AU politics
Why Piers Morgan is the one laughing now
Once a Fleet Street joke, he's landed a star job on American prime-time TV. I'm beginning to think he knows what he's doing
Deborah Orr
@DeborahJaneOrr
Thu 20 Jan 2011 04.00 EST First published on Thu 20 Jan 2011 04.00 EST
Piers Morgan when he was a mere showbiz editor of the Sun. Photograph: UPPA
When Piers Morgan was a lad, he was considered a bit of a Fleet Street joke. Well, sort of, because it was hard to know whether he was for real or whether he was mugging for the cameras. The cameras in question belonged to Sun staffers, who would go to events with Piers, then the paper's showbiz columnist, and take pictures of him standing next to uncomfortable-looking but obliging celebrities, which would then be printed on his page, Bizarre.
He's come a long way. Now he sits in a US television studio actually interviewing uncomfortable-looking but obliging celebrities, because, unbelievably, he's the replacement for veteran American television host Larry King.
En route, Morgan edited Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, the News of the World, before he was 30, survived an insider-dealing scandal that saw one of his colleagues jailed, lost his job as editor of the Mirror after publishing extremely fake-looking photographs of British soldiers torturing Iraqis, became a television personality on both sides of the Atlantic, and only got punched a few times, mainly by Jeremy Clarkson. I'm beginning to think the unthinkable. That Piers knows what he's doing. Scary.
US television