This Morning's Cat Deeley cringes ‘I’m just making it up’ as viewer figures plummet

This Morning's Cat Deeley dropped a bombshell while chatting to a new morning show presenter on the ITV programme.

During Thursday's (June 27) episode, Cat, alongside her co-presenter Ben Shephard, was in conversation with comedian Chris McCausland who has recently taken on hosting duties for a weekend morning show on the network. Ben was curious about how Chris was adapting to the nuances of presenting after a career in stand-up and sitcoms.

Ben probed: "From your perspective, Chris, the presenting stuff is what you don't do. You do stand-up, you do scripted stuff, but actually there's in and outs of breaks, there's the starts of [segments], there's the end... how did you get on with that part?"

Chris humorously revealed: "I just made it up," prompting Cat to confess: "That's kind of what we do, in all honesty!" The candid moment delighted fans on social media, with one viewer commenting on Twitter: "Did Cat say she doesn't know what she's doing presenting the show lol? Yeah we know!"

Other viewers were more concerned about how Chris’ new morning show will fare, with one writing: “The hour before James Martin on a Saturday morning is TV’s barren wasteland… good luck Chris.” Someone else penned: “So yet another person they’ve chosen to try and crack the weekend morning show. 3rd time lucky and all that I guess.”

Chris went on to explain that he prepares a lot more than with his comedy work, adding: “I think, don’t have sentences in your head, just have the essence of what you’re going to say. The lovely thing is it’s pre-recorded so if you say something you don’t like, they’ll just get you to say it again.”

Other fans were keen to support Cat – despite the viewer figures plummeting since Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield left the show to be replaced by Cat and Ben. One X user wrote: “Cat Deeley on This Morning is way more authentic and genuine than what we had with Holly and Phil. Ben could do with relaxing a bit more and being a bit less newsreader formal after years on GMB though.”

Viewing figures for the programme have become a concern, with the show achieving around 486,000 viewers per day in 2024. In comparison, October 2018 saw the show pull in a massive 2.7million viewers. It was regularly achieving more than 1million viewers a day in 2023, but when Cat and Ben took over it stumbled to around 635,000 before dropping lower.

ITV argued the programme was viewed on average 840,000 times a day in April 2024 – but this includes viewings on ITVX and ITV+1. The channel insisted: “This Morning has never had a better connection with its viewers.”