Back in 1997, Chris Morris’s legendary current affairs spoof Brass Eye featured a beautifully faked breaking newsflash about a shocking incident. Noel Edmonds had shot Clive Anderson dead. Police were reportedly prevented from entering the grounds of Edmonds’s house by machine-gun fire but feared that the entertainer might take to the air in a helicopter gunship and “start spreading his massacre over hundreds of miles”.
As absurd as it was, this joke wouldn’t really have worked with other comparable figures in the TV firmament. It was funny because for all of his apparent goofball amiability, there has always been something oddly maniacal, unstable, even extreme about the screen persona of Noel Edmonds. To glance at his CV is to be bewildered. It contains the highest of highs and a few truly subterranean lows. He’s had a stab at virtually every format in light entertainment – indeed he probably claims to have invented several of them. He’s succeeded gloriously and failed conclusively but he simply will not stay down. And he’s back – as strange, hysterical and weirdly implacable as ever in ITV’s gently barmy Noel Edmonds’ Kiwi Adventure.
In Kiwi Adventure, the revelations come thick and fast. Ostensibly, the series follows Edmonds and his wife, Liz, as they attempt to launch a bar-restaurant in New Zealand. But this isn’t a show best appreciated as a linear narrative. It’s very much about the journey rather than the arrival. It’s a long road and along the way we learn many things. We learn that Noel considers Liz to be “an earth angel…I believe she was a gift from the cosmos”. That he considers his fancy nail gun to be “a sex toy”. That Edmonds has a “crystal bed” (literally a bed with some crystals suspended above it) to which he partly attributes his amazing longevity. That he has a workout regime he calls “Tranquil Power”. And that he has a nickname for his private parts (“Mr Happy and the Twins”).
Possibly because he’s been part of the furniture for so long, Edmonds’s oddness has gone slightly under the radar. He got his first broadcasting break in 1968 as a newsreader at Radio Luxembourg, a renegade offshore broadcaster that nurtured a whole generation of first-wave Radio 1 talent. Soon, he was on a roll, presenting that station’s prestigious breakfast show from 1973 to 1978. But mere radio stardom couldn’t constrain this thrusting young upstart for long. In the Seventies, Top of the Pops acted as a regular pipeline between radio and television and Edmonds soon found himself drifting towards the small screen. He was a co-presenter of the original Top Gear, an eventful sideline that ended not long after Edmonds narrowly avoided getting the BBC sued for making what Fiat regarded as unnecessarily scathing comments about its new Strada model. Even at this early stage, understatement and discretion weren’t really part of the Edmonds toolkit.
His first really memorable TV foray was 1976’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a Saturday morning magazine show that broke new ground by being genuinely interactive, both with its use of phone-ins and via its Swaporama segment, in which kids were able to trade toys with one another. This was followed by the ill-fated early evening variety-fest The Late Late Breakfast Show. A mixture of music, chat, pranks and stunts, the show is sadly most remembered for tragedy. By November 1986, its Give It A Whirl segment had been living dangerously for a while: one man had fractured his pelvis after a 140mph car crash and a woman had broken her shoulder while being fired from a cannon. This astoundingly cavalier attitude towards health and safety culminated in Michael Lush falling to his death during the rehearsal of a set piece involving escapology and a bungee jump.
The show, of course, could not go on. Edmonds, on the other hand, absolutely could. Soon, a pattern emerged of shows that were simultaneously critically scorned and, in ratings terms, absolutely enormous. The Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow (1988-1990) felt like a dry run for the light entertainment behemoth Noel’s House Party, which dominated Saturday evening TV schedules through the pre-talent show Nineties. Broadcast live from the fictional village of Crinkley Bottom (Noel has an enduring taste for very mild profanity: his pub in New Zealand is called The Bugger Inn), it introduced a grateful nation to delights including the Gunge Tank and Mr Blobby. The inexplicable, brief popularity of this globular pink irritant eventually led to poorly judged expansion and the creation of several Blobby-themed amusement parks around the country, at least one of which fell into sad disrepair.
Was this a metaphor for Noel Edmonds’s career? Had the shiny-floor Icarus finally flown too close to the sun? For the time being, not a bit of it. Next came an eventually victorious but obviously torturous battle with Lloyds banking group, which was found to have destroyed his Unique Group production company via a loans scam. This affair is referenced in Kiwi Adventure during a trip to Edmonds’s statue of a praying knight which, he says, represents the trauma the affair caused him. But in parallel, Edmonds would strike telly gold again with the ingenious game show Deal or No Deal.
However, alongside this prodigiously successful daytime TV staple were a few oddities. Elsewhere in the Edmonds-verse, things were beginning to get weird. It was becoming clear that Edmonds had strong views on certain matters, and that those views might ruffle a few feathers. He railed at the BBC, calling for the end of prosecutions for licence fee refuseniks (this dissatisfaction with his former employer peaked in 2014 with a speculative plan to buy the BBC before it “sleep-walked itself to destruction”). He made inflammatory comments about immigration, claiming “the bus is full”. And, always one to put his money where his mouth was, he also made a TV show reflecting this tabloid-adjacent, scattershot sense of grievance.
Noel’s HQ was a one-season wonder launched in late 2008, purportedly as a response to so-called “Broken Britain”. The show peaked with an episode exploring an army veteran’s planning battle with Wealden district council. Enraged, Edmonds prowls the studio, launching a deeply personal attack on the council’s unfortunate head press officer Jim Van Den Bos, who had the temerity to describe Noel’s HQ as “an entertainment show”. Wrong, Mr Van Den Bos. Wrong on so many levels.
So it went on. In 2015, Edmonds claimed that the greatest problem facing humanity was “electrosmog” caused by wifi (his taste for dubious new age woo is a constant undertone to his Kiwi Adventure). In 2017, he created the extraordinary and almost indescribable Cheap Cheap Cheap, a competition show masquerading as a comedy masquerading as an existential crisis, resembling nothing so much as the post-apocalyptic game show in That Mitchell and Webb Look. Something had to change.
And it has. Noel Edmonds can be accused of many things. But an unwillingness to jump in at the deep end is not one of them. And so in 2025, at the age of 76, he can be found pottering around in New Zealand, increasingly eccentric but utterly undeniable: still the absolute embodiment of main character energy. In addition to the pub and the restaurant, he’s extolling the benefits of “structured water”, planning to construct an “energy garden”, engaging in slightly strained banter with his local hired hands, making endless dad jokes and idly wondering whether he might have been an emperor in a past life. Pure Edmonds, then. He’s infuriating, he’s relentless, and, possibly unwittingly, he might just have made his masterpiece.
‘Noel Edmonds’s Kiwi Adventure’ begins on ITV1 and ITVX tonight at 9pm
