Holly Willoughby is a woman in search of a fresh start. Her stint on This Morning ended messily, with her response to the Phillip Schofield scandal – the infamous “Are you OK? I hope so” monologue – making her a figure of public mockery. Subsequent attempts to relaunch her career, like her short-lived time hosting a Bear Grylls reality show, stalled. So now it has come to this: Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy).
Your response to it will vary based on how generous you’re feeling. The kindest offering would be to say that Willoughby has pivoted to YouTube, having cannily observed that television is dead and this is where all the eyeballs are these days. It is a cookery and lifestyle show that allows her to be unapologetically herself without the meddling influence of executives who have spent years trying to enforce a persona upon her.
Then there is the less kind option, which is to say that Willoughby has done a Meghan.
This, unfortunately, is kind of true. Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy, don’t forget) is extremely With Love, Meghan in tone and presentation. It is a heavily manicured cookery show, presented by a woman who seems as if she needs quite a lot of help in the kitchen, that exists more as a referendum on the host than a traditional show. However, let’s be clear that this is far better than that, because Willoughby lacks the sweatily desperate control freakery that made With Love, Meghan such an uncomfortable watch. Perhaps it would be better to call this a Saturday Kitchen rip-off and be done with it.
From what I can tell, every episode of Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy) will see Willoughby – and, by association, the health company Voy – cook a dish in her monochromatically pastel kitchen with a guest. Episode one’s guest is Stanley Tucci, who is about as safe a pair of hands as you could hope for. He’s chatty. He can cook. He and Willoughby are old friends, since she apparently made him a bottle of toffee vodka in her dishwasher once. He makes some courgette pasta, and is as charmingly snobby as ever.
Which is great, because absolutely none of this is even slightly about him. That much is evident by the show’s format, which sees him reading his own interview questions off some spoons (“Milk or bag first?” “What’s your favourite type of potato?”), even though typically that role would be filled by the host. Instead, the whole thing comes off as an aggressive audition for whether Willoughby is allowed to be famous again.
The weakest elements of the show are the ones where this is most overt. Before Tucci joins her in the kitchen, we see her engaging in some toe-curlingly “candid” banter with the crew, in which she swears a bit and talks about wine. The messaging seems to suggest that this is the real Willoughby, not like that fake automaton who tricked enough people to like her that she qualified as the highest-paid woman on British television between the years 2018 and 2021.
Once this burns out, though, we’re left with the real real Willoughby, who is more or less the same woman who presented This Morning. The best moments come when she stops trying to violently rebrand herself and just allows herself to be quick, funny and endearingly nervous about her new venture. The bits where she seems most like her true self, like when she teasingly provokes Tucci’s culinary sensibilities with microwavable Rustlers, have energy and charm in equal amounts. If that can be sustained over the coming episodes, audiences will naturally find her.
The plan seems to be to keep Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy) going as long as possible, in which case it will almost certainly start to become the thing it wants to be as episodes progress. Let’s cross our fingers that it wants to be 15 minutes shorter than it currently is, because plenty could be trimmed from its 45-minute duration. For instance, there is an interminable section near the start where Willoughby painstakingly slices four courgettes with all the concentration of someone trying to defuse a nuclear bomb. It is not essential viewing.
But you can’t help but root for the show. Yes, the format might be a little safe and stale, but given the alternatives – a reality show, a wellness podcast, a cynical As Ever-style lifestyle store – there’s still some pleasure to be had from watching a person get on with doing something they’re naturally very good at (with or without Voy).
• Holly Willoughby Together (With Voy) is on YouTube now
