HOLLY WILLOUGHBY could become the new Cilla Black as she eyes up a series of telly deals worth £10million after distancing herself from ITV.
As ailing skating show Dancing On Ice ended on Sunday, with little hope of a return, its presenter also confirmed she was not coming back to host You Bet! for the channel.
With her time on ITV’s This Morning now a distant memory, Holly is poised to start a new chapter in her career, featuring lucrative deals with the streamers — including a second series of her Netflix reality competition Celebrity Bear Hunt.
And there is still the option of taking on key projects with the BBC, including a potential reboot of Cilla Black’s best-known show, Blind Date.
The dating programme has already been mooted by Holly’s husband, producer Dan Baldwin, as a potential big-budget revival.
A TV insider said: “There might not sound like obvious parallels between Holly and Cilla, but they’re both two of the biggest stars of modern telly.
“It’s not pure coincidence either that when ITV decided to reboot Surprise, Surprise — another show made famous by Cilla — it was girl-next-door Holly they turned to.
“So the prospect of her fronting a reboot of Blind Date is a very real one, and a pairing that many viewers could see as a natural fit.
“Emulating Cilla isn’t just about taking on her shows, it’s as much about carving out a niche as a solo presenter with serious clout in the world of telly.
“But together with her husband Dan, they form the ultimate power couple in TV. She has the public appeal that gets viewers tuning in, while he has a track record of making hugely successful TV shows.”
Dan’s production company, Hungry Bear, is behind huge programmes including The Wheel and Michael McIntyre’s Big Show.
Last year it also brought back Gladiators, which jumped from ITV to BBC One and was an instant hit.
When discussing the success of the challenge contest, Dan said he would look at other favourites to revive, and instantly brought up Blind Date, which Cilla fronted from 1985 to 2003.
Dan said: “Another one you’d like to see back, Blind Date, are we ready for that? What a Saturday night that was. I’m thinking Blind Date with Claudia Winkleman on BBC1.”
Although Claudia probably isn’t a viable choice due to her commitments hosting The Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing, reviving Blind Date on the Beeb seems feasible given Dan performed the feat with Gladiators.
Coincidentally, Cilla was also married to a powerful figure in the entertainment industry who drove her career forward.
Known as “Our Bobby”, Robert Willis took over after her manager Brian Epstein died in 1967, and helped turn her from a singer in the Sixties and Seventies into a TV star in the Eighties and Nineties.
He negotiated her contract with London Weekend Television, part of ITV, every two years and made her one of the highest-paid and best- known presenters on telly.
When Bobby bought the gameshow Moment Of Truth for his own production company, he brokered an arrangement by which she charged £50,000 an episode to present it on ITV. There were 36 episodes in total, running from 1998 to 2001.
By 2003, the Liverpudlian singer, was said to be earning £17,000 a week — equivalent to £884,000 a year. Today, that figure would be almost £2million annually.
Holly has previously praised Cilla for blazing a trail with her TV career in the Eighties and Nineties.
There might not sound like obvious parallels between Holly and Cilla, but they’re both two of the biggest stars of modern telly
TV Insider
Cilla — who died aged 72 in 2015 — had fronted Surprise Surprise from 1984 to 2001.
Talking around the 2012 reboot of Surprise, Surprise, Holly said: “It was one of my biggest fears that Cilla wouldn’t like it as she’s a bit of an icon for me . . . you can only aspire to have a career like that.
“She is an incredible lady. Cilla was like the female anchor, she was the first. I have a lot of respect for her.”
Blind Date would be the perfect vehicle for Holly to move away from ITV and draw a line under a difficult 18 months for her career.
A TV insider said: “When Holly quit This Morning in 2023 she had just got over the tumult of Phillip Schofield’s controversial departure from the show, combined with a plot to kidnap, rape and murder her.
"Then she returned to Dancing On Ice, which she had previously hosted with friend-turned-foe Schofield, when its ratings were sliding and its cancellation was fast approaching.
