When Phillip Schofield got Petula Clark to 116 ...

Apparently it is News that Phillip Schofield has come out as gay.  However, I always thought he was and I’ve been racking my brain as to where I got such an idea... And why this is News.  I think it goes back to when he was in the broom cupboard with Gordon the Gopher… 

Yes, I know the out the closet joke has been done to death but…

Phillip was the first CBBC in screen continuity announcer and he performed this task from a broom cupboard.  As I remember there was a lot of dead air to fill… So Phillip came up with games.  One of these games was to promote Downtown as sung by Petula Clark every day on his show for no apparent reason.  

Now I don’t know if Petula is a gay icon but I suspected there had been a wink to the audience going on some years later when an act called "An Audience with Peter" (right) did a routine that involved singing alternative lyrics to Downtown with jokes about homosexual intercourse in.  Is she a gay icon?  Perhaps or perhaps not – these two things could have been entirely unrelated and I could be putting 2 and 2 together to make 5 … but because of this I’ve just assumed (wrongly perhaps except it now seems I was right) for years that Phillip was gay...  Then again it could be that Peter also discovered that record via Phillip’s relentless promotion of it and that Phillip gave Peter the germ of the idea…or not.

Of course it is entirely possible to have a strong interest in female recording artists and showtunes without being gay and so this may just have been stereotyping on my part.  As the broom cupboard segments were live apparently most were not recorded so we will never know quite how Phillip came over in those days (85 – so long ago he was still single) and I only have my memory to fall back on... 

 

But I’m not the only person to remember Phillip’s obsession with Downtown – he would play it every day and ask people to send in photographs of themselves down town...  

On one nostalgia video someone asks Phillip about Downtown and he responds that the choice to endlessly play Downtown was just “random” … Okay, it could have just been a good tune but Phillip’s playing of it got very serious.  He managed to get the record re-released as a single and apparently it got up to 116 in the charts. Maybe it just was a bit of nonsense to see how far you could get a track up the charts by relentless promotion...  That said the joke went a very long way...  He even got to talk to the icon Petula himself so here’s Phillip talking to Petula about her career and how often she goes Downtown…

…not that any of this is of the slightest important but it’s a little trip downtown...

And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along.
So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles, forget all our cares
So go downtown
Things will be great when you're downtown
Don't wait a minute more downtown
Everything is waiting for you

Update 29th May 2023

It seems an affair with a younger man was being covered up.  Apparently this is scandalous because Phil knew the young man as a child in his role as a patron of the theatre school... And they both lied to producers about the relationship.  It is common these days for employers to have rules that employees must declare their relationships if not on the same seniority level... there are accusations of things that I will not repeat here.  In the words of the late Mrs Merton : who knew what attracted Matthew to MILLIONAIRE Phil Schofield....

But perhaps the final word should go to King Solomon....

The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s inmost parts (Proverbs 18:8 and 26:22, NIV)