Former ITV star Judy Finnigan admits confusion on Phillip Schofield departure

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Judy Finnigan, one half of a former This Morning duo Richard and Judy, is pondering the show’s future after the departures of both Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield.“I’ll be absolutely straight.

I did not recognise the world that people were saying This Morning had become when all that happened and Phillip left,” she says, referring to employees’ claims of a toxic culture at the programme. “It simply wasn’t like that when we were there.”“I couldn’t understand why Phillip had to go,” Finnigan continues, saying she sent him a couple of emails after he quit “just telling him to keep his chin up and wishing him luck”.Many remember husband-and-wife team Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan in their prime: him being the fast-talking interviewer who sometimes put his foot in it; she the calmer, more measured character who could gently encourage reluctant guests to come out of their shell.It was TV marriage gold when snippets of their everyday life seeped into the show, Judy sometimes tutting irritably at some of Richard’s less tactful comments.Finnigan, now 75, was a trailblazer for women on TV and beyond, becoming synonymous with discovering and championing fiction through the Richard & Judy Book Club.

She was the first female news reporter at Anglia Television in the Seventies.“I suppose I blazed a trail in Norfolk,” she chuckles.

Today, she’s a bestselling novelist – her latest book Roseland, a sequel to her first, Eloise, is a family saga set in Cornwall, exploring family dynamics and fractured relationships.Set 10 years after Eloise’s death, it finds her children, grandchildren and best friend gathering for the wedding of her true love, Jack, to a young TV location scout of whom they are all suspicious.Finnigan, who