“The only new project she got at ITV was You Bet! which was another reboot of an old show which didn’t quite get the ratings execs hoped for.”
Bosses at ITV were said to be shocked when they were told Holly wouldn’t be able to return to film a second batch of episodes this year, with co-host Stephen Mulhern.
A full series of You Bet! was one of a trio of projects the channel is believed to have offered her to stay with ITV. Holly had started her career at the broadcaster with kids’ show Ministry Of Mayhem in 2004 and was viewed as its “golden girl”.
On Sunday — the same night that Dancing On Ice’s 17th series ended — ITV had to issue a statement.
Unfortunately Holly couldn’t commit to the dates to host the new series of You Bet!, but will hopefully appear as a guest panellist on one of the shows
ITV
It said: “Unfortunately Holly couldn’t commit to the dates to host the new series of You Bet!, but will hopefully appear as a guest panellist on one of the shows.”
The suggestion was she could not do the ITV show because she might have to do another project, believed to be the second series of Celebrity Bear Hunt.
Widely considered Netflix’s bid to rival I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, it sees 12 famous people taken into a tropical wilderness where they have to try to survive.
Its popularity is hard to measure as it appeared on a streaming service whose viewing figures are often shrouded in mystery.
But insiders say the show, which featured Bear Grylls challenging the celebrities, created enough buzz to warrant a second outing. It is already being planned, with filming pencilled in for this year.
Holly’s appearance on the Netflix series opened executives’ minds to the idea that someone so closely associated with a single terrestrial channel could make the leap to working with a streamer.
And with the likes of Netflix and Prime now trying to encroach on the territory of traditional broadcasters like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, she is a fantastic asset.
The online platforms are also willing to offer her huge sums, with the first series of Celebrity Bear Hunt said to have bagged her almost seven figures.
ITV would struggle to compete with that, in an age where advertising revenues are being squeezed.
The channel has yet to officially state that Dancing On Ice has been axed, insisting after the most recent series ended “no decision has been made”. But the confirmation is expected within days.
As she promoted Celebrity Bear Hunt last month, Holly seemed to relish the prospect of hosting a show solo and, tellingly, referenced the fact she had already done so on Surprise, Surprise years ago.
Of her decision to sign up for the survival show, she said: “I’d just got to that stage in my life where I thought, ‘I want to try something new.’ I was nervous about it, because it was a real departure from what I normally do.
“Everything you do and everything that feels new always feels like a new chapter.”
By Rod McPhee, TV Editor
IF you listened to her team, you would think Holly is a wide-eyed innocent, a naive fawn, the girl next door.
Don’t believe a word of it.
That might be her persona when she greets us on the telly with her warm, familiar face. But make no mistake, you are dealing with a very calculated operator.
And nothing could illustrate that more than the past 48 hours.
In that time, Holly, who has already consigned This Morning to her distant past, has passively watched as Dancing On Ice rolled under a bus and then had it confirmed she would not be returning to You Bet!, her last remaining show with ITV.
Which means that after more than two decades with the channel, she’s free. Free to finally conquer the BBC. Free to milk the streamers for £10million (at least) and free to become one of the most powerful women on TV, if she chooses.
She will, just you watch. Holly has always shown a quiet, simmering ambition, ever since she took her first steps in children’s telly.
Between then and now she’s quit her management agency, YMU, and hired an elite PR team to help boost her image.
The speed at which she distanced herself from fellow This Morning host Phillip Schofield in early 2023 was also palpable.
Six months later, she quit the show entirely as a result of a murder and kidnap plot, just before signing up to front Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt . . . in one of the murder and kidnap capitals of South America.
And don’t forget that after launching the rebooted You Bet! in 2024, to mediocre ratings, she is now walking away from her own show, claiming that she “couldn’t commit”.
In other words, she’s got a better offer. Well, good for her. Because she’s a woman, she will be perceived as scheming, savage and selfish.
But if it were anyone else, the descriptions would veer more towards single-minded, shrewd and selective.
Whatever you think of her, Holly is on the move and on the up – and I wouldn’t advise getting in her way.
