There was a weird moment on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories last night. Donal O'Donoghue reports
There was a weird moment on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (UTV) last night. Ok, there were lots of weird moments – the subject, after all, was David Hasselhoff – but the corker was when The Hoff had a go at his interrogator. This happened in the midst of Morgan rewinding the notorious video of the Baywatch star floundering about in a miasma of drunkenness. Saying that the episode (the fall-out, not the video) was one of the most upsetting moments in his life, The Hoff lambasted those publications that went to town on the video. And that includes you said The Hoff to his host – referring to The Daily Mail, the publication for whom Morgan works as a columnist.
Now this was weird because it seemed almost as choreographed as the opening credits of Baywatch. We get The Hoff dramatically pausing, we see The Hoff’s Daughter (who made the video) delicately dabbing an errant tear from her cheek, and we get The Morgan pretending to squirm in his seat (a difficult feat as he’s not one for squirming). And once the moment had passed, the two were the best of chums again (well they worked alongside each other on America’s Got Talent) with Morgan thanking his host for his honesty and the cued-in audience clapping like performing seals. So if you had come to this show expecting the former tabloid terrier to hassle The Hoff, you were on the wrong bat-channel.
The probably with Life Stories is that, despite all the hype about exclusivity and earth-shattering revelations, it mostly smoke and mirrors: a variation on that old TV show This Is Your Life with Morgan wielding YouTube footage instead of a ginormous red book. Whereas that old TV warhorse never had a bad word to say about anybody, it at least seemed to be real. With Piers Morgan’s slickly packaged vehicle there is a whiff of those frightening backslapping shows, ‘An Audience With’, as the big names – Rod Stewart, Elton John, Cliff Richard – are wheeled out and given an easy ride by one-time demon journalist of Fleet Street.
Once upon a time Morgan didn’t take prisoners. Perhaps his most infamous headline, during his tenure as the editor of The Mirror, was ‘Achtung! Surrender’ on the eve of England’s Euro ’96 clash with Germany. He shipped some flak for that (sorry!). But over the years he has reinvented himself as a TV celebrity, someone who was once peering over security fence, is now inside the fold. He is a poacher turned gamekeeper – a judge on TV talent shows and the high profile replacement for Larry King on CNN – and I’m not sure which Morgan is worse.
