By Lucy Caulkett-
Dame Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of ITV, says everyone at the channel is “devastated” by the news of Caroline Flack’s death.
McCall was addressing an audience at the Enders and Deloitte’s Media And Telecoms 2020 conference in London. She said: “I think the thing about Caroline Flack is that ITV are absolutely devastated by what happened to her.
“So many people at ITV knew Caroline, including me, and it was unbelievably tragic. She said:
“I think that we can never know what is behind suicide. It is not in any way simple. It is a very, very complex thing.”
Dame Carolyn said ITV would continue to take advice from mental health charities like Samaritans.
Caroline was under pressure to step down as the host of Love Island after her arrest over an assault against her boyfriend Lewis Burton, but ITV said the door would always be open to her. It is the second calamity in a year to hit ITV, after two former Love Island Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis contestants took their own lives.
Only last year ITV’s kingpins were hauled before Mps in Parliament after Steve Dymond committed suicide on the Jeremy Kyle show after failing a lie detector test which he insisted was wrong and which drove him to suicide. Itv representatives in that case conceded that the lie detector tests used for the Jeremy Kyle Show were not reliable, an admission that at the time led to sharp criticism against the programme makers and the ITV brand.
Itv bounced back with other heart stopping programmes like Love Island which seized the imagination of youths across the Uk especially. In the tragic case Of Caroline Flack, multiple causes have been blamed for her death by credible analysts, but the public have in general pointed the hand of blame to the media.
Every strand of contributing factor or potential contributing factor is being examined by a handful of professional puzzle crackers, but ITV’s own official stance is that they don’t know the cause of her suicide because of its complexity.
Dame Carolyn emphasised her commitment to a duty of care, adding that the channel has been joining forces with Dr Paul Litchfield. She said: “As far as duty of care is concerned, we are absolutely focused on making sure our duty of care is, for both our participants and for our talent, world class. We want to be best in class for that”.
She continued: ”I think its because we reviewed Love Island last summer, so a few months before last summer’s series, Paul Litchfield, who is the former CMO, works with us, and he made a whole load of recommendations which we have implemented, which is about aftercare, which is about casting, which is about a whole range of things – financial management, social media management.
“Social media is the thing that has gone absolutely ballistic. It has actually only happened in the last three years, because in the first two years (Love Island) was too small.
“It wasn’t really a successful programme. It has only really made a big difference in the regionals three years ago on social media