Punchlines about the Trades Descriptions Act were a staple of late 20th-century light entertainment. Which was fitting, given we now reckon light entertainment was heavily populated by exceedingly dark men, and not especially entertaining.
Still, with what feels like half of the era’s major stars now playing to sparsely populated police interview rooms, one untainted man appears to have spied an opening. The hall of fallen warriors must regroup for the final battle, and the search for a leader has alighted on Noel Edmonds – perhaps the most unappealingly embittered superhero since South Park’s Cartman created clawed vigilante “the Coon”.
Really, nothing peps up August like a dash of Angostura Edmonds – a man who has never been able to forgive the BBC for permitting him a 30-year career, and now pops up bi-monthly to piss all over the corporation.
Cast from the firmament, Noel seems convinced he has all the best lines – and in a way he does, if we define “best” as batshit crazy and so beyond Partridge as to render Steve Coogan’s character a sort of lovable broadcasting treasure in the Harry Secombe mould.
This week found Noel turning his thoughts to the personnel decisions of his former employer once more, in a wide-ranging interview which also touched on the apocalyptic dangers of something called electrosmog.
To see Noel in action is to feel like you’re watching a high-concept movie in which the protagonist is cursed with being unable to say anything without his inner monologue being transparently revealed. I’d like to see “Inner Nolly” voiced by Bruce Willis, like in Look Who’s Talking, but if Bruce is unavailable, I think Pam Ayres would make a decent fist of it. But let’s look at an example. If you can read the following without coming to a conclusion about what Noel really feels about new Top Gear host Chris Evans, then you are a purer soul than I.
“It’s interesting,” Noel confides caringly to the Daily Mirror. “I was a guest on Chris’s boat at the Monaco Grand Prix and we had a chat. Chris said he wouldn’t touch Top Gear with a barge pole. He said how tired he was,” Noel continues, “and he did look tired. And so I was stunned when within weeks he not only had shown interest but accepted the job. I just hope he’s not taking on too much.”
Oof. “He’s a brilliant talent,” Noel goes on. “He’s also a mercurial talent in a Kenny Everett and Clarkson mould. He will need to be managed and supported otherwise he could just burn out and make some shocking mistake.” Right. Any more? “I hope it works out for him. I’m a big fan of his.”
As for other “excellent presenters”, Noel has nothing but love for Ant and Dec. “They’ve been honest, they’ve plundered the House Party archive and created [Saturday Night] Takeaway. I take it as a compliment.”
Incidentally, despite refusing to pay his licence fee, Noel still wants to buy the BBC with a consortium of investors – which I’d have hoped would be as easily achievable as acquiring the commercial rights to gravity, or human suffering. But which is probably becoming more realisable with each month.
Still, few can deny he has an uncanny gift for futurology. “You could argue that television is dead,” Noel explained in 2001, right around the start of an ongoing period widely referred to in the US as the new golden age of television. That gem came in a memorably hilarious interview with the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone, in which Noel also discussed the value of his then-property in Devon. “It’s worth a lot more because it’s the largest estate in England without a public right-of-way across it.”
For any who may be confused, Noel was not referring to Crinkly Bottom, the manorial locus of House Party, where Noel served as the self-styled Lord of Misrule. Some strange tear in the Beeb’s fictional continuum saw the same estate which featured in To the Manor Born – Cricket St Thomas in Somerset – also serve as the setting for construction of that exquisite pink-and-yellow early 90s folly. Alas, visitors to the site will now find the Blobbyland theme park being reclaimed by nature. “That there was a whole theme park dedicated to Mr Blobby at all seems inconceivable today,” remarked the Western Gazette last year. Appended was a 2012 YouTube clip showing an eerily derelict Blobbyland, creepers entwining around its ruins, and strewn with artefacts “including a high chair, toothbrushes, toaster and sofa, all in his trademark pink with yellow spots”.
Sic transit gloria Nolly. Perhaps one day this lost citadel will be discovered by a buccaneering archeologist, who penetrates the complex system of gunge-based booby-traps Noel will have laid for meddling raiders, and is able to reach out just in time to grab the ultimate prize – an explanation of the actual point of it all – before it collapses for ever behind him.
Back in the present day, however, Noel has a theory about A-list anti- celebrity Walter Palmer, the Minnesotan dentist who killed the Zimbabwean lion named after Cecil Rhodes – listen, I just type this stuff – and whose reality TV career could be assured if he’d only hurry up with the Barbara Walters interview and accept his manifest destiny.
Noel is big on bad karma and negative energy, and judges Palmer’s trophy hunting thusly: “I regard that as a massive negative. The individual concerned has to look at his negativity system. People who do these things have an imbalance in their energy system. Positivity can be measured scientifically.
“The man who shot the lion – this is not a threat, this is science – will have karma. Something is going to happen to that guy because what he did was so utterly negative. The energy he poured out left such a big gap, negative energy will pour into him.”
Is this a really bad time to bring up that business about the healthy Asian bull elephant at Cricket St Thomas being euthanised so it could make way for Blobbyland?
Probably. After all, Noel is the Gotcha maestro who lambasts those who can’t take a joke, yet who – along with Jimmy Savile – threatened to sue Chris Morris, in Edmonds’ case for tricking him into appearing in Brass Eye.
All that remains is for me to urge someone in BBC light entertainment to get back to me on my new programme concept, inspired by the Jean Claude Van Damme world cinema classic Hard Target (trailer line: “Businessmen hunt the ultimate prey … man.”). In my version, former BBC celebrities who refused to pay their licence fee would be hunted across some of England’s most beautiful and inaccessible private estates by Walter Palmer, with Mr Blobby serving as his loader. Come on, Auntie: it may not be Bake Off but it gunges all over Traffic Cops.
