and Phil” (daytime TV stardom quickly makes you mononymous) was an immediate hit with viewers. Willoughby brought a touch of her kids’ TV anarchy to This Morning, often dissolving into laughter on air. What she might have lacked in journalistic rigour, she made up for with charm, empathy for guests and an easy rapport with Schofield. “I’m just a person that likes asking questions and has a natural interest in other people’s lives,” she summed up her presenting style.

The pair weren’t averse to the odd stunt designed to amp up their “relatability”, such as the notorious occasion when they arrived at the studio in their gladrags after winning a National Television Award in 2016, joking that they were worse for wear. The following year, she received a ?200,000 pay rise that put her on an equal footing to Schofield. She later said that the disparity had been to do with their relative experience, rather than her gender: “If there was a pay gap, it wasn’t just because I was a woman [...] I think it was that Phil had been there for such a long time.”

Hers became a name that’s often affixed with terms like “nation’s sweetheart”, a shorthand for a sort of middle England niceness. Brands figured out that allying themselves with this particular niceness could be lucrative. Willoughby’s fashion collaboration with Marks & Spencer sold out speedily when it launched in 2018, and any items she wore on air (think printed midi dresses from upmarket but still accessible high street stores) would be quickly snapped up too.

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But more than a decade into Willoughby’s stint on This Morning, the tide of public opinion started to turn. The show was met with backlash when she and Schofield presided over a “Spin to Win” competition segment that offered viewers the chance to have their energy bills covered for four months. Critics branded it dystopian, a gamification of the cost of living crisis. Worse still was “Queue-gate”. It was claimed that she and Schofield had jumped the line to see the late Elizabeth II lying in state in September 2022 (“Please know that we would never jump a queue,” came their response).

When news of Schofield’s affair with a younger colleague broke the following summer, the show was embroiled in a media storm. Reports alleging a “toxic” work environment proliferated; ITV denied these claims, but the show’s veneer of amiability had shattered. Willoughby, who’d taken pains to never say anything remotely controversial throughout her career, couldn’t win in this scandal. She was both criticised for her past association with Schofield, and berated for not standing by him. Her much-publicised address to viewers following Schofield’s departure didn’t quite hit the right tone: her opening question, “Firstly, are you OK?”, was much mocked (including, later, by Schofield, during his strange comeback vehicle, Cast Away).

Willoughby was already facing a tough year, then, when things took a horribly dark turn in October 2023. An undercover US police officer had spent less than 48 hours communicating with security guard Gavin Plumb, who was described as “obsessed” with the star, in a chat room. He was so alarmed by Plumb’s plot to kidnap, rape and kill Willoughby that he contacted UK police, who arrested the security guard. The presenter stepped down from her This Morning role just a few days later. “I now feel I have to make this decision for me and my family,” she said.

When Plumb went on trial in summer 2024, many of the disturbing messages shown to the jury were deemed “too graphic to be published”. He was later found guilty and received a life sentence with a minimum term of 16 years in prison. Willoughby chose not to make her victim impact statement public, but did release a short and powerful response to the verdict. “As women, we should not be made to feel unsafe going about our daily lives and in our own homes,” she said, praising the “bravery” of Plumb’s previous victims, without whom “this conviction may not have been possible”.

Willoughby inevitably retreated from the public eye during this appalling ordeal. For a time there was a question mark hanging over whether she’d return to her role on Dancing on Ice (she did, eventually, with her longtime friend Mulhern taking over from Schofield). As she later revealed in a January 2025 interview with The Sunday Times, her first in well over a year, quitting TV was never an option for her. “I knew that I would come back,” she said. “It was important for me to get back to normality for lots of reasons.”

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When your life is turned upside down in such an awful and public way, she noted, “you have a decision to make. You either decide, right, I can take this on board and it can absolutely affect all aspects of my life. Or I can make a choice to go, let’s focus on everything that’s positive and good.”

Her first major step forward comes in the form of Celebrity Bear Hunt, a high-concept contest which sees an eclectic array of famous people – think Boris Becker crawling through the undergrowth with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – dropped into the Costa Rican jungle. Here, they must fend for themselves and complete tricky challenges… all while being “hunted” by adventurer Bear Grylls.

It’s far enough removed from This Morning to be a fresh start, but this slightly chaotic-sounding set-up might also be a welcome throwback to Willoughby’s kids’ telly days; she’s always been at her most endearing when she’s able to go off-piste. The fact that the Netflix show will be watched around the world, not just in the UK, will probably be equal parts thrilling and terrifying for someone whose fame has, so far, been very much confined to home soil.

As far as comebacks go, there are no half measures here. The symbolism of it being all about trudging through adversity, albeit of a very different kind, probably wasn’t lost on Willoughby either, who describes herself as “made of quite tough stuff”. Rather than being crushed by a traumatic experience that might have reasonably caused anyone to retreat, she’s opted, in her words, “to positively move forward”. That resilience might just help her to usher in the next chapter of her career.

Celebrity Bear Hunt is streaming on Netflix now