Phil Donahue, talk show host who changed American television

Phil Donahue gave America’s housewives a platform to shock the nation with their most intimate secrets. The resulting confessions not only shattered the “motherhood and apple pie” vision of Midwestern suburban respectability, but created a format for a daytime audience debate show that would later inspire Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer, not to mention Robert Kilroy-Silk and Trisha Goddard on British television.
Little was expected when Donahue launched a talk show on a local TV network in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Yet when a variety show in a neighbouring studio in front of a live audience was cancelled, he had an idea. What if he invited them in to watch his interview with the “celebrity atheist” Madalyn Murray O’Hair and then gave the audience the opportunity to grill his guest and prompt a debate?
As O’Hair began to trigger outrage in the aisles with her mockery of Christianity, the programme was an instant sensation. Donahue received furious phone calls from his bosses after sponsors threatened to pull out, followed by “herograms” when they realised how much the station had benefited from the publicity.
When the first audience debate show was syndicated across America in 1970, Donahue would proclaim “We’re here to learn” before thrusting his microphone under the nose of an obligingly opinionated audience member or barking into a phone, “Caller are you there?”
America’s housewives had been treated to an undemanding diet of daytime television that mainly comprised cheesy soap operas and silly game shows. “We were competing with Monty Hall [on Let’s Make a Deal] who’s giving $5,000 to a woman dressed like a chicken salad sandwich.”
His target audience doing housework in front of the television now had the opportunity to ask US presidential candidates how they were going to make them better off. “The average housewife is bright and inquisitive,” said Donahue, a robust figure with vivid blue eyes framed by steel-rimmed spectacles below a wave of thick greying hair. “TV had treated her like some mental midget.”
From the start, his one stipulation was that all topics had to be “hot”. “We were in Dayton. To begin with, stars were not available to us. So I knew that the only way we could survive would be issues.”
Homosexuality, domestic violence, child abuse, breast enlargements and reverse vasectomies all came up for discussions that revealed a surprising lack of prudishness and restraint. Most controversially, Donahue started a debate after showing a film of a surgical abortion in the wake of the Roe v Wade US Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalised abortion in America.
In the Eighties The Phil Donahue Show was the first American show to have serious discussion about HIV/Aids, which up to that point was being characterised in many quarters as a “gay plague”. An interracial lesbian couple were invited on to talk about having a child together through artificial insemination.
Donahue was just as happy to ask his audience about safe-sex orgies and male strippers; he once even hosted his show in a dress and stockings to lead a debate about transvestitism. And if members of the audience had something important to tell their spouses, such as women who asked their husband for a divorce on air, Donahue was more than happy to facilitate, prefiguring a format that would be popularised in recent years by Jeremy Kyle and others. He once asked a child who had weeks to live: “I would be afraid I’m going to die if someone told me I had leukaemia. Aren’t you?”
As the show grew in popularity and importance, celebrities regularly sparked debate. Elton John talked about how he had been hiding behind his outlandish and outsized glasses, hated touring and was unhappy in his personal life; Salman Rushdie emerged from hiding to make a public appearance seven years after a fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini because of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses; Donald Trump was accused of kicking old ladies out of rent-controlled apartments he had bought in Manhattan, while Ian McKellen spoke about his sexuality having just come out.
For nearly 20 years there was nothing else like Donahue on the TV networks. However, by 1996 the 60-year-old had plummeted down the ratings, effectively destroyed by the competitors his innovation had inspired, such as Springer and Winfrey, who said in homage: “If it weren’t for Phil Donahue, there would never have been an Oprah show.” That year Donahue announced his retirement. After filming 7,000 shows he was hailed as proto male feminist. The writer and film-maker Nora Ephron said of him: “If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue, he would never have wondered what women want.”
Phillip John Donahue was born into a large Catholic family of Irish heritage in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1935. His father, Phillip, was a furniture salesman; his mother, Catherine (née McClory) worked in a department store. After attending St Edward High School in Lakewood, Ohio, he studied business administration at the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1957.
That year he made his first steps into broadcast journalism as a production assistant at KYW radio and television in 1957. When the announcer failed to turn up one day, Donahue got his chance behind the mike. He built up his broadcasting experience over the next decade and as a radio host proved his mettle interviewing John F Kennedy and Malcolm X.
By the time he started the show that would make his name, he described himself as less buttoned up. “You know, I was a virgin when I got married. I obeyed all the rules and then suddenly, you know, I began to see Catholics voting for Nixon in the 1960s, supporting the Vietnam War. And my wheels started to turn.”
He had married Margaret Cooney, whom he met at university, in 1958 and the couple had five children: Michael, Kevin, Daniel and Mary Rose survive him. His youngest son, James, predeceased him. Donahue blamed his workaholism for the end of his first marriage in 1975. In 1980 he married the actress Marlo Thomas, who had appeared on his show. “The women of this country were in love with him,” she said. “When we got married, I got a lot of mail saying, ‘How could you have taken him from us?’” She survives him.
Donahue could not resist the offer of a comeback talk show for MSNBC in 2002, but it was short-lived. He later claimed that he was sacked because he opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq and the station was owned by General Electric, which was a big defence contractor.
In 2006, Donahue co-directed the award-winning feature documentary film Body of War, telling the story of a severely disabled Iraq war veteran. He was latterly a vocal campaigner for various liberal causes.
Yet he was proudest of giving American women a voice, even if the results were sometimes chaotic. “I preside over the imperfect science of trying to raise the curtain on some issues,” he told The Times in 1988. “Our programme belongs to the people. It has the messiness of democracy.”
Phil Donahue, American talk show host, was born on December 21, 1935. He died on August 18, 2024, aged 88