Piers Morgan is leaving his daily TalkTV show to focus on the Uncensored YouTube channel, saying daily, fixed TV schedules have been “an increasingly unnecessary straitjacket”.

The Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel has built up an audience of 2.35 million subscribers since 2022, with Morgan’s most recent interviewees including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Morgan, 58, told The Times: “It’s clear there’s a huge global demand for the content we’re making.”

He added: “The commitment to a daily show at a fixed schedule… has been an increasingly unnecessary straitjacket.”

Referencing his interview with Mr Sunak, which has clocked up nearly 400,000 views since being posted on Monday, he told the paper: “Had we waited until 8pm to air it first on TalkTV it would have been overtaken by the breaking news of King Charles’s cancer diagnosis.”

His interview with Mr Sunak saw him offering the Prime Minister a £1,000 charity bet that ministers would not be able to send asylum seekers to Rwanda by the time of the election.

Uncensored, which aired at 8pm, launched in 2022 with an “explosive” interview with its first guest, former American president Donald Trump, and formed part of the primetime launch of TalkTV, a venture from News UK which publishes The Times and The Sun.

Morgan told news website Semafor of the move to YouTube: “The frustration for me has been continuing to create a TV-format show when that’s not how 95% of my audience is watching it.”

Some interviews will still be shown on TalkTV while a replacement in the schedules is found, The Times reported.

Other headline-making interviews from Morgan include the November 2022 sit-down with Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, the full version of which has had nearly six million views.

The sports star opened up about the death of his newborn son, telling Morgan it was “the most difficult moment that I have had in my life”.

Morgan made headlines in 2021, after leaving ITV breakfast show Good Morning Britain following an on-air clash with weather presenter Alex Beresford over the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.

Morgan said he did not believe Meghan’s claims from the headline-making special, with his comments sparking more than 50,000 complaints, the most in Ofcom’s history.

The watchdog later ruled Good Morning Britain was not in breach of the broadcasting code over Morgan’s comments.

In 1994, aged 29, he was appointed as the editor of the News of the World by Rupert Murdoch and he went on to edit the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004.

He appeared as a judge on America’s Got Talent in the US in 2006, and also won the US celebrity version of The Apprentice in 2008, during which he appeared alongside Mr Trump.

Morgan later landed his own show in the country on CNN, titled Piers Morgan Live.

The programme, which regularly featured lively debates on topics such as gun control, ran from 2011 until 2014.