The sum of all Piers
Piers Morgan Uncensored wasn't offensive or triggering. It was tedious.
Previously: The ‘straight’ guy
”With his head thrust through the Overton cat flap, Tom Newton-Dunn really believes he's not right-wing.”
In the early moments of the first episode of his TalkTV show …Uncensored, Piers Morgan read quotes on free speech from Winston Churchill, George Washington, and Christopher Hitchens. But the entire programme was against the sentiment of another popular quote by Hitchens: “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.”
His schtick is boring. Not offensive. Not edgy. Not triggering. But boring. At the beginning of the first of several monologues, a grab-bag of his familiar obsessions (‘wokeness’, ‘cancel culture’, Meghan and Harry, ‘cancel culture’, ‘illiberal liberals’, trans sportspeople, and anger that Mr Potatohead doesn’t have lifelike human genitalia) a trigger warning flashed in the corner of the screen and Morgan warned:
For all ultra-sensitive, permanently-offended, woke snowflakes who may have accidentally tuned in tonight, you’re not going to enjoy this show. In fact, it’s going to really annoy you. It may even provoke trauma.
It’s fortunate that Uncensored doesn’t have a studio audience as there wouldn’t be space to seat them among the many strawmen that Morgan requires for his rants. Moments after railing against the particular ‘woke mob’ of his imagination as the source of “modern-day fascism” and calling for a return “to being real democracies”, the presenter introduced the first part of his interview with Donald Trump.
Another line from his opening monologue (“As Nelson Mandela might have said, it’s been a long walk to freedom…”) was probably designed to offend. It was just silly. As everyone knows, Mandela’s 18 years on Robben Island pale into insignificance when compared to Piers Morgan walking off a breakfast show and having to make do with a huge Mail Online contract before being signed up by News Corp for £50 million.
The onscreen graphics suggested someone in the production team considers The Day Today and BrassEye to be educational material. At one point, Morgan buried his head in his hands and the slogan “the world’s gone nuts” appeared beside him rendered in a font that recalled messing around with ClipArt at school. The vibe was very much ‘man pisses himself for attention on an early-2000s Fox News set’.
Morgan’s tone during the encounter with Trump ping-ponged between sycophantic and mildly pushy. It was like a pro-wrestling bout between ageing fighters who telegraph the moves to each other and the crowd. The “explosive” clash promised by the promo clips was not delivered but trailed again as coming up in Tuesday’s show.
Trump was allowed to monologue for much of the interview, with Morgan letting lies and distortions whip past him. It was clear that Morgan had left “standing up” to the Trump until near the end of the interview and even during that segment he couldn’t help but suck up a little: “You’re a great talker — we’ve seen that today…”
And after dismissing claims that the election was stolen, Morgan had a more brand-friendly reason for Trump’s loss: The Hunter Biden laptop story in The New York Post — another Murdoch property for which Morgan now writes a column — was not adequately covered by the rest of the media. If it had been, Morgan reckoned, Trump would probably have won.
There was no scoop in the Trump interview despite the endless promises from The Sun and Morgan’s carnival huckster interludes between each segment. The promised beef was sliced thinner than carpaccio but a lot more tasteless.
Despite an advertising blitz, a publicity campaign that took in every corner of the Murdoch empire — with multiple radio appearances and several Sun front pages — as well as appearances on BBC and ITV shows, and 7.9 million Twitter followers, Uncensored had an average audience of 317,0001 between 8 pm and 9 pm last (a 2% audience share), peaking at 397,000 viewers.
Of course, The Sun (“Morgan shines on a night of TV history.”) and The Times (“Morgan holds his own in a bold start”) provided their readers with the kind of unbiased and balanced reviews you’d expect from the epicentre of British “no one tells me what to write” journalism. And Morgan is both managing expectations (“It’s early days…”) and crowing that Uncensored is a hit.
Morgan’s tactic to increase the audience will be the same as it has always been: Creating feuds, wilfully misunderstanding events, and performing anger about things he doesn’t remotely care about. His purported aim of “cancelling cancel culture” gives him the opportunity to be endlessly offended himself while pretending that it’s the imagined ‘woke mob’ that’s truly fragile.
The show’s title graphics — featuring an exploding 3D brain from which the words “woke insanity”, “snowflake society” and “the world’s gone mad” emerge — were an honest reflection of what followed. If GB News is like being shouted at by the most obnoxious bloke in the flat-roof pub, Piers Morgan Uncensored is the same rant delivered in a neon-bedecked wine bar that ceased to be “classy” in 1986.
At least 1,000 of whom were hacks writing about it.