Pray For Susanna Reid, a Woman Condemned To Be Flirted With By Piers Morgan

Susanna Reid has a postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism. She has stood in for Andrew Marr on the BBC's flagship political show. She's a journalist, but she's a fun journalist. She was on Strictly Come Dancing and presented the BBC's Oscars coverage. So she probably thought that when ITV came waving their chequebook, she'd be the perfect fit for their morning show Good Morning Britain.

This is what Susanna Reid's life is like now:

Susanna Reid gets teased by a 'jealous' — Daily Express (@Daily_Express)May 9, 2016

Piers Morgan tries to KISS Susanna Reid on live TV after flirting outrageously with her — Enoch Jeremiah (@EnochJeremiah7)December 7, 2015

Lucky Piers Morgan finally gets a kiss from Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain… — Standard Showbiz (@standardshowbiz)December 10, 2015

Piers Morgan admits to sneaking a peek at Susanna Reid in the shower — The Sun (@TheSun)April 28, 2016

This is just a tiny selection of the stories about the supposed flirtation between Susanna and her co-host Piers Morgan. There is at least one story about them in the news every day.

Now, there is a possibility that there's a journalist at every tabloid newspaper watching all three-and-a-half hours ofGood Morning Britain to find something that counts as coquetry. Or there's a possibility that the show's publicists supply journalists with screengrabs, stories and video every day, hoping to keep the will they/won't they story alive. Far be it from us to guess which of those things it is, but let's note that this is how the official @GMB account promotes the show:

Piers is already making an impression on Susanna… — Good Morning Britain (@GMB)April 13, 2015

.— Good Morning Britain (@GMB)May 9, 2016

Susanna is an experienced journalist who is being treated as a sex object by the tabloids and that sucks. The thing is, Susanna Reid is not flirting with Piers Morgan. If you take anything away from watching Good Morning Britain, it's that she appears to be largely repulsed by the idea of him. She tends to grimace and cower when he comes near her. Piers, meanwhile, is a bit of a creep. He "jokes" about taking a look at her in the shower, there's a video of him appearing to look down her top, and he asks her, "What would your kids say is your most shameful secret – other than 'Mummy fancies Piers?'".

Even the tabloids seem to recognise she's not along for the ride, and occasionally run stories about her "squirming" at his advances. Look at this supposed supercut of them flirting, and see if you can hear the screams from behind Susanna's gritted teeth.

But the stories keep coming. In part, this is becauseGood Morning Britain is the latest in a series of morning TV disasters for ITV. They say if you keep picking at a scab it will never heal, but that hasn't stopped producers at the channel, who cancelled their low-rating breakfast TV show GMTV to launchDaybreak which had even lower ratings, so they cancelled that to launch Good Morning Britain,which had even lower ratings, so they spent £1.5 million revamping the set and bringing in Piers Morgan and making it a bit more like GMTV and it got even lower ratings.

Producers won't accept that this is because people don't trust Ben Shephard in an open collar polo shirt to give them information about world events, but rather because there's not enough on-screen chemistry. Sexual chemistry, goes the conventional wisdom of daytime TV, is the secret ingredient to piling on a million extra viewers. People don't watch morning news for the news, they watch it for the implication that somewhere off-camera, some fucking is happening.

This school of thought says that people watched GMTV in the hope that Andrew Castle might be stretching his weathered sinewy legs around Penny Smith. That the success of The One Show, Britain's anti-matter news magazine show, is that people were thinking about the founding co-hosts having sex, even though one of those hosts was Adrian Chiles, a man who, presumably, climaxes with the same sigh as when he sips an acceptable pint of bitter.

And so Susanna Reid has to just put up with her won't they/won't they relationship with her co-host, because that's now the norm for daytime TV. She smiles through it, occasionally complaining that she is unfairly accused of flirting, but then getting on with the job: going into work each day, trying to talk about terror attacks, then on the way home, reading about how she leads Piers on, then going out and having to deny that she has "intense sexual chemistry" with him, then standing next to him while he says that she "scrubs up well at 4am" and laughing and smiling.

Susanna is far from the only woman in Britain who starts each day with a man she is sexually appalled by, but top marks for putting the bravest face on it.

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