JAN MOIR: Holly's new show is a steaming landfill of banality that makes even Meghan's look good. It's so obvious what's behind her desperate quest to be 'relatable'

Firstly, are you OK? Caring, sharing Holly Willoughby blessed us with a return to the broadcast world this week, floating back down the airwaves like a blonde cherub on a candy-floss cloud of crud.On Together, her new lifestyle show on YouTube, Holly was once again amongst mere mortals to show us how to deep fry vegetables, grate cheese, boil water and make small talk with Stanley Tucci for what seemed like a jail stretch.It took the pair of them 50 minutes to make one simple dish – spaghetti with fried courgettes – and that makes it sound more interesting than it was.‘Am I chopping, chopping, chopping?’ Holly asked at one point, gazing helplessly at some basil leaves. Well, something was certainly being shredded, but the smart money was on career prospects rather than soft herbs.Fifty minutes! In that time, the Duchess of Sussex would have hand-tied eight bouquets of luxury premier roses, gift-wrapped enough homemade gourmet chocolates to feed an army, brandished her upside down jam tongs, FaceTimed Harry to remind the world of her ongoing Royal Connection and Celebrity Status, prepared a multi-course banquet ofTikTok dishes for her imaginary showbiz friends and laid half a dozen eggs herself to show her tardy chickens exactly how it should be done.Holly takes a more laidback approach to this lifestyle television racket, believing that her embryonic skills as a chat show hostess – aided by her carefully curated silly-sausage, Bridget Jones-lite persona – will power her through the shallows. Caring, sharing Holly Willoughby blessed us with a return to the broadcast world this week, floating back down the airwaves like a blonde cherub on a candy-floss cloud of crudOn Together, her new YouTube show, Holly was once again amongst mere mortals to show us how to deep fry vegetables, grate cheese, boil water and make small talk with Stanley Tucci ‘You are quite specific with your everything,’ she said to Stanley at one point. ‘Do you ever eat anything not like I imagine you eat?’ [sic] was another piercing howitzer from this master interrogator, who is also no slouch when it comes to being a food critic. ‘It tastes a lot more complex than I now know it is,’ was her verdict on the spaghetti in this Rocky Horror of a Holly show.You have to wonder. What does she want from us, the viewers? Are we really supposed to warm to yet another undercooked magazine programme fronted by a woman with a bouncy blow dry wielding a wooden spoon while pretending she’s not worth about £12million, with hot and cold running Birkins and a large personal staff at her disposal?We have been there – most recently with Meghan and her With Love (Netflix) series – and we are not sure we want second helpings of this performative nonsense.Or is that too harsh? Perhaps this YouTube souffle of cheese just needs a little time to ripen and rise. Maybe sometime next century it will climb out of the steaming landfill of banality that has so far marked its debut.In the meantime, it has been more than 30 months since Holly left ITV’s This Morning under difficult circumstances. In 2022 she and co-host Phillip Schofield were heavily criticised for allegedly skipping the queue at Queen Elizabeth’s lying-in-state at Westminster Hall in London.In a country rightly obsessed with queues rules and etiquette, this did not go down well. Then there was the departure of Schofield under a very dark cloud, following an ‘unwise but not illegal’ relationship with a young man who worked on This Morning.It has been more than 30 months since Holly left ITV’s This Morning under difficult circumstances, while a man who plotted to kidnap and murder Holly was jailed for life in 2024And a man who plotted to kidnap and murder Holly was jailed for life in 2024, with a minimum sentence of 16 years.For 14 years Holly and Phil were the most successful duo on daytime television – but not even they could survive the scandal. His disgrace – rather unfairly – ruined not just his own reputation, but smoked across hers, too.Today, Holly says that, after everything she has been through, she doesn’t care what people think of her new show, and perhaps that is just as well. Together is unscripted and filmed in documentary format, complete with shaky camera angles and shots of the crew crammed into a small corridor, dutifully laughing at all Holly’s little jokes. There is even a camera inside the on-set fridge, so we can see Holly peering at the shelves and rootling around for spring onions.Thrilling is not the word I am looking for.There are five strands to Together, including Talk Together (a gabfest in which C-list female stars discuss who they want to ‘sh*g’) and Look Good Together, which will feature fashion and beauty. The first show was part of Cook Together, in which she introduced her friend Stanley, who she squealed ‘is in every film that has ever existed, and he also happens to be an extraordinary cook’.Rubbish, of course, but oh god, here he comes; the don of yawn, the signor of bore, a man who never tires of telling British peasants that ‘each pasta shape is meant to be paired with a certain sauce’ as if we hadn’t worked it out for ourselves years ago.Stanley is so pleased with himself and so utterly oleaginous that he carries a bottle of olive oil around with him at all times, presumably harvested straight from his own kneecaps. ‘How annoying am I?’ was his opening gambit on Together. Don’t tempt me. He likes to present himself as a sophisticated man of the world but wasn’t above making a smutty joke about a courgette eight minutes into the programme. Stanley likes to present himself as a sophisticated man of the world but wasn’t above making a smutty joke about a courgette eight minutes into the programme, writes Jan MoirFor her part, Holly is pleasant enough and super-keen to be seen as relatable. For in this world of counterfeit countertops and bogus kitchens, authenticity is all. Look at her! She is wearing jeans and drops the F-bomb, so normal and high street, just like us. Yet this facade soon falls apart when she takes a bottle of wine out of the fridge and is alarmed to discover it is something called – gasp – pinot grigio rosé.‘It’s pinot grigio, but its pink, how weird is that?’ she cries.It’s not weird at all, Holly. Twenty-one million bottles of it are sold in the UK every year and it is a popular, cheap tipple primarily consumed by women aged 25 to 54 – exactly your viewing demographic, I would have thought. Then Stanley is a bit sniffy about Italian sparkling wine, which will not go down well with the prosecco mums, either.This is what gets me. These fake lifestyle kweens enriching their own reputations and bank accounts at the expense of other women, who are encouraged to trust and believe in them.On her recent appearance on the Australian version of MasterChef, the Duchess of Sussex told contestants that her mother Doria was a wonderful cook and that she grew up eating amazing Californian produce.Perhaps this was just to burnish her credentials as a judge who knew one end of an organic carrot from the other, yet previously Meghan has repeatedly said that she was a latchkey kid who grew up on microwavable food, tv dinners and eating at chain restaurants such as Taco Bell and the salad bar at Sizzler. Can all these homecooked versions of reality be true?In this lifestyle show world, simplicity, truth, coherence and good taste are the ingredients that so often get left out of the main recipe. However, when Cook Together finally ended and the spaghetti was served, at least Holly and Stanley seemed pleased.‘You’re amazing,’ she said to him.‘No, you’re amazing,’ he replied.It really was amazing.