ITV is said to be “really excited” about snapping up Gary Lineker to present its new game show, The Box, set to air next year.
The channel presumably sees the former Match Of The Day host as a potential saviour of the Saturday night slot, once the most important and coveted moment on terrestrial TV’s weekly calendar, but now struggling to retain any relevance in the era of the big streaming services.
Given Lineker’s seemingly insatiable need to make controversial political pronouncements, it’s a strategy that looks more likely to give ITV nightmares than a new frontman in the mould of Bruce Forsyth.
It’s reported that ITV has been “sniffing around” the 64-year-old Lineker for some time. The channel is facing a potentially existential problem as it seeks a replacement for Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which came to an end last year. It had been a game show that – uniquely in the modern era – recaptured the pure light-entertainment magic of the 1970s to the 1990s, when families across the country would routinely sit down together to watch their favourite programmes, providing huge viewing figures and advertising revenues to match.
Given that desperate need, replacing two universally loved and accomplished entertainers such as Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly with a football presenter with a habit for putting his foot in it is a dangerous gamble.
Given Lineker was paid a yearly salary of £1.35m by the BBC, recruiting Lineker is likely to be an expensive risk as well as a reputational one. What ITV has on its hands is less “Mr Saturday Night” and more a deeply divisive figure who is as likely to have viewers turning off as tuning in.
So ITV’s celebrations might be short-lived, especially if it is unable to police his frequent public interventions on social media. BBC rules dictate that staff must uphold the corporation’s impartiality on personal social accounts. The 2021 ITV guidelines state: “Online communications, especially relating to news, political, religious and industry issues, should be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.” So will it do what the BBC seemingly never could and insist he finally shuts up?
Perhaps new colleagues might demand the channel’s chiefs do so, having seen the tension his behaviour caused among the rank-and-file at the BBC. As long ago as 2018, Lineker was criticised by the BBC’s cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew for his use of social media. “Please keep your political views, whatever they are and whatever the subject, to yourself,” said Agnew. “I’d be sacked if I followed your example.”
Lineker has long preached a kind of morally lofty and pseudo-neutral liberalism – “Linekerism” if you will – but this has never really stood up to scrutiny. His assertion that he is politically neutral has been continually undermined, such as when he described the attacks on Israel by Hamas on October 7 2023 as “that Hamas thing” and said of the ensuing war in Gaza, “I can’t think of anything that I’ve seen worse in my lifetime.” This despite his lifetime encompassing the Vietnam War, the Yugoslavian Civil War, the Rwandan genocide, the Iraq War and the rise of Isis to name just a few.
In 2023, Lineker criticised the government’s policy of stopping migrants in the English Channel as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. Even a spokesperson for Sir Keir Starmer said comparisons with 1930s Germany “aren’t always the best way” to make an argument.
ITV is said to be “really excited” about snapping up Gary Lineker to present its new game show, The Box, set to air next year.
The channel presumably sees the former Match Of The Day host as a potential saviour of the Saturday night slot, once the most important and coveted moment on terrestrial TV’s weekly calendar, but now struggling to retain any relevance in the era of the big streaming services.
Given Lineker’s seemingly insatiable need to make controversial political pronouncements, it’s a strategy that looks more likely to give ITV nightmares than a new frontman in the mould of Bruce Forsyth.
It’s reported that ITV has been “sniffing around” the 64-year-old Lineker for some time. The channel is facing a potentially existential problem as it seeks a replacement for Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which came to an end last year. It had been a game show that – uniquely in the modern era – recaptured the pure light-entertainment magic of the 1970s to the 1990s, when families across the country would routinely sit down together to watch their favourite programmes, providing huge viewing figures and advertising revenues to match.
Given that desperate need, replacing two universally loved and accomplished entertainers such as Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly with a football presenter with a habit for putting his foot in it is a dangerous gamble.
Given Lineker was paid a yearly salary of £1.35m by the BBC, recruiting Lineker is likely to be an expensive risk as well as a reputational one. What ITV has on its hands is less “Mr Saturday Night” and more a deeply divisive figure who is as likely to have viewers turning off as tuning in.
So ITV’s celebrations might be short-lived, especially if it is unable to police his frequent public interventions on social media. BBC rules dictate that staff must uphold the corporation’s impartiality on personal social accounts. The 2021 ITV guidelines state: “Online communications, especially relating to news, political, religious and industry issues, should be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.” So will it do what the BBC seemingly never could and insist he finally shuts up?
Perhaps new colleagues might demand the channel’s chiefs do so, having seen the tension his behaviour caused among the rank-and-file at the BBC. As long ago as 2018, Lineker was criticised by the BBC’s cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew for his use of social media. “Please keep your political views, whatever they are and whatever the subject, to yourself,” said Agnew. “I’d be sacked if I followed your example.”
Lineker has long preached a kind of morally lofty and pseudo-neutral liberalism – “Linekerism” if you will – but this has never really stood up to scrutiny. His assertion that he is politically neutral has been continually undermined, such as when he described the attacks on Israel by Hamas on October 7 2023 as “that Hamas thing” and said of the ensuing war in Gaza, “I can’t think of anything that I’ve seen worse in my lifetime.” This despite his lifetime encompassing the Vietnam War, the Yugoslavian Civil War, the Rwandan genocide, the Iraq War and the rise of Isis to name just a few.
In 2023, Lineker criticised the government’s policy of stopping migrants in the English Channel as “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”. Even a spokesperson for Sir Keir Starmer said comparisons with 1930s Germany “aren’t always the best way” to make an argument.