Holly Willoughby Together is being pitched as a warm lifestyle reset, full of health, beauty, fashion, home comforts and thoughtful conversations. Naturally, its first headline moment involves Holly Willoughby being asked which comedian she would “s**g.” A calm return to public life, then.

The former This Morning presenter, 45, is launching the YouTube channel on July 28, marking her most significant screen project since leaving the ITV daytime show in 2023 after 14 years. It also arrives after a difficult and unusually public period in her career, including the end of Dancing On Ice and the criminal case involving former security guard Gavin Plumb.

What happens in the first episode?

For the premiere, Willoughby is joined by Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan, a guest not exactly known for tiptoeing around a suggestive joke. According to the Daily Mail, Ryan gets Willoughby to play a version of S**g, Marry, Avoid, choosing between comedians Rob Beckett, Josh Widdicombe and Romesh Ranganathan.

Willoughby’s answer reportedly puts Ranganathan, 48, in the most blush-inducing category. Ryan then teases her friend by saying: “I’m just sending Romesh the video of you saying you want to s**g him!”

Representatives for Ranganathan were asked for comment.

It’s a slightly chaotic way to launch a glossy lifestyle channel, but it does show viewers something useful: Willoughby is not returning as a careful museum version of herself. The old live-TV looseness is still there, even if the set now looks more like the kind of room where someone might discuss linen storage.

Why is YouTube a new step for Holly Willoughby?

Speaking ahead of the launch, Willoughby told the Press Association she is “so excited,” while also admitting the move is “all new territory” after so many years in traditional television.

“It’s just a shift. It’s been 14 years, you get so used to how things work,” she said.

She suggested the gap between TV and YouTube is not as wide as it might look, though the working language is different.

“But then in other ways, you finish an item, and everybody comes in and grabs thumbnails, and I’m like, ‘Oh, what are you talking about?’” she said.

Willoughby said the production mixed digital know-how with more traditional entertainment experience.

“It felt like a load of us were kind of learning the same thing,” she added. “Half the team were digital, half the team worked classic entertainment. It was interesting because everybody was blending their ways of working.”

What will Holly Willoughby Together cover?

The channel will release two episodes a week and is expected to cover lifestyle and wellness subjects, including health, beauty, fashion and home content. But the series is not being sold purely as a soft-focus makeover show.

The guest list will include people billed as “inspiring,” with longer conversations planned across different topics. Early interviewees include:

  • A grieving mother whose son took his own life
  • A tech safety campaigner
  • Chefs
  • A florist
  • A makeup artist

That mix suggests Willoughby is trying to build something looser than a standard celebrity chat format. Some episodes may be light, some may carry real emotional weight, and some may apparently involve Katherine Ryan threatening to send evidence to Romesh Ranganathan.

Willoughby said her children helped inspire the move to YouTube. She has two sons and a daughter with her husband, television producer Dan Baldwin, whom she married in 2007.

Is Holly Willoughby returning to TV?

Willoughby is not closing the door on television. Definitely not. She made clear that her affection for the format has not faded.

“I love telly. Telly is in my blood. I love it, and hopefully I’ll go back and do other TV shows and things like that when the time feels right,” she said.

For now, though, she sees the YouTube channel as a chance to try something different.

“It’s just that there’s opportunity and options, and it just felt like, ‘Let’s see where this goes.’ And I think I needed a bit of a challenge,” she said.

She compared returning to work to “stepping into an old pair of slippers that [she] used to wear,” while also saying she is looking forward to the direct response that comes with YouTube.

“I’m really looking forward to hearing the feedback because that’s the good thing about YouTube,” she said. “If people don’t like anything, we can change it.”

Why does this comeback matter?

The launch comes after two years in which Willoughby has mostly focused on her company, Wylde Moon, while keeping a lower public profile. Her departure from This Morning followed a turbulent period for the ITV programme and serious concerns over her personal security.

Gavin Plumb, a former security guard, was convicted over a plot to kidnap, rape and murder her. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 16 years.

Willoughby is also now working without the long-running on-screen partnerships that helped define her previous career. Phillip Schofield left This Morning in 2023 after admitting he had lied about an “unwise but not illegal” affair with a much younger male colleague. Willoughby later continued presenting Dancing On Ice with Stephen Mulhern, Last March, it was announced that the show would be “rested,” with no plans for another series.

Last year, she also presented Netflix’s reality competition Celebrity Bear Hunt alongside Bear Grylls.

So this YouTube launch is not just a format change. It is a controlled re-entry, on her own terms, after years of very little feeling under control. The first viral clip may not be the serene wellness moment anyone carefully placed on a mood board, but it does make one thing clear: Willoughby is back in front of an audience, and she seems ready to see what they make of it.