Starring Piers Morgan as Norma Desmond

Piers Morgan is trying to make his retreat from broadcast television sound like a victory. You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh.

Previously: A more elegant way of being awful

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Piers Morgan has the kind of ego where, if he wet himself in public, he’d tell the world that it was just as he planned all along: A test of just how absorbent his very expensive trousers actually are. The announcement that his show, Piers Morgan: Uncensored — better known to millions of non-viewers as Piers Morgan: Unwatched — will now be a very expensively produced YouTube show rather than a broadcast proposition is the media equivalent of styling out publicly pissed pants.

In typical cock-of-the-walk style — emphasis on the cock — Morgan told Semafor:

I’ve just decided that I no longer want to create my show for linear television — I just want to go full digital globally. There’s something quite anachronistic about a show like mine still trying to create old fashioned TV for a pre-scheduled time slot each night for a relatively small audience — when we’re getting such gigantic audiences digitally.

News UK insiders, spinning faster than a row of laundrette dryers, told the Financial Times that the decision was “jointly agreed by News UK boss Rebekah Brooks with Morgan”. In the same story, other sweetly singing birdies at the company suggested that Lachlan Murdoch, who now nominally leads News Corp, is making a “strategic play… to create a global digital audience with growing digital advertising behind it”.

I hear from News UK sources less wedded to the company line that Rupert Murdoch — who was seen stalking the halls of the firm’s London offices before Christmas — has run out of patience with TalkTV in general and Morgan in particular. When the three-year deal for Morgan to appear across News Corp’s print and broadcast properties — reportedly worth £50 million — was announced in 2022, there was no mention of the “anachronistic” nature of “old-fashioned TV”. Instead, Morgan crowed:

I’m delighted to now be returning to live television with a new primetime show whose main purpose will be to cancel the cancel culture, which has infected societies around the world.

Now, his TV show has been cancelled by the most dangerous form of wokery — total indifference. Morgan’s retort is to point to YouTube where his channel has grown to 2.8 million subscribers over the past two years and his most popular videos have hit millions of views — Israel-Hamas War: Piers Morgan vs Bassem Youssef (22 million); Andrew Tate vs Piers Morgan (14 million); Piers Morgan vs Bassem Youssef Round 2 (11 million views); Kanye ‘Ye’ West interview (8.7 million).

There are some problems with that ‘I’m still big on YouTube, its the TV audience that got small’ though. The big interviews are outliers. Most of Morgan’s output struggles to break 100k views. That’s even with News UK’s marketing budget and relentless cross-promotion in its newspapers and across its radio network.

Morgan’s recent encounter with Rishi Sunak hasn’t broken 500k views yet — despite blanket coverage of their morally bankrupt bet on relocating immigrants to Rwanda — and even most recent International Wankerweight belt clash with Ben Shapiro, who brings his own audience of angry middle-aged men and incels to any encounter, is stuck at 861k views.

To crack SocialBlade’s Top 100 listing of UK YouTubers, Morgan needs to roughly quadruple his subscriber base. For context, British YouTuber supergroup, the Sidemen, are 17th on that list with ten times as many subscribers as Morgan and four times as many for their 98th placed second channel.

The Times’ coverage of the move is, unsurprisingly, little more than an gussied up press release. The paper’s media correspondent, Alex Farber, acted as stenographer for another statement from Morgan:

Piers Morgan is leaving the “unnecessary straitjacket” of his TalkTV show to focus on his successful Uncensored YouTube channel.

His daily 8pm show was launched nearly two years ago. Morgan, 58, said that no longer having to be a “slave to the schedule” would allow him to improve the Piers Morgan Uncensored channel… He described Piers Morgan Uncensored, which is also owned by News UK, the owner of TalkTV and The Times, as having a “start-up mentality” and said that the change would free it up to feature longer interviews with bigger guests, supported by more clips. Some of the interviews will be shown on TalkTV as the channel juggles its schedule to replace Morgan’s show.

Morgan was what passed for a ‘star’ on TalkTV with most of its schedule taken up by figures like ‘Iron’ Mike Graham, a man with a face for radio and a voice best suited to a life of Trappist silence. He was regularly beaten by GB News’ Nigel Farage and talk of Murdoch wanting to acquire the rival right-wing troll channel remains rife.

It’s interesting that the Times story points to Joe Rogan and his 16 million YouTube subscribers as “an inspiration for the change”. Rogan built his podcast following over many years with extremely low overheads. Even with his recently renewed multi-year deal with Spotify — reportedly worth $250 million — Rogan’s studio set up and staff remain relatively modest. Morgan broadcasts from a custom-built studio with all the bells, whistles, and staff needed for a traditional TV production.

TalkTV is in a desperate state with, as Byline Times reports, the boss, former Mirror man Richard Wallace, telling presenters to “get angry” and rile up viewers in the hungry hope that figures will rise along with rage levels. It’s PR bollocks to suggest that Morgan moving to digital-only is some kind of win for the station. His viewing figures were abysmal but they were the channel’s bright spot.

With millions spent on marketing and Morgan’s wages, the acquisition cost for those two million YouTube subscribers is ridiculously high. The current production values and levels of staffing don’t make economic sense with the levels of revenue his YouTube channel will earn even from his most watched interviews.

Let’s jump back to September 2022, when Morgan was interviewed for a ‘Lunch with the FT’ feature and compare that to his pitch now. Then he claimed:

[Is TalkTV] in it for the long haul? Absolutely. And does Rupert Murdoch have a habit of over time making these things work? Absolutely. 

His only instruction to me is to get the show right… I’ve got a three year contract. 

Two years into that contract and it doesn’t appear that the Murdochs are in it for the long haul but instead are feeling rather fed up with having lavished so much cash on Morgan and seen only lukewarm YouTube numbers for the privilege.

TalkTV’s response to a mischievous Daily Express query about Morgan’s employment status (“No, it is not true that Piers has been sacked by Rupert Murdoch. Piers is still very much working for News Corp.") has a real ‘the Prime Minister still has full confidence in the minister’ vibe to it.

The Rogan reference in The Times story and Morgan pointing to Shapiro’s far right sewage pipeline, The Daily Wire, in his comments to Semafor suggest he’s going to take ‘never mind the quality, look at the quantity’ approach. He told The Times:

I could happily interview Elon Musk for three or four hours tomorrow and the audience would lap it up. But the nightly restriction of having to go into a studio at 8pm when sometimes there is nothing happening and literally fill time? Nobody wants that.  

A relatively small number of people want what Morgan is supplying even on his ‘good’ days with major interviewees. His talk of the ‘Uncensored’ brand vastly overestimates his personal draw. He will face even greater competition on YouTube and if News UK starts to tire of giving him the levels of promotion which he’s accustomed to getting, he may finally realise it’s not just the audience that’s got smaller.

When the News deal runs out, I suspect Morgan’s channel will too. No doubt he will wash up somewhere else — after a nuclear war, Morgan would be found presenting a controversial chat show for cockroaches — but his ‘stardom’ and relevance will continue to decline, no matter how ‘uncensored’ he continues to be.

I look forward to Piers Morgan starring as the Norma Desmond on digital media; alone in a studio that is swallowing him up, still raging on about the good old days on Good Morning Britain and when Meghan Markle once went for a drink with him… possibly; the living ghost of a tabloid editor from a time gone by; denying phone hacking to the shadows, a marginally more modern Kelvin MacKenzie, groping around for a new ‘shocking’ line to get just one more hit of attention.

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