Piers Morgan will leave TalkTV after two years to focus on his YouTube channel.
He no longer wants to be a’slave to the schedule’ and wants to break free from TV’s ‘unnecessary straitjacket’. He will continue to host his show Uncensored, but it will now be available only on YouTube. However, some of the interviews will continue to air on the channel as they look for a successor for the show.
‘It’s clear there’s a huge global demand for the content we’re making, but the commitment to a daily show at a fixed schedule, with all the editing and time sensitivities that involves has been an increasingly unnecessary straitjacket,’ he told The Times.
The show presently airs on weekdays at 8 p.m., but under the new format, Piers will focus on lengthier conversations with major guests rather than daily production.
The 58-year-old journalist has amassed a following on his YouTube channel, which has 2.3 million members since its start in 2022.
‘People are watching the content on YouTube rather than conventional television and I have no problem with that,’ he commented.
Piers explained his choice further, citing his recent interview with Rishi Sunak, which has 400,000 views on YouTube.
‘Had we waited until 8pm to air it first on TalkTV, it would have been overtaken by the huge breaking news of King Charles’s cancer diagnosis,’ he said.
His most successful uploads include an interview with Bassem Youssef, which has had 22 million views, as well as films with Andrew Tate, Kanye West, and Cristiano Ronaldo, each with over five million views. His TalkTV interview with Ronaldo drew less than 350,000 viewers.
‘I could happily interview Elon Musk for three or four hours tomorrow and the audience would lap it up. But the nightly restriction of having to go into a studio at 8pm when sometimes there is nothing happening and literally fill time? Nobody wants that. The question becomes, why do it?’ Piers asked.
Piers Morgan Uncensored is the sixth largest English-language news channel on YouTube, according to a Press Gazette research in October that looked at average amount of views.
Source My Celebrity Life.