Piers Morgan Returns To ITV To Talk Viral Baby Reindeer Interview And Global Online Success
Three years after his exit from the broadcaster Piers Morgan returned to ITV studios on Tuesday to discuss his viral Piers Morgan Uncensored interview with the self-named “Real Martha” from Netflix’s Baby Reindeer – which has now clocked 25 million views online.
The unexpected reunion comes after Morgan’s headline-grabbing walkout from ITV’s Good Morning Britain in 2021. He has since been hosting his own show since 2022, launched on TalkTV before launching out on his own YouTube channel.
Despite his acrimonious departure, he took to X to joke about his return to ITV.
He wrote: “Just walked past the @GMB studio and nearly stormed back IN!”
He added a further tweet.
Earlier that morning, ITV host Lorraine Kelly previewed Morgan’s return with the journalist’s former Good Morning Britain co-host Susanna Reid: “We’ve got Piers on, speaking many things, including of course Baby Reindeer.”
Reid responded: “I look forward to seeing Piers.”
The reunion comes on the heels of Morgan’s public musing at Good Morning Britain for excluding him from a montage celebrating the show’s 10-year anniversary and prominent hosts.
Later Tuesday morning, after discussing the Baby Reindeer scoop with Kelly, Morgan spoke candidly about where his departure from Good Morning Britain has taken him and the road to global success with Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Kelly began: “If you’d still been on GMB…”
Morgan said: “I walked past [the studio] earlier, actually. I was going to burst back through the doors and just shout, ‘I can’t take this any more either!’”
Laughing the host asked “Would you have been able to do the interview if you’d have been on TV?”
Morgan replied: “I don’t think so. I would not have time to do it properly. I don’t think you would give 50 minutes of live TV on GMB to something like that.”
“What about TalkTV when you were on that?” Kelly asked.
“TalkTV… that was a linear network,” Morgan continued. “We found there was not much of an audience. At the time for that kind of thing in the uk. There is in america. Didn’t really work out here. I am very sorry that part of it didn’t work out. From all of that came Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel.”
He added: We have 3 million subscribers now. We’ve gained 200,000 subscribers in the last week alone… because of this and other big interviews: [former President] Donald Trump, [footballer] Cristiano Ronaldo, [rapper] Kanye West. I think we’ve built this incredible digital platform now.”
Going into further detail as to his show’s success online, Morgan said: “It’s amazing really, one clip from the interview that we put on TikTok, we’ve almost 2 million followers to that, one clip has had 26 million views. These are unbelievable numbers.”
Kelly said: “It sounds like you’re ahead of the curve.”
Morgan replied: “I think so… We had a good go at TalkTV. We tried our best to do it. What we discovered is that there is no real market for linear television in the way that we’d hoped. What we did discover is that there’s a massive audience, potentially, for what I’m now doing on our YouTube channel. And it’s global.
He continued: “40 percent of the audience I have on my YouTube channel is from America. A lot of people in the middle east watch. We had 22 million people watching an interview with Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian comedian. So it’s a huge audience out there, not necessarily the audience who turns on conventional television. Television is going through a revolution that music went through when it went from vinyl to digital. Newspapers are going to digital. We are living in a very different time.”